I’ve noticed a Facebook trend where people will post a simple question or request advice and follow that up with a lengthy codicil that basically pleads, “Don’t be an asshole” E.g.: “I’m going to my cousin’s wedding in Tampa. Anyone have any hotel recommendations? Please no comments about how Florida is a cesspool that’s not fit for human habitation.” Or “I’m attending a work conference in Austin, Texas. Any ideas on vegan friendly meal options there? Please no comments on how vegans are patchouli-smoking hippies and I’m wasting my time by going to Texas and not eating a big steak or enjoying the local barbecue.” Or “I have tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. Has anyone gone to a big stadium show before? When’s the best time to arrive? And any tips on parking to avoid the crush when the show lets out? Please no comments on how Mick Jagger is an undead mummy and that the Stones best work was over before I was born and how arena shows are absurdly expensive.” Is this what the Internet has done to us? We can’t just answer someone’s question without unsolicited, meanspirited commentary? Or just not say anything at all? And the requests aren’t paranoid, because we’ve all read the threads where people are, basically, assholes.
Author Archives: Stephen Robinson
This Time I Know It’s For Real…
Abigail Fitzgerald (now Burns) was married in front of a sizable assemblage, even for a Catholic, at the Willows Lodge in Woodinville, about a half-hour north of Seattle. Of all the weddings Gina Merrick had attended in the past decade — the flurry of wedlock that began for her at twenty-five, she thought this one was fine. She didn’t rank weddings, preferring instead to classify them, as she did everything else, as either “good” or “bad,” and much like “right” and “wrong,” there was more diversity in what she included in the latter group.
Gina, stirring a spoon in her coffee cup that contained no cream or sugar, sat next to a vacant space at Table Six where a pearl-finish place card bearing the name “Sara Richter” rested like a headstone above an untouched plate of food. Surrounding her were her friends Brenda Waylen, Margaret Ashe, and Pauline Goodman. Their husbands had all been excused after behaving well during the speeches and champagne toasts and had gathered in the garden with beers to wait out the reception.
“‘This Time I Know It’s For Real’ is a curious choice for a wedding song,’” Gina said suddenly. She’d sipped her coffee in silence for several minutes now. “It implies a checkered past.”
“Yeah, right, yeah,” Brenda said, nodding. This did not indicate actual agreement or even that she was actually listening, but it was a method of conversation that had gotten her through college and assorted book clubs.
“Don’t you think it was really super fun for a first dance?” Margaret phrased all her statements in the form of questions, like a Jeopardy! contestant.
“No,” Gina said, “I thought it was really ‘At Last’ desperate.”
Margaret flashed an apologetic half smile, as she did whenever she disagreed with someone, and flung a lock of coal-black hair, flecked with white, over her shoulder, which she did whenever she was about to be disagreeable. “Not everyone’s lucky enough to marry their college boyfriend, after all.”
Gina tapped her spoon sharply against the saucer. “Luck had nothing to do with it,” she said. “I knew what I wanted, so I didn’t waste my twenties dating bike messengers and struggling bipolar writers.” These weren’t hypotheticals but references to Abby’s previous romantic entanglements.
Across the table, Pauline Goodman nudged a bite-sized piece of beef tenderloin onto her fork. She was a painfully slow eater who always complained midway through a meal that her food was cold. The three women were in the same college sorority with Gina, but Pauline, with her vague hairstyle and first-day-in-heels posture, was the one Gina’s mother couldn’t accept as a member of her beloved Gamma Phi. At the University of Georgia — or “Ugh!” as Gina grew up calling it — Ellen Payton and her sisters would never have blackballed someone like Pauline because she would’ve known better than to bother rushing at all.
Pauline looked over at Gina through cloudy, gray eyes. Her voice was dreary and musty.
“I was still single at twenty-seven,” she said, as if measuring the age by the standards of the Tudor era. “I prayed and prayed. A month later, I met Walter.”
“I’m sure you took some action,” Gina insisted.
