Letter to Nordstom re: their dressing rooms

Dear Nordstrom,

Your dressing room lighting truly and wholly sucks. I was in one of your stores this afternoon, frantically looking for a dress to wear to my reunion on Sat. Why leave this until the last minute? It is none of your business and not relevant. I had previously visited a half dozen other stores and tried on dresses in their dressing rooms. I was feeling pretty good because, despite my less than perfect physique, some of the dresses had looked okay and I hadn’t cringed in utter revulsion upon removing my clothes to try on said dresses. Then I go to your dressing room. Apparently during the time it took to stroll from another store to yours I gained 20 lbs of cellulite……in my ass. Why, oh why, do you have such horrible lighting inside your dressing rooms? You are remodeling your store, it’s looking great, the communal areas of the dressing rooms are very nice with low key lighting. Why in the hell didn’t you change the lighting inside the actual dressing room which now has three mirrors to triple the angst? Are you assuming we as customers will think, well if it looks halfway decent in here, it will look amazing in a dimly lit restaurant? I just don’t understand how you manage to sell so many clothes. I bet your bathing suits just fly off the shelves, huh? I am not sure if you are aware, but your dressing room lighting has been widely discussed between shoppers for years and it is acknowledged that it is an unfortunate, cruel reality. But you had the chance to change it and you didn’t. Of course I bought the damn dress anyway, I have run out of time and it was totally cute. But still, I think you have an obligation to your customers to make them feel better about themselves when trying to cram their butts into too tight jeans that cost as much as a car payment. That way we buy more, feel positive about our appearance, and we both win.

Sincerely,

An annoyed (and apparently saggy) customer

Letter to Mercedes Benz Drivers

Dear drivers of newer Mercedes Benz models,

You pretty much drive like an asshole. I just had to come out and say it. I realize not all of you do and some models are worse, I am talking to you C300 drivers. It seems lately whenever I am merging onto the freeway, I have one of your cars traveling towards me in the slow lane going 5000 miles an hour before swinging over at the last second into the other lane. You know how often I swore you were going to clip me and send us both spinning into a fiery wreck? I know there are other reckless drivers out there, hell my step-daughter got into two accidents within a week, but it must be the obnoxious over-sized emblem that makes you stand out. My annoyance isn’t because I am envious of your car, I drive a cute BMW convertible. It also isn’t due to my driving too slow, I am historically a pretty fast accelerator….particularly when I think I am about to get smashed into. It’s almost like you have this immense ego that you have a sleek, new MB and that you basically own the road. Or maybe perhaps you really do buy into the whole German thing and you really do think you are driving on the Autobahn. I’ve got news for you, you’re not….you are on the friggin 56.

Therefore, in order for us all to get along and for me to safely make it to my destination without dying or being a stressed out mess, can you please remember that you aren’t the only one on the road? Oh and you Mr. driver of the SL550, that was a stoplight, not a suggestion to shoot halfway into the intersection, thereby causing me to think I had met the end of my life. So everyone in agreement?

Sincerely,

Sane Driver

School Rules

So part of the school weekly update that they phone you and email you. It is nice to stay informed but why the phone call? For the illiterate, not likely, for the people that don’t have an email account? Scary. So here is the following: “We are committed to safety at our school. Please follow the traffic rules. When we all follow them, traffic can move smoothly and best of all no one will get hurt. Thanks for your attention to this matter.”

Every fucking week we get this message from the school. Sometimes they throw in a police officer that has spoken to the nerdy traffic kid or safety guard or whatever the hell they are to “scare” us into compliance, but this is becoming a tiresome, broken record. What they need to say is either -- Look fucking cross at the crosswalk or else we will take a picture of you, photoshop it to make you look fat and ugly and then post it on FB, or the first person that crosses the street legally and correctly 100 times will get a magnum of Opus 1. I’m just saying I have solutions, it’s not an app, but it does have practical utility.

Mrs. Robinson

So I was walking with the girls in the park as they were riding their respective bikes. Treise was in cute dress and riding those plasma car thingys and people kept smiling at her adorableness (they don't know her true nature). This teenage guy walks by and smiles as well and I smile back thinking, yes she is cute. That's when I looked down and realized that they way I was holding my arms crossed coupled with the cut of my shirt was basically showing the world a lot of my cleavage. I'm like way more than twice his age. So fast fwd to last night when I was running, and I end doing the intervals around the park by our house, but I go by my house first and my dog Zoe (Rhodesian Ridgeback) was on the driveway (this will come in to play). I am running around the park when that same guy starts running next to me and trying to say something. I'm thinking, WTF I am not Mrs. Robinson. I remove my headphone and say Uh yeah? and he points behind me and says “Is that your dog?” Fucking Zoe had seen me and followed me and by the looks of it to a stranger was chasing me. I guess I am not Mrs. Robinson. He did keep running next to me though for a while which was odd - I think he is a bit off in the head. I mean he is 14 or so and playing on a playground. Get a life guy.

LOL

I hate when someone writes something they want to be taken as humorous and then they add lol following it. If it was indeed funny, I will have laughed out loud or in my head or otherwise (not sure what this looks like). If I didn’t think it was funny then it isn’t lol after all, at least not to me. I also don’t use emoticons and I never have. I am not sure why they offend me, but I hope to convey my point without having to rely on them. Needless to say I have upset many people who didn’t get my intention to be sarcastic and kidding. Such is life.

