Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I’m in Orlando right now. Have been since Thursday. We’ve been to Epcot and the Magic Kingdom and Citywalk. Orlando is nice enough, but has no soul. It’s the Olive Garden of cities. The weekend has been fun but suffered from a horrible lack of planning (we were meeting up with some people and nobody ever really got a chance to get to know each other). I have shin splints. I’ve probably walked 10 miles in various amusement parks, and my feet don’t hurt. My shins are killing me, but my feet are cherry.

I’d always thought that when you offer up an abject apology, the recipient’s job is to either say “that’s ok, don’t worry about it” or say “apology not accepted, you can go to hell”. There’s nothing worse than groveling in front of someone and them ignoring you. Was it on purpose? Are you being told to go to hell? Did they just not see it? Who knows. I think I’ll just have to stop reading that blog, since the whole situation has my feelings totally hurt. Which is stupid. This is the internet. This is not life.

We’re going to Orlando this weekend. We’re supposed to be going to Orlando this weekend. Hub’s got jury duty tomorrow morning. He’s already had it extended once. Maybe I will just go to Orlando without him.

I need to buy some more clothes. Just about nothing I own fits properly anymore.

We’re in the midst of a gigantic solar storm, and people in the most unusual places are reporting seeing the Northern Lights. Check out this photo from Houston! Boerne, about an hour south of Austin, as well as Llano, an hour west of Austin, also have reports in. I’m so jealous! The aurora is something I want to see before I die.

I just found girly gun nirvana.

Hello Kitty hi-cap .45
Faux-fur covered AKs, M-16s, Uzis, etc. I love that HK, and the gingham-covered Beretta.

Men do not realize that women often aren’t taken seriously because of their gender. Granted, it’s not an easy thing to observe. It’s not a hostile thing, surely; more of a brush-off. Like the scene in The Princess Bride where Buttercup kisses the ailing king on the cheek and tells him she just wanted to thank him for being so kind to her because she wouldn’t be alive in the morning, and he said, “Well, isn’t that nice. She kissed me!” That’s more of an example of senility, but it’s the same sort of attitude. There are simply those men out there who prefer not to talk to women. I ran into an example a couple of weekends ago at Gunstock. Not surprising, really – hold a gun-related event in Texas and it’ll be full of good-old-boys. There were something like 4 women who were there and visible the entire weekend. One of the guys there… To women, he is cordial but distant. To men, everyone he meets is his new best friend. It was difficult trying to explain this to hub without being perceived as a feminazi or overly sensitive. Probably, I came off as both.

When I was running 4-5 on-site tech calls a day, at least once a week I would show up and encounter a confused looking man. “But I thought there was a tech support guy coming”, he’d say. “Well, I’m the tech support guy”, I’d say. “You? Nawwwww”, was the response. Then I’d proceed to fix everything and garner some respect. If I ran into problems, I’d get comments like “Well, maybe one of the guys at the shop can fix it”.

It is a fine but dangerous line women walk. We are perceived as being complainers, nags, bossy, or feminazis. Sexual harassment is believed to be a sham. I assure you, it exists. I encountered creepy and unwanted attention as young as 12 years old. The whole attitude of “oh, you’re just over-reacting, I was only kidding!” belittles and demeans whoever is complaining. A better response would be “I’m sorry that what I did made you uncomfortable”. Why is it so hard for people to apologize? Why is it so much easier to brush off their concerns and joke about them? Are people afraid that by apologizing, they are exposing a vulnerable part of themselves and therefore might be wounded for it? That’s stupid. Better to be perceived as an honest person who cares even a little than as an asshole. I will help out honest people in the future. I will be much less likely to deal with assholes.

Double standards suck. A guy gets his girlfriend pregnant. He’s in trouble, yeah, but she’s branded a slut who will screw anything that moves. Women who want to keep their last names after marriage are feminist bitch troublemakers. Men who stay home to take care of the kids while their wives work are whipped.

Now all this makes for some amusing life experiences. There’s nothing quite like doing something that’s considered a male activity and doing it well. I get a lot of respect for the buck I shot a couple of years ago. I get private amusement at going to a gun range and shooting a nice evil black gun in front of a bunch of guys. I like being able to fix computers, even though a lot of time it seems like I have to start over three or four times because I don’t get the whole story the first time. Weirdly enough, sometimes women don’t take me seriously either – they’d prefer a male fixing their computer.

The moral? Do whatever you want to do. Don’t worry about what others think you should do based on your gender. If you want to do something, do it – and do it well enough both to please yourself and pleasantly surprise others.

It was quiet. Too quiet. Granted, even a deafening din would seem soft in comparison to the rest of the day: screams, wails, the muffled smack of fists hitting flesh. This was a quiet of a different color.

He said: should I go up there and see?
She said: I don’t know, I’m just enjoying the quiet.
He said: but should I?
She said: should you? Probably. Will you? I don’t know.

He did.

The quiet was broken. A torrent of unintelligible shouting bombarded the spaces, intermixed with wails of frustration. Two small bodies scampered into the room.

He said: wash their hands. They have scattered the entire contents of the catbox all across the upstairs. There is cat litter caked into their hair.

She said: shit.

And it was.

The seeing-eye cat is back, this time on an adventure with a seeing-eye dog.

Check out my sweet little girly gun and all her rowdy neighbors.

From left to right: full-auto Uzi, Dissipator AR-15, The Pink Lady, full-auto Mac 11/9, and a really pimped-out AK.

Ever wonder what the business end of a bunch of guns is like?

There were a lot of fun toys out there last weekend.