“No, I just prayed. What I realized later was that all along I was praying for him.”
“Yes, you mentioned that at your reception.” The overcooked buffet chicken and the bride making a toast at her own wedding had landed Pauline’s big day in Gina’s “bad” column. “But I don’t think the Good Lord runs a welfare office. Nothing in life comes without effort and planning.”
— from The Wrong Questions
Trump VIII….
The very first U.S. president was a general, as were many who followed him. However, military operations are much different now. There aren’t that many Pattons or MacArthurs left. I think this is why Trump is so popular among conservative voters. He’s a “business magnate,” which the modern-day equivalent to a pirate or a conquistador. And deep down, Americans — who rejected the monarchy and embraced democracy, which is a form of monarchy that is spelled differently — have an affection for the emotional unstable borderline personalities that were prominent on the throne. That is true leadership to them. Measured diplomacy is skullduggery. They don’t want their leaders to be politicians… that’s for ambassadors. And, after all, can’t you picture Trump, more so than Jeb Bush and especially Lindsey Graham, in the following scenes?
Hairy legs and all…
I… have nothing. I’m sorry. This is just mic-drop stupidity here.
Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore told a church gathering on Sunday that the U.S. Supreme Court “destroyed the institution of God,” when they legalized same-sex marriage earlier this month.
Whoa, that’s harsh. I wonder what drove them to do such a thing?
“Despite what they think, it’s not their doing. Satan drives us. He’s out there destroying everything God created including us as human beings.”
Oh, so the devil made them do it. What else has John Milton been up to?
In comments later, Moore elaborated on the sexual revolution before rambling on about gender roles, saying, “When you start teaching kids that they have the right to choose whether they are male or female. When you talk about three or four years old, you know what they think. They don’t know much. They may learn fast. And when they get in their mind they can be a man if they’re a girl or a woman if they are a boy, I don’t know what the end is going to be. Except it will come down to things like when you take your little girl to the girl’s bathroom and you wait outside and you see some guy with hairy legs going into that bathroom, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Are you going to stand back and let that guy go in the bathroom with your little girl?”
It seems like he’s advocating for violence against trans women. He doesn’t say “Are you going to stand back and let your little girl go into the bathroom…” with the person who doesn’t even have the decency to star in a Nair commercial. He says, “Are you going to let that *guy* go in the bathroom…”
Maybe because I’m not insane and all, but I don’t understand this obsession with transgendered people using what some insist is the “wrong” restroom. From the Duggars to this guy, the specter is always raised of sexual predators lurking around the stalls. Isn’t it possible these people just want to use the restroom? When I’m there, sex is the last thing on my mind. It’s usually the sixteen ounces of coffee I drank that morning.
Sweet Potato Pie…
Jane Hind dropped by for dessert after Thanksgiving dinner with her boyfriend’s family. “There was chili on the turkey, chili in the stuffing, chili in the scalloped potatoes,” she told Gina while helping herself to a slice of sweet potato pie. “I couldn’t chance the pumpkin flan.”
Chris Beltran, after a quick hello, had hurried into the den where Charlie, Tom, and Frank watched the Seahawks game. Outside the kitchen, Teresa Chapman banged her thumbs against a shaking BlackBerry. Brushing past her, Jane mumbled “excuse me” between chews.
“I always thought this would taste like mashed potato pie… just, you know, with a different color.” She scooped up the velvety filling with her fork. “But it’s bomb.”
“Sara made it this morning,” Gina said. “She doesn’t add any of those awful Yankee touches.” She shuddered. “You can’t trust people who’d ruin a perfectly good pie with marshmallows.”
Teresa swore under her breath and looked ready to hurl the offending BlackBerry at the wall. “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” She turned to Gina. “I have to hop on a call.” She started toward Payton and Cody’s bedroom, which was closest, but the cold wind of Gina’s voice held her in place.
“Sara’s in there,” Gina explained. “She’s taking a little breather after dinner. Feel free to use the master suite. Charlie should have made the bed after his nap earlier.”