Solar power

You know the license plate frame things – mine currently is a KPBS one because I want everyone to know that I am an intellectual elite and not just an ordinary snob for no reason. Anyway, I was in V’s school parking lot and I saw one that read “I am not bald, I am a sex machine with a solar panel”. At first I chuckled and thought that’s one crazy grandpa dropping off their grandchild, but then I thought, what if it is a parent at this school, that’s kind of weird. Then I scolded myself for my prudery and decided that I should feel sorry for that person, because he has had one hell of a bad summer what with all of the June gloom, May grey, July where the hell is the sun, and August yea three whole days of sun. Surprised he didn’t just head to the East coast with its unprecedented heat waves. Next time I see the car, perhaps I should leave a get well soon card.

Vivi-isms because they are so awesome.

Vivi came up to me and said that she was too tired. I suggested that she take a nap. She said “I’m too lazy.”

While watching Hardball with Chris Mathews I posited that I wish they had a hand that would come out and smack the interviewee that won’t answer the fucking question. Vivi responded – “You can say that again”. Guess she is paying attention to my rants.

“I like your hair mommy”, oh yeah? “because it’s not in your face”.

Yesterday Treise was calling from my balcony off of the bathroom and when I responded to her Vianne asked, “Is Treise on the roof?” Yes and I am so amazingly okay with that….what the hell?

Vianne and I were having a conversation about how superheros. She wanted to be one when she grows up and I explained that they were not real and only on tv. She said – Well Daddy is a kind of superhero – I asked her why – and she said Well, he can’t fly and he doesn’t have shooters or anything, but he does help lots of people.

Pointing to boys standing behind us, "Do we know those boys?", "No", "So are they strangers?", "Yes", "Then can we kill them?" WTF?

Random thoughts that might be on Twitter had I an account (and they changed the pesky character limit).

I think eclectic fashion sometimes means blind person getting dressed.

I'm going to sign up for the doctorate in ministry. Won't that confuse my following when I start teaching them about flying spaghetti monsters and lace my sermons with profanity?

Graffiti on the back of a turn lane sign “you are a fuck face, and a fuck head too” – I don’t think the comma is necessary, especially if they are going to forgo all other punctuation, but I also pondered if it wasn’t a bit redundant – if someone is a fuck head, doesn’t that include the actual face?

Tuesday was a fairly good day with Treise. I thought I might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Today is Thursday and I realize that tunnel was actually a black hole that has the capacity to suck all of the patience and energy out of my being.

Rating Diego

I was recently on Netflix trying to rent another Diego movie for Treise and I was mentally saying, which means in my head in case that was confusing, “Well I won’t rent that one, it only got 3 stars” when my mental part of me had one of those, holy shit I am going to totally slam into the back of that thought moments, anti-lock frontal lobe and all. Seriously, who the hell writes in to rate Diego movies? Are their comments along the lines of… ‘Well it was very educational at first, but then the wolf cubs that were trying to find their mama weren’t entirely believable and from that point on I couldn’t even stomach the Spanish words being shouted at me. I think I’ll move to Arizona where they understand me better.’ It’s a show meant for children to be transfixed by the obnoxious vocal styling – CLICK TAKE A PIC (which doesn’t even rhyme by the way). You aren’t supposed to rate it, you are supposed to be totally annoyed by it and have it stuck in your head the rest of the day. Please just get a damn life already…..like the one that I have which actually is kind of boring and sucks, so maybe yeah, go on with your rating system – you rock. I will totally rent Diego and the whale shark rescue which Mike claims is a real thing (the animal). Oh and why Diego is at it, I have a little list of the things he can rescue, with Dora’s help of course, because some of them may be a little female related. I’m thinking along the lines of those boobs I used to have that have traveled so far south, I need a telescope to see them, and while you are at it, can you look for the elasticity in my skin because I am pretty sure it is near my boobs. Why you ask? Probably because I lost them around the same time – thank you second child, not only are you a monster, you apparently sell body parts in the black market (or at least tautness – can you sell such a physical condition?). Go Diego go, Go Diego go.

Scientific Studies

There are always ridiculous headlines summarizing the results of scientific studies that I am really embarrassed to say grab my attention time and again. Examples include ‘Drinking alcohol makes you live longer and escape cancer and Alzheimer’s’ and ‘Being a mother can be a stressful endeavor and result in early onset psychosis’ (is that something that can be early onset? granted I made that headline up so I say yes it can). I read these and shout yes! I knew I wasn’t crazy….mostly. However, there are certain headlines that drive me bonkers. I get that grad students need to publish and so they perform studies that are so necessary to our understanding life; groundbreaking work that will reveal the true nature of our existence. Today on the news they had something to the effect of ‘Sleeping less than 6 hours a night can make you underperform normal tasks’. That is so incredibly interesting because I was wondering why when I had a baby I was stumbling around like an idiot. I thought it was those hormones. They are after all named after women of ill repute. Oh and recently, ‘Helicoptering parents make anxious kids’. Apparently they did a study of college kids whose parents have to talk to them every freaking day at least once when they are in colleggggee – the time when you are sent out to sink or swim. These very kids are not as confident as their drunken roommates.

I gathered that I was a reckless mom because I was frequently at parties and I didn’t really pay much attention to my kids besides making sure they weren’t killing themselves every once in a while. Turns out I was being a great parent. I wasn’t just making a kid, I was creating a confident, independent girl who one day would score the winning goal in the group round of the world cup. Oh shit she’s a girl. Maybe she could one day be running for President like Hilary…oh wait, there’s those genes and of course the minor problem of not being rich. Either way I was doing a good thing by paying less than adequate attention to my kid. Yes, there are times that you can have your cake and eat it too. Most of those times you have to be wealthy, but there are some times when you can just squeak by and I totally own those times.

Check out this one – a little bit of awesome…. I prefer this article.