I work in retail/customer service, because I’m a moron. I say I’m a moron for one simple reason: only a moron would willingly subject themselves to the amount of abuse I take on a daily basis. Now, if it were face-to-face, that’d be one thing; I love a good argument, and I’m happy to have one while standing in front of someone. Unfortunately, 90% of the shit I hear from customers comes while I’m talking with them on the phone. Yesterday, I had a guy tell me that, among other things, he would “see [me] in court” because there was damage on the car he rented that wasn’t there when he picked it up. Despite the obvious shortcomings in his statement (namely, I’m not going to end up in court, not to mention the fact that he signed a contract saying the car had no damage on it), it got me thinking: what is it that emboldens people to talk to another human so disrespectfully on the phone?

A large part of it comes, I suspect, from the anonymity factor- I’ve never met this guy before and will probably never meet him (unless we’re in court together), so he feels it’s safe to say whatever he wants to a stranger. And I get it, to some degree, but does that really make you feel better? Insulting some dude you’ve never even met? (Wait, I totally get it. That would actually make me feel a lot better.) Anyway, here is a list of phrases I hear on a regular basis that bug me; translations are included for clarity.

1) “Let me speak to your manager.”

Translation: “You’ve outlived your usefulness. Also, I think you’re a fucking idiot, and I’d like to speak to someone who isn’t.”

2) “Why would you offer a pickup service if you can’t pick me up in (some place nowhere near my office)? Is that good customer service?”

Translation: “I don’t know how to read a fucking map.”

3) “I’m not paying for (this thing I agreed to purchase), and I’m calling my credit card company. They’ll take care of this.”

Translation: “I’m under the impression that American Express = Supreme Court.”

4) “I’m writing a letter to the Better Business Bureau, and this company is going down!”

Translation: “I AM AN INSANE PERSON.”

My point is this: yelling at someone on the telephone, while cathartic, accomplishes absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s counterintuitive; if you yell at me, I’m less likely to help you and more likely to want to throw you down a fucking elevator shaft.

Don’t yell at people on the phone.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the NYC public transit system, allow me to paint you a picture. Whenever a train enters or leaves a station, the operators stick their heads out the window to ensure that there are no obstructions on the track ahead, that nobody is standing too close to the edge of the platform, etc. It’s an important part of their jobs, one that has probably saved countless people from injury or death over the years, and yet…it takes every ounce of my willpower not to stick my hand out and slap those people in the face whenever they ride by.

It’s not that I harbor any animosity toward the people working for the MTA; I just have the urge. It sounds really sadistic and weird, but I can’t help myself. I’ve actually daydreamed about what would happen if I did it- would they stop the train and call the cops? Would the conductor just grab my shirt and drag me alongside the train until I hit the wall at the end of the track? Do they carry guns or batons? Are they authorized to stop whatever they’re doing to beat the shit out of someone? Would I get tazed? So many possible scenarios.

I think about things like that far more than I’d care to admit. One time, I saw a woman standing next to a puddle (not just a regular puddle, a New York City puddle, where it’s equal parts water, garbage juice, hobo urine, and some type of blood) in a beautiful dress, hair perfectly in place, makeup painstakingly applied; she’d clearly spent a lot of time getting ready. And I thought to myself: I wonder what would happen if I just pushed her into that puddle? I’d never actually do it, but the idea inhabited my mind for an unsettlingly long amount of time.

Does that make me a bad person? I like to think that the line between daydreaming about stuff like that and actually doing it also serves as the line between good and bad people, but maybe I just think that to make myself feel better. I don’t know.

15 minutes are up.

Song of the Day:

Here’s where I’ll be posting a link to a song that I like. Fairly self-explanatory.

The Police: “Spirits In A Material World”

Don’t have Spotify? Your loss.

Oh, the aforementioned Ruff Ryders chain:

When I was younger, I went through a phase of trying (and I do mean “trying”) to culturally align myself with the black half of my heritage. I wore Fubu, Ecko, listened to every hip-hop CD I could get my hands on (including “Opposite of H2O” by Drag-On, which is embarrassing even to remember), wore chains (one of which had the Ruff Ryders’ “R” on it), pinkie rings, and a watch on each wrist and, oh yeah, I grew an Afro.

Yep. I also got cornrows, and that’s roughly the time my dad decided he’d had enough of that shit and demanded I take them out. It was an overcorrection on my part; I felt as though I neglected to appropriately acknowledge my racial composition (growing up just south of Boston will do that to you), so I just piled it on all at once.

The end result was that I looked like a fucking idiot.

My brother told me that all the time, but in my arrogance, I thought “Man, he’s just mad that I don’t wear Abercrombie like him. GATOR BOOOOOOTS, AND THE PIMPED-OUT GUCCI SUUUUUUUITS…” But he was absolutely right- in my haste to connect with black culture, I ended up looking like a parody of a black guy. Since I don’t look black, though, I really just looked like a fat white loser who desperately wanted to be black. (Note: Far be it for me to say what constitutes a good or a bad look, but this is always a bad look.)