“Your sister-in-law looks stressed,” Jane noted after watching Teresa slam the bedroom door shut behind her.
“She always is,” Gina stated without sympathy. “She’s just not cut out for corporate life. She should rightly work in some low-pressure field — like a small-town librarian or a public schoolteacher.”
“Why doesn’t she?”
The ice in Gina’s glass rattled sharply as she motioned toward the far end of the living room.
“Didn’t you notice the von Trapp family over there? Someone’s gotta keep that sad little Multnomah roof over their heads.”
Jane looked up from her dessert plate. She picked out the small, ponytailed man wrangling the attending children as Teresa’s husband, Ray. He was rail thin except for a pot belly and flabby chest, which jiggled under his loose turtleneck sweater.
“What does her husband do?”
“Nothing,” Gina declared. “He stays home with the kids.”
“Typical,” Jane said. “Women had this whole movement so we could do what we want with our lives, and men swoop in and use it as an excuse to lie around and watch sports.”
“I don’t think he’s into sports,” Gina remarked, lifting a dark eyebrow. “He was a dance-theatre major at Reed.”
Jane shook her head, her tan face wearing a half-frown. “Then how did Teresa not know he was a deadbeat? That’s like betting on the Clippers.”
“It’s possible she thought he was the best of the lot. After all, she attended a college with no Greek system, no business major, no grades, not even an official ranking. It’s like I tell the girls: You have to be vigilant regarding your surroundings, both personally and professionally. Just because there’s a crop doesn’t mean there’s any cream.”
Jane flicked brown crumbs off her fingers.
“Maybe she’s happy,” Jane said as the muffled shouts of one side of a tense argument threatened to break down Charlie and Gina’s door. “I do caution my clients, though, not to anchor themselves to some fixer-upper. It’s almost always a waste of time and energy. Now, me and the world’s hottest man? He was turn-key ready when we met.”
“I suppose,” Gina said casually, and then more forcefully, “I assume you didn’t share this philosophy with Cindy Prior when you sold her that landfill in the Central District.”
Jane’s response was like a prerecorded message: “It’s an up-and-coming neighborhood.” She set her plate on a sideboard. “Look, Cindy was at the point in her life when it was now or never. I introduced her to the best available property within her reach. Now, she can say she’s a homeowner. You know what that means in the world? When you die, there’s an estate sale. When you’re a renter, the super just calls Goodwill.”
— from The Wrong Questions
serhasacomplaint 
Badly done, Jared…
From the Business Insider:
The FBI has subpoenaed an affidavit containing alleged texts between former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle and a former female Subway franchisee in which Fogle says he paid for sex with a 16-year-old girl, according to the former franchisee’s attorney.
On June 19, the lawyer says that Fogle again asked the woman to advertise herself on Craigslist. She responds: “Is this the same website you found that 16 year old girl you that you f*****? …I still can’t believe you only paid $100 for her.”
Fogle responds: “It was amazing!!!!”
She asks: “What part of her ad made you think she was selling sex?”
He says: “U will have to read them to see.”
The age of consent in Indiana, where Fogle resides, is 16 years old.
First place, whenever someone asks you such a leading question — “I’m going to grab some cash at the corner ATM. Is that the same bank that you robbed at gunpoint and used the funds to buy a warehouse full of cocaine, assault rifles, and bootleg Prince records?” — your response should *not* be to willingly incriminate yourself but to borrow from Eric Stoltz in PULP FICTION and shout, “I don’t know you. Who is this? Prank caller! Prank caller!”
Also, if you’re engaged in this type of activity, shouldn’t you have a “no text” policy? Everything’s verbal or you use code words (“Did you tape DOWNTON ABBEY? YES! It was AMAZING! Very satisfying… episode.”) or invest in that MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE technology where everything self-destructs after 60 seconds.
Posted by Stephen Robinson on August 1, 2015 in Social Commentary
Tags: Jared Fogle, Subway