some funny, some angry, some needy
In case it isn't obvious, I found him like that when passing through Macy's on the way to the Lloyd Center DMV. I'm pretty sure all the people who saw me stop to take his picture thought I was the mastermind behind the poor mannequin's humiliation; of course I was not.
God, I hate grant proposal writing. So much hangs on me wording it just right, on selling myself in the right way. I'm trying my damnedest in the next two, three days to get my RACC proposal done -- the due date is the 20th and for a couple of reasons I may not have a lot of time coming up soon. So the more I get done now the better... obviously.
Unrelated: the morning of my birthday, a girl I only knew marginally in middle school and high school messaged me on Facebook, thus:Happy Birthday! Hey remember when we tied your back pack to the leg of the school buss seat? You missed your stop. Oooops! We didn't do it to be mean I think we did it just to have the company to walk home with :)
To which I can only respond:
a) No, I don't remember that. In fact, I have zero memory of it.
b) We were never close, her or her friends and I, so I'm smelling a little over-rationalization here with that whole "We just wanted company to walk home with" line.
c) Whatever! I have no memory of it! I'm not even convinced she remembers the right person.
I mean, it shouldn't get to me, but it kind of did. What the crap kind of behavior is that? Because if I did remember it, isn't that a fucking assholish thing to bring up on someone's goddamn birthday, fifteen years later? You feel so guilty about some silly prank you pulled on the quiet kid (who may or may not have been me) that your once-ever message to this person, a Happy 30th message on Facebook, simply has to include some strange, awkward non-apology/appeasing-of-guilt? I've got news for you: we've all bullied someone. We've all done things in junior high and high school we wish we hadn't, and that's okay. The way to prove you've grown as a person, you've learned to be more sensitive to someone else's feelings, is by not ever making them feel how they felt back then again. It's just such bad form, such nakedly selfish behavior, to stir up this kind of shit just so you can feel a little less guilty. It's something a child would do. I expect more from adults.
I don't know, maybe that's my mistake.
Anyway, I'm upset on principle. I admit, it very well might have been one minor incident lost in a sea of other incidents that I've simply moved on from and forgotten about; it could very well have been me whose backpack strap was tied to a bus seat, but that's not the point. The point is, it did resurrect something, for a moment I remembered (in general) being bullied back in those days, and that is a piece of shit thing to make someone do on their goddamn birthday.
But fuck it. I just wanted to vent some steam. Now back to a little Scrabble, a little flirting, and a lot of grant-writing.