Chitchat: A how to guide

So let's say you are hanging out in the office and you spot a coworker you like but don't know that well.  Maybe you see a cousin you haven't seen in a while at your grandma's house. 

This person is an acquaintance.  Acquaintances are not the same as friends.   You don't have the same kind of conversations with acquaintances.  

Now.  Sometimes I will say some shit to people I don't know very well, because I'm filled with tons of feels and if I'm stressed, they start leaking out the edges.

Which means that mean someone asks me a completely innocent question like-- How are you?, I might answer with the actual truth.  Which pretty much horrifies the people who simply spoke words to acknowledge my physical presence and didn't want to be hit in the face with a list of reasons why my life isn't working properly right now.

Don't be like me.  Unless you like making people uncomfortable, in which case, take every single polite question people ask and answer it with some truth.  But mostly, just say you're fine, and keep the truth out of the office.  I wish I could do this more, but when I get stressed, I start throwing truth in people's faces, and no one wants that. 

The alternate title to this post could be-- Stop asking me goddamn intrusive questions. I don't know you. 

So let's say you want to make the polite chitchat.  Why not notice something nice about the person and say-- hey, I love your dress.  Where did you get it?  Oh, is that a picture of your son/daughter?  What is his/her name?  

If you ask a parent about their kid out of the blue, they will be happy to talk. And people who are wearing cool clothes like to be told they are. Then you can feel good that you paid the proper amount of attention to your acquaintance.  They'll be happy, and you won't be a goddamn irritating nosy-ass person.  

If you do this enough, people will like you, and maybe you can get in on that juicy gossip us women love so much.  I do actually love gossip.  Who doesn't?  People are interesting, and we're gonna talk about them.  They tried to preach against gossip when I was in church, and talk about a lost cause.  Churches are gossipy as hell.  But so is everywhere!

Here is what you should not do, if you are looking to make chitchat-- 

-Don't comment on the most obvious thing.  Maybe consider not commenting on the pregnancy of the very obviously due pregnant woman.  Maybe don't ask the guy with his arm in the cast what happened if you don't even know his name.  Because EVERYONE is doing it.  It gets fucking old to explain to the entire world why you're wearing a wrist brace.  

-Don't ever ask a woman if she's pregnant ever.  Do NOT do this.   It will either become really obvious that she is, because you see her all the time and these things tend to get to the point where they can't be missed-- OR.  (fucking) OR!!!  You are about to embarrass the shit out of yourself.   And it's none of your business because this is a goddamn stranger you're talking to.

 -Don't ask me when I plan to complete some life transition.  When are you going to get a boyfriend?  When are you going to get married?  When are you going to have a baby? 

I WILL CUT YOU, I SWEAR TO ZEUS. 

If you are asking me this question, you obviously don't know me well enough to be asking me this question. Have you ever thought that the person you are asking about babies could be infertile?  

How you could be the latest in a long line of motherfuckers who keep bring up babies to a woman who is deeply wounded and sad by her inability to have children?  But hey, you need gossip, right?  You need to poke your nose into other people's painful beeswax and give it a stir, RIGHT???  

(This is not about me.  I don't want babies. This is called an example.)

Look, if you knew the infertile woman enough to know her business either she would have told you herself, or someone in your close friend group would have given you the heads up.   

Wah, wah, I didn't mean it.  Dude.  No one gives a shit what you meant.  Everyone in the world thinks they have the right to demand that women answer for their life choices.  Cut it the fuck out.  The reason why you are an asshole that is hurting that poor lady is because EVERYONE is asking her this, and that's a lot of questioning and shit to take. Over and over and over.

Before Josh and I got together, people would ask me when I was going to get a boyfriend.  Like I had some catalog I could pick a nice boyfriend out of, and I was sitting alone just for spite. 

When people do this to you a lot, it feels like the world is a judgey motherfucker who keeps telling you you're doing everything wrong.  And no one has to answer for their life choices to strangers or near strangers. 

So in conclusion-- Don't ever say to people, "When are you going to..."  Unless the end of the sentence is something like "come hang out with me" or "give me the other half of that report I need".

This has been-- Goddamn, the world needs some etiquette lessons,  with Ali Thompson.

You're welcome, fuckers.  :D 

In further cat news...

Foxy did not want to be cuddled, and Josh is always the cutest. 

Fisheye again!

I love love love the Lomography fisheye camera.

Arrrgh!

