Tag text lingo

STFU Fridays: Restaurant Loudtalkers, Illegible Texters, My Mom’s Gut

Heather Christena Schmidt 16 Comments

Here I am. It’s Thursday night. I’m in my pajamas. As you see, no make up. I’m just hanging out. I’ve written a lot today – both a blog post, as well done revisions on my new blog book coming out soon. I also went bowling and to the library. Those were pretty good times. I should be spending my night relaxing and reading my new Hem biography with a nice glass or two of skim milk.

But I’m just so fucking excited for this week’s Shut the Fuck Up Fridays that I cannot wait to post it. So I’m writing it early and posting it tonight because it is just that good. At least as it’s worked out in my head.

Shall we begin?

Restaurant Loudtalkers

Have you ever been in a restaurant, only for someone to be talking so fucking loud that you just want to break a glass and cut the motherfucker to get him to shut the hell up? It’s not always men – that’s sort of sexist for me to say “him.” In fact, more often than not, it’s been the broads.

Once we were out to eat and these three humungous women (I don’t mean their physical girth … well, they were a little heavy, but I mean like Amazon Women – tall, muscular, and quite frankly frightening); these women were loudly rambling on about their new marriages, the inadequacies of their husbands, and how nice it would be if they didn’t have to get porked every night. In the middle of the goddamned restaurant! In front of children! I will never forget as they pounded out of the restaurant, little Pookies clung to me in fear then asked what they were talking about. I really appreciated that.

Today’s experience was no different. We were picking up take-out salads and this old guy was shouting – literally shouting – to the person sitting right across from him. MY NEW NUMBER IS 7-9-5-4-4-3-7 … NO!! 7!!! 7!!!!” Then he kept going on and on about how his grandkid was in soccer and his son was getting a promotion and his fantasy football club was meeting up again and blaa blaa blaa blaa blaa, in the highest decibel possible. In the five minutes I waited for our food, I learned more about this guy’s life than I have ever wanted to know about another human being, a complete stranger no less.

Walking out, I was so overwhelmed by the Restaurant Loudtalker that I immediately turned into this crying lady who has the balls I don’t have to say what’s making me cry:

Illegible Texters

The other day I was talking about how my Trailer Trash Mom started texting and it is – like – seizure-inducing to read the things. I’m not talking about texters like her, though. I’m talking about the people that text, Tweet, email, Facebook, Instagram – whateverthefuck social whoring you want to reference – shit that just looks stupid.

B4

L8

Ta2

H8er

Seriously. There are very few acronyms I find to be acceptable alternatives to basic English literacy. OMG is one. WTF is another, with its variants WTS and WTH. B4 and L8 are not; nor is Ta2. H8er just makes me emotional again:

My Mom’s Gut

Everyone has been asking what the conclusion of my Terrible Tuesday was the other night. My mother and grandparents came over to dinner; it was such an awful day and I was essentially wasted by 6 o’clock. Before that, though, my mother announced that she was going to bring my grandparents over around 2 or 3, instead of when I invited them to come over, at 7. Being a generous host, I canceled my afternoon plans and made sure to be home by 2.

They showed up at 4:45.

So I had laid out some appetizers since they’d be there for so many hours before dinner. Just some chips and dip, and some caprese salads. I spilled an enormous amount of chips with dip on my chest, licking every one of them up with no comment from the crowd. Then I served dinner – again, relatively healthy. Nothing too bad and pretty low cal.

To be precise, I served some garlic bread, nonfat tortellinis with fat free feta, bar-be-qued sirloin (even though I don’t eat red meat), and a medley of vegetables (brocollini, asparagus, and snap peas). My mother – having just returned from her couple of months at the trailer with her hillbilly husband – was not used to eating such an healthy meal. It’s all Ramen, chili dogs, and McDonalds for those two, so her gut was a little ill-prepared for such an easily digested and nutritious meal.

As everyone sat and let their food digest before taking a piece of red velvet cake for dessert, my mother suddenly leaned forward and scooted to the edge of the couch. She spread her legs and positioned her hands on her knees, then puffed out her chest and let out the most uproarious and earth-shattering belch I have ever heard another human being let out.

