Thursday, January 08, 2009

fun moments

I had finished cooking myself a shapeless dinner last night and was preparing to eat it when I got a phone call on my land line. I answered. The woman on the other end said, "Hi, good evening, my name is Gina. How are you?"

Now many people, when receiving obvious telemarketer phone calls, just hang up the phone. It seems kind of impolite to me, and I don't see any reason to be rude to people doing their horrible jobs, so I try to be a little more human. So I said, "Hi, I'm doing fine, but I'm just about to sit down to my dinner, and I'm not interested in any commercial services, so thanks for calling." A perfectly polite and firm way to dodge an unsolicited pitch.

Gina pauses. Gina then says. "Woooow. . . you're retarded." Like that, with the accent on the "you're" and not the "retarded."

I said, "Excuse me? Who are you, and where are you calling from?"

Gina responds, "Who are you? Who are you?"

I am in shock because a stranger has just interrupted my dinner to sell me something, and has just insulted me with an incredibly juvenile and nasty insult, so I say, "Wait a minute, honey, you called me, and you're asking me who I am? Who are you?"

Gina says, "Oh, now I'm a honey, I see."

I start to give some response along the lines of "What the hell is going on here??" but get to "What the...?" before coming to my senses and just hanging up on the bizza.

WTF!? How do I get insulted by random strangers in my house?! BARACK OBAMA I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO MAKE AMERICA A BETTER PLACE WAHAHHHHH!!!

Anyway, that was totally awesome, and it ruined my mood for a few minutes, to the point where I really wanted to be high or drunk so that I could just forget it. I don't think I've had that feeling before! But now I just think it's really funny.

Also, I fell off my bike yesterday whilst trying to ride my bike home in a snow storm. It was a silly, slow-motion fall on a snowy sidewalk, so all the injury I suffered was some light bruising on my left shin. But I had left work early to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, to see Jenny Holzer's installations of large arrays of electronic tickers spelling out statements about the war in Iraq, which uses a medium reserved usually for journalism or advertising for discomfiting second person addresses ("I watch you / I breath you / I touch you") to recreate the experience of standing in Times Square and reading the impersonal news but this time implicating you in the events announced. But God does not care for people who choose art over work, and he punished my sloth by causing my wheels to slide out from under me. I also saw an interesting exhibit by a deaf-mute artist, Joseph Grigely, whose art consists of the post-it notes he uses to banter in writing with people in bars. I also read the opening and closing sections of "Song of Myself" yesterday, and cried lightly thinking about this homosexual romantic dying a hundred and twenty years ago: "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." Can you tell I was having my period?

Let us not be capsized by our loneliness, R! It is sunny here.

2 comments:

Grraar said...

Tom's friend Jesse got a tattoo done by Jenny Holzer, right under one of his nipples. Now she has the rights to that part of his body. She's only called in those rights once to take a life sized polaroid of him.

xoxo, n.g.

Bananarchist said...

that's hilarious. this is an IP case waiting to happen.