I am going to sit here for a minute and try to think of something cool and interesting to say.  But right now, I am just pissed off that someone keeps dumping fucking trash in the sidewalk and street on my block. 

It's fucking gross, and it's a goddamn MOUNTAIN now. 

Jesus Christ, we'll be lucky if the sanitation guys take ANY of our trash after this.  And it keeps fucking happening. 

Life in the city.   

When that Don Lemon guy said that one of the big problems with the black community is littering-- well, first of all let me stop for and moment and say you have to be shitting me.  Dude.  Really.

And he said he had never seen anyone littering in a white neighborhood.  So I would like to invite him to come to Philly.  Where we have progressed far far beyond littering.  We are through the littering looking glass here to a garbage utopia. 

Just two days ago, a truck on my street threw 3 soda bottles out the window (at the same time -- coordination!) and just barely missed hitting me square in the face as I was walking on the sidewalk.

I have seen a hoagie on the sidewalk with only 2 or 3 bites taken out of it, maybe 3 steps from a garbage can.  I have seen this multiple times .  In Center City, which is our downtown and is supposed to be the nicer part of the city.

Every time it happens, I am astonished.  It's usually right outside a place selling hoagies. I imagine someone taking a couple of bites and then being like-- Fuck this fucking hoagie!!  RAAAAH!  And then they slam it down on the ground and walk off in a Hulk rage.

The hoagie did not meet their expectations!  TAKE THAT, SIDEWALK! 

I am on hoagie watch.  I will tell Josh-- I saw another hoagie rage-slammed onto the sidewalk!  It's weirdly exciting.  

There's also chicken bones everywhere, especially on the trains. 

I go to other cities and I can stop saying (in a voice of total wonderment), but it's so clean .  The people who live here must be wizards.

When I hear New Yorkers reminiscing about when NYC was rougher, I always want to invite them to visit Philly.  Would you like to walk down the street drinking a beer and throwing garbage everywhere?  Maybe punch a lady in front of a cop and then stroll away?   

The cops here can punch a lady in the face and get away with it.   They might not mind if you do too.  They don't seem to stop and help anyone else that I've seen.

Philadelphia.  I love you.  I really do.  I don't want to live anywhere else.  But man.

The city is also hugely raising property taxes on everyone and dropping them on the fucking casinos.  They are talking about putting another one within walking distance of my fucking house. 

Dislike. 

I guess this all boils down to-- I want someone from the city to give the mountain of garbage assholes some kind of ticket or something.  It's gross, and it puts me in a pissy mood. 

I should also say that when I start in on the city and get all complain-y, Josh reminds me that this is a working class city (for the most part) and has had incredible struggles with poverty.  When manufacturing left America, Philly was hit hard.  It keeps being hit hard.  I guess someone should tell Don Lemon that white people litter too.  It's just that when there's no money to keep the streets looking clean, everything starts to kind of go to shit.

Prototype

As I began to work on this project more-- the art project I'm calling Being a Fat Girl right now until I can think of something better-- as I spend more time thinking about it, it is starting to evolve.

Originally, I was thinking of working with street harassment exclusively, but the subject matter has expanded.  (Like my ass!! SEE WHUT I DID THERE!) 

For one thing, I didn't want to use the words "Fat Bitch" over and over (and over and over ).  Street harassers aren't exactly clever people.

I wanted to engage more with the totality of my fat lady experience.  I wanted to use things that happened to me when I was a fat kid and when I was online dating while fat and all through my big fat life.

What a shame. 

You have such a pretty face. 

This one is from my childhood.  Random ladies (and the occasional man) would say this to me, usually when I was shopping for clothes with my mom.  Or if I was trying to preform "nice and dressed up little girl", which they didn't hesitate to let me know, was a complete failure.  

I think I started hearing this around 7 or 8.  And I can't emphasize enough-- 

The majority of this body shaming of a little girl is coming from COMPLETE FUCKING STRANGERS. 

And it was devastating.  Every single time. 

In addition to being a super fucked up thing to say about a kid, it's confusing as fuck. 

What does it mean?  That if I'm fat, I should also be ugly?   That if I lost weight, I could attain a truly Pretty self, and therefore be more acceptable in public?  That access to all things Girl and Female and Pretty are cut off to me, because I'm fat?

All of the above? 

Is it possible to be pretty in a traditional way and still be fat?  What does it even mean to be pretty?  Isn't the concept of Pretty a sexist tool of oppression?   