Now, Miley Cyrus isn’t pudgy, so she’s got that going for her, but that shit last night? She looked like a 13 year-old girl telling her parents “I’M A SEXUAL BEING NOW AND YOU OLD STICKS-IN-THE-MUD NEED TO LET ME BE A REAL WOMAN NOW!” The weird faces she keeps making (which are some unholy punk rock/rebellious/drifter-looking-for-a-campfire hybrid) just seem like a really weird cry for attention. Or help. Probably help. But I digress.

It seems like she’s doing the exact same thing I did when I was 15, and I assure you, that’s the only thing I have in common with Miley Cyrus. She found a cool (? I think twerking is absurdly stupid, but whatever) part of culture, tried desperately to align herself with it, overshot the mark like fucking crazy, and last night was the end product. And that’s how you get Will Smith and his family to look at you like this:

Even Jaden Smith is embarrassed for her, and that’s saying something.

Anyway, Miley Cyrus is weird. I don’t care for her at all.

My hand is all fucked up. Here’s how it happened.

I got home from work yesterday and decided to engage in a rousing game of Frisbee. Two throws later, the frisbee was behind a fence, because I’m unable to play even a sport requiring no athletic ability.

“No worries,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just scale this 9-foot fence and grab it.” I scale the fence easily, then come to the realization that I now have to get off the 9-foot fence. In my haste to ensure a safe landing, I forgot to take my hand off the top of the chain link fence. I was reminded a moment later by the feeling of the fence entering my palm in two different places. Oh, and I didn’t stick the landing. I am just the fucking worst.

I hit the deck, fall down, and look at my hand- it’s already soaked in blood. Claret (I don’t want to write “blood” twice) starts pooling in my palm and dripping off my fingers. Now that I think about it, it’s kinda fitting that I gave myself a fucking stigmata trying to hop the fence to a church parking lot. I start looking for a way out; after all, I can’t go back the way I came. I find a gap in the fence that I really wish I’d noticed sooner, and I slip through, safe and sound.

So that’s the story, in case you gave a shit.

They say to be a good writer, you should write for at least 15 minutes a day. I’m not exactly sure who “they” are, but I don’t make the rules, I just play by them. So in honor of that requirement, here are some thoughts of mine.

I don’t like autumn. People think it’s great because it finally cools down, the leaves are changing, and football season starts, but I disagree. Autumn depresses me- the leaves aren’t “changing color”, they’re dying. Autumn is just a shitty placeholder between the dog days of summer and the (possible) winter wonderland ahead, assuming it actually snows and isn’t just some bullshit “wintry mix” that makes you want to swallow a knife.

Even the music I listen to gets more and more dreary as summer transitions into fall. After all, you can’t listen to Grover Washington’s “Mister Magic” in the fall, can you? (NO, YOU FUCKING CANNOT. It sounds weird, so do yourself a favor and don’t do it. Don’t even YouTube it until next May.) So I’m looking forward to The Smiths and Radiohead and about 6 months of eating out of sheer depression. But not savory foods, more like chocolate chip cookies that I didn’t space correctly on the pan so they turn into one giant, salmonella-infested-in-the-middle-yet-nearly-cremated-on-the-edges fucking disaster. I will still eat it, and then I’ll write about it. Fall turns me into Bridget Jones, I guess.

15 minutes are up. Whoever came up with that rule is an idiot, because I think I actually got worse.

As a general rule, the mindset behind personal blogging ranges from self-indulgent (at best) to openly masturbatory (at worst). Some people might say “What’s wrong with keeping a diary? I have the best of intentions! I’M JUST A ROSY-CHEEKED SO-AND-SO!”

Bull. Shit. A diary is a collection of your innermost thoughts. Your hopes, your dreams, your most intimate desires and fears. A diary is not meant to be read by all of your friends and family, and it’s not something you cross-post on fucking Facebook.

People tend to write blogs for one reason: because they like the attention. You can provide whatever excuses you’d like, but there’s really no other way to justify it. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. After all, I’m writing this with the hope that people will huddle around their computer screens to capture my words in the same way that families sat around shitty radios in the 1950s to listen to Orson Welles or whoever. My grievance stems from the fact that so few people are willing to call blogging what it is: an exercise in self-importance. You presume you’re doing the world a service by posting a recap of your Labor Day weekend (“GREAT TIMES AT LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE YOU GUYZ”), but you know that isn’t so. Even the people who write comments like “Wish I could’ve been there!” don’t really care, because if they did, they would have fucking gone. I want to call it a circle jerk, but I think a more accurate term would be a circular jerk (get it?!)- nobody wants to admit that they’re writing for the attention, and on the flip side, the reader doesn’t want to admit they’re reading it out of a sense of loyalty and being supportive.

So why did I start this blog? Well, mostly for the attention. But I also want to write about the petty annoyances of everyday life (hence the title “A Hopeless Cynic.”) In exchange for your readership, I promise never to share my dreams, thoughts, or details of my latest vacation unless I’m bitching about it. Sound good? Good. See you in 6 months when I remember that I started a blog and want to complain about something.