My grandparents sort of sat there as if nothing was going on, although my grandfather did verbalize what she had just done by saying belch, like he normally does when he does it.

To make matters worse, when she was done letting out the gut-busting, time-stopping esophageal foulness, she wiped her mouth, giggled and said “I guess I’m ready for dessert.”

While everyone else ate their dessert – acting as though not a goddamned thing had happened – I snuck to the bathroom and sat there, tears leaking from my eyes at the horrifying display my mother had just turned the evening into. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was my Trailer Trash Mom’s gut rot. No one will ever know, but in the end it was all emotional and teary and STFU:

 

Prolly a Lil

Heather Christena Schmidt 7 Comments


 

This post has sadly been removed due to publication and copyright laws. You can still read it, though, by buying B(itch) Against the World for unlimited viewing, plus more great and new posts from 2011. And it’s only $2.99! Click the picture of the cover for more details!

 

 

 

 

Is that true?

Heather Christena Schmidt 2 Comments

Just this week, I have had the great fortune of adding another pet peeve to my master list of peeves, a list that seems to be ever-growing by the day.  The top peeves, of course, are matters of grammar.  You all, faithful blog followers, know that I cannot stand text lingo (wat up wit u lol); just as you know I have come close to completely melting down over the use of fake words like ‘good’er’ and ‘funner.’  And we all remember that post long ago and far away on Art is of Words when I had the equivalent of a digital aneurysm over the new trend in putting spaces between an exclamatory sentence and its exclamation point(s) (OMG I am sooooo excited !!!).

But I have other pet peeves besides grammar and punctuation.  The grocery store lady is one of them; another, still, is when people take too long to return a text message, or worse – ignore it.  But some of these are lower on the list, because yes, lovely readers, I do prioritize my list by just how annoying the particular peeve in question is.  Well, I have added a new one and it’s a doozy, so it’ll be ranking pretty high up there with the exclamations and the OMGs.

At dinner a few nights ago, I was confronted with a situation that I realized I have been confronted with quite a few times in the past, without realizing it of course.  We were at dinner with a group of my husband’s family and friends, and every time I said something, one person in particular felt that it was necessary to verify what I said with either my husband or someone else in their “circle.”  I said something about the Internet, and this person said to my husband “is that true?”  I said something about a mutual friend we all had, and this person said to one of the other friends “is that true?”  I think it happened three times during the course of the evening that night, and upon thinking about it more realized that I am second-guessed to death every single time we are around this person in particular.

This made me think for a while – am I seen as a liar?  Do people see me as not a trustworthy source of information, even over mundane things?  Were other people being second-guessed as well?  I felt so second-guessed after this particular dinner that I began to second-guess myself, so asked around.  To my surprise (and relief), I found that a lot of my friends encounter people like this – people that have to verify everything that you say in front of you with someone they trust more, even on the most minor of issues.  An old high school friend of mine told me she has a co-worker that is constantly second-guessing everyone in the office; one of my friends even said that he broke up with a girlfriend of eight months because the girl’s dad did it so often.  So what’s the deal?

After even further second-guessing, I realized that I could not – for the life of me – figure out why people do this.  Why they have to “is that true?” someone they may have known for years, decades even, is completely unreasonable to me.  Not only does it just not make sense, because generally you associate with people you believe and trust, but it is just so rude.  Second-guessing someone you consider more than just an acquaintance – be it a co-worker, friend, or relative – is like turning to a nurse and asking if the doctor is right in saying you have bronchitis.  It’s illogical, rude, inconsiderate, and really says more than it is probably even intended to.  But then, I can’t figure it out.  Is it that these people have trust issues?  Or is it more deeply rooted, sort of like a subconscious need to establish just whose side you are on, even for information?

As with most questions I ask myself, I still have no answer for this one.  Perhaps that is why it ranks so high up on my master list of pet peeves:  the very fact that it happens is bad enough, but not knowing why is enough to make that funky blue vein pop out of my forehead.  To that person that always, inevitably, does this – the person at my family and friend dinner, the person at my friend’s office, my friend’s ex-girlfriend’s dad, and all you other second-guessers out there – we have all updated our lists accordingly.  And let me tell you, once you’ve reached the status of an entry on the pet peeve list, you hear about it.