Not to mention the intersection of race and Pretty.  Since the dominant (White) culture is the one determining what gets to count as Pretty and therefore acceptable for a woman, I am benefited by being a white person and thereby having more access to whatever white culture has determined to be Pretty.

The way I read this comment now is that since I have some of the markers of what people would consider Pretty--

I'm white. I have pleasing facial features that read as feminine.  I appear to come from the "correct" social class.

That it's a shame that my fatness comes in and ruins everything. 

Fuck that noise.   All of it.  Fuck sexism and classism and racism.  Fuck ALL of the bigotry.

In this series of photos, I am trying to make my "pretty face" look as weird as possible.  And I have to tell you, I really enjoyed making the weird faces.  Josh would tell you that I make weird faces all the time.

I am doing this project for the other fatties because it's important to talk about our experiences.  Nothing is so lonely as thinking it's just you.

But I'm also doing this project for the non-fat people out there.  Because when I tell non-fat people about my experiences, they are shocked. 

This happens every day.  It happens ALL the time.  Right now, someone is informing a fat little girl that she's ugly.   And this person is GROWN and ought to know fucking better.

I can't even count the number of times this happened to me. 

This is the pain that never goes away.  I've erected my punk rock Fuck You force field to keep myself sane and protected, but there's still a core of a little kid who doesn't understand why grown ups keep hurting her feelings and telling her she's ugly.  

It's a core of rage and shame.  And every so often, something dumb happens that sends me right back into that place, and I cry and I rage and it sucks pretty hard.

I demand to be treated like a person.  I demand that my experience not be erased by people who tell me that I'm too sensitive.  I demand the right to be left the fuck alone. 

Which is really all I have ever wanted.

Don't be a horrible person

Like a lot of people, I found the Zimmerman trial verdict upsetting.  For those two people who weren't paying attention-- a dude chased down a black teenager who wasn't doing anything wrong and killed him.  And got away with it.

Which is bullshit.  And it's upsetting.  But it's also been upsetting and cringe-making to see the White People reaction.  There are the out and out racists.  The people who are using the tragedy to flog their own pet causes.  And the white people who want to say oh, well this is a bad thing but it was Not Racist.

Don't do that. 

No seriously, don't. 

If you are white in America, your job is to shut up and listen to the minorities who want to speak about their experiences with racism.  Don't fucking contradict them.  How the fuck would you know what it's like to deal with racism?  You're white.   

No one wants to hear a white person talk about how they think a black person was mean to them this one time.  Don't do that.  Racism is not just individual people being mean to each other.  I'm not a scholar, so-- linkage.

Look, this is the important part-- if someone was mean to you, that sucks and I'm sorry.  But Trayvon Martin is DEAD.  And some people seem more concerned about if George Zimmerman being called a cracker is just as bad.  It's NOT, ok?  

Hurt feelings are not just as bad as generations of oppression.  That is a ridiculous thing to think.

Ok, so the stupid Twitter fight.   So this is me.

Now.  I think this is fairly mild.  My thought process was-- it is infuriating when some dude lectures me about sexism and denies rape culture.  So as a person who is in the dominant racial category (White, duh) maybe I could tell my people that it's not cool to lecture a minority about their oppression.  I mean, I have about 300 followers, so it's going nowhere, but it seemed like a good thing to try to put out there.  It got a couple of retweets and favorites.  I'm living my life and feeling ok about it.

 But then this crazy person comes at me with-- white people are more discriminated against than black people. 

Which is fucking stupid.  I was on a break at work, and I didn't have the time or inclination to explain to this idiot the difference between his hurt fee-fees and a dead child, so I called him a white supremacist, cursed him out and figured the problem was solved. 

And then he came at me about my "language".  Jesus Christ.  Like, I'm the one who is the problem now, because I said the word "fuck", not his racist, ignorant statement.

Whatever.  I cursed him out again and blocked him.  But for fuck's sake.  I am fucking tired of people who get called out on doing something racist or even just racially insensitive and act like being called out is just as bad as doing something racist.  IT FUCKING ISN'T.  Stop being such an awful turd!

My sweary language isn't as bad as your racism.  I don't care about swearing. (Obvs.)  Any time I hear some White Straight Dude say-- oh, white men are the most oppressed people now, I want to scream.  

It must be so hard for you, HAVING ALL THE RIGHTS.

Organization

Sometimes, I get on an organizing kick.  We just bought a new filing cabinet from Ikea, which Josh put together.  Without any help from me, because sometimes I'm awful, and I hate putting Ikea stuff together.  I love that they have affordable stuff that has a design emphasis, and a LOT of the stuff in our house is Ikea.  But putting it together is a horrifying process for me.  I hate it SO BAD. 

We also got a new rug for the dining room/office.  I had originally bought one that was mostly white.  I did this knowing I had multiple cats, one that's long-haired.  It was always, always covered in cat fur.    

I don't know what I was thinking-- that I liked the rug enough to magically become a new person who vacuumed all the time?  

Yeah.  That did not happen.  I would just stare at the furry grossness and feel bad that I knew I wasn't going to do anything about it any time soon.

So we put that one in my studio where the cats mostly aren't allowed and replaced it with a grey one that doesn't show the fur too much.

You have to lean into the kind of person you know you are.  I'm going to be 35 in two weeks.  I'm not going to magically change into someone more virtuous about cleaning.  And anyway, I have other stuff to do than deal with the stupid floors.  

I am also trying a to-do list app for my Mac, because the paper to-do lists have gotten out of control.  I have reached the point with the back-end stuff I'm doing to run my art stuff/career/business that it's too much stuff to deal with on a paper list.

I have like 6 pieces of paper with various stuff scribbled on it , and I can't figure out what's what anymore.  So I'm going to try going digital.  I'm setting reminders on my iCalendar too, so hopefully that will help.

I have had people complement me before for being "so organized", but that's just because I know I have to write every goddamn thing down.  If I don't, I'll see a shiny thing and all my plans and to-dos will fall out of my brain onto the floor.  And I'll end up wandering around the house uselessly, wondering why I entered a room.

Is this interesting?  I don't know.  I'm excited about a filing cabinet, people.  OH THE   GLAMOUROUS LIFE OF AN ARTIST.

Don't worry-- I had a weirdo Twitter fight with a rando this week, so I'll write about that too.  And here is a cat photo. 

Hello, I am Foxy.  I shed on rugs and everywhere really.  I do not like being brushed.

More photos!

This fisheye camera is so cool.  I love flowers and trees in the city.

I'm not normally a flower photo person, but I love the contrast of the flowers with the bricks and steel of the city. 

The fisheye is also amazing for cat photos.  CATS!

You can't dance in front of nuns

Josh and I were at the grocery store (the crap one on York) and there were nuns in the soda aisle!  With full on habits and everything.

I was wearing a very short tunic dress, with leggings, and I suddenly felt self conscious about how short it was.    

So, in true defiant style, I decided to bust a dance move right there. 

Josh gave me massive side-eye and said-- You can't dance in front of nuns. 

So I did it again.  Rock the Casbah was playing! 

Josh puts up with a lot of foolishness. 

Day jobs part 2

I am making a promise to you guys right now-- I will never discuss the details of my day job on this blog.  Or on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere.   

Mostly because it's in real estate, so it's automatically boring. 

But also because I've worked places where they are really tight about what people say about them on the internet.  Like, you could get fired for talking smack about them on Facebook. 

So I don't ever intend for my name and Company Name to come up together on a google search.   Because (as we discussed earlier), I need this job for money and I don't want to lose it.

Plus, I would say, out of all the jobs working corporate I've had-- this one is not bad.  The people are not assholes determined to make you hate your life, which I can't say for every place I've worked.

With all that said, the day job is kicking my ass right now.  I normally work 10 hours a day, 4 days a week.  Which is amazing because it gives me the time I need to conduct art business and make the art.  So I work the 4 days, work on art stuff all day Friday while Josh is at work and then work maybe half days on Saturday and Sunday. 

But I've been doing overtime lately, so for the past couple of weeks, the days have been closer to 12 to 13 hour days.  And my ass is pretty throughly kicked right now.  It's not pretty when you have to keep injecting caffeine into your system every hour just to keep yourself on your feet.  I was walking around yesterday like a zombie. 

Instead of moaning BRAAAINS, I was moaning FILES instead. 

I have this enormous list, and I can't even figure out where to start.  I've lost the power to understand which things come before other things.  And I need to rewrite my artist's statement.  Which I don't think I can do right now. 

It would probably end up something like-- 

I MAKE ART GOOD!  LOOK AT IT!  LOOOOK!  BUY!  Do you have a place where I can get some money for these paintings??  GIVE IT TO ME.  I used fortune cookies! I AM A BOSS ARTIST!   

I'm pretty sure that won't go over well. 

I think I'm going to address some postcards and then take a nap. 

Damn.  I feel pretty bad, you guys.