start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

i forget that these are a part of every summer

from my back porch i am watching this landscaping dude awkwardly maneuver a huge stand-up riding mower on this tiny fucking parcel of an urban residential lot. we are talking like 8 x 12 feet of grass here

there are 3 different lawn care machines roaring within 3 houses of me right now

one of my neighbors hires a 5-man team of landscapers to manicure this minuscule little yard

do you work at home?

ha yes on fridays i do and my back porch is typically a wonderful place to work

My neighbor used to use an assholish lawn service that blew all his grass clippings into my garden

marcos your neighbors need to embrace the Chicago-style yards and swap out the grass for cement, a handful of mulch, and some poorly maintained monkey grass.

Finding out a friend/local living legend in the cartoon and animation scene was turned down for support from the big local public space/street art collective because he "Wasn't famous enough".

Irrational in that I have always suspected it to be a popularity contest/ponzi scheme w well-meaning volunteers and fundraisers at the bottom raising the cash to go to hip street artists and art scenesters at the top but just sorta sucks to hear that confirmed from a super talented artist who is struggling rn.

Irrational only inasmuch as I'm not sure that anger is necessarily the most appropriate response, but I'm really really really tired of having to remind people at my work (who are technically above me and certainly make a lot more money than me) how to do their jobs. Guess I should just exit the working world altogether, huh.

something I am really considering today

My city does a pretty good job of keeping the gutters clean with their street sweepers, but on those features that produces curbs on the "wrong" side of the street, like traffic islands, the gutters look like early man middens with sand, dirt, cigarette butts, shards of car light lenses, batteries, etc.

Walkman melting down. Sad, been a dear companion for the last year and a half.
May be a battery thing but looks like changing that can be tricky.
Anyway not acting the way that it has been, buttons not responding and getting stuck in one lp instead of shuffling through all the hundreds of hours on there.

Hope I can sort it, but at the moment it just seems to have a mind of its own.

Finding out I earn slightly less than HALF the average pay for someone in my country (Australia)

I get that my first name is spelled differently than the way(s) the name is usually spelled, and I'm generally resigned to the fact that people are going to misspell it. But there's something about people misspelling my name when replying to an email WHERE MY CORRECTLY-SPELLED NAME IS PART OF THE EMAIL ADDRESS that really rankles. And it happens all the time. I'm always tempted to misspell their name in response. "Dear Bobe..."

^ This happens with my surname despite it being four letters long and shared by about 100m people.

They must like it a lot.

I've got a female co-worker named Lindsay who does this with mine.

i hate hate hate a very stupid thing

one of my friends talks about me to all these other friends she has, like apparently is always telling stories about me to them & so now these friends of hers that I dont fucking know all talk to me like they know me when i irl meet them for the first time or on facebook and i hate it

i dont like people!

and i am insecure enough to wonder if they are pulling my leg & they say my whole name (first & last name) like i am some kind of minor lame celebrity it makes me nervous & suspicious & i dont like it

fin

Wondering if it can really be constantly windy every time i walk across the park. Can't keep my hat on my head. Would think that it would have to be calm at least some of the time.
& watching trees getting constantly buffered by the wind and losing their purchase in the ground.
Have heard that there are people going around intentionally uprooting plants around the park because people I've talked to have seen them do it. Have just seen the end results, young trees lying on the paths around the place. Though have seen people intentionally breaking lower branches of trees, the ones they can reach.

Am certainly aware that somebody has stolen trees from the community garden since there have been 4 missing and the band attaching the tree to its support while it grew strong enough to stand on its own has been cut.

Doesn't seem to have much point apart from the immediate supposed satisfaction of the vandalism.

More of an irritation than true anger, but it is an irritation every goddamn time I see a license plate holder that says "XYZ Alumni", where XYZ is some university or college. This irritates the hell out of me because in almost every case it ought to say either 'alumnus" or "alumna", not "alumni" - and if you're going to brag about your education, you at least ought to do it in an educated way.

I avoid that irritation by figuring it means "[I am one of the select group of] XYZ Alumni" or like it refers to the Alumni Association.

it just makes me think whatever college license plate frame is most popular in the area graduates the worst drivers. in baltimore i like morgan state university alumni drivers are the worst. it's totally not justified but they're drawing attention to themselves.

and yes the alumni thing bothers me too. learn latin, asshole.

perhaps the car is owned by a couple who are both graduates of said university

oh that reminds me, i drive down a street with light rail tracks on it every day. only one lane on each side of the tracks for a few blocks. at least twice a week some idiot double parks on the street, which forces everyone to drive onto the tracks to get around them. of course often following the tradition of double parking where there's an open spot very close by. and people near the light sometimes can't understand why they need to stop where the line is or else they are on the tracks. yesterday this heroic light rail driver stops and just lays on his horn and uses the loudspeaker HEY BRO! YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE! GET OFF THE TRACKS! WHERE'D YOU GET YOUR LICENSE AT? it was awesome.

light rail hero

and i am insecure enough to wonder if they are pulling my leg & they say my whole name (first & last name) like i am some kind of minor lame celebrity it makes me nervous & suspicious & i dont like it

fin

try to use this to get u into restaurants, then yr celebrity will be delicious

TBF re the full name thing Veg, if its on FB maybe theyre just being lazy and tagging you which defaults to full name?

To bring it back to the topic I hate it when people tag people on FB for no or lame reasons (unrelated photos, comments on news posts with nothing but personsname, etc)

When ppl who aren't buying drinks plant themselves in the way of the bar

OTM. Hate standing drinkers when the bar isn't full (OK, I hate them when it is full too, but at least then they have an excuse) in general: blocking the bar, blocking the route to the toilets, standing right behind my chair talking loudly and swinging their drinking elbow an inch away from my head. Sometimes complete strangers even rest the other arm on the back of my chair and that makes me wish a painful death upon everyone. I have personal space issues.

VG I would hate that too, it would make me super paranoid! Does she talk about other friends to you like that or are you her only Facebook wall celebrity?

Currently thinking bad things about the owner of the car whose alarm has been going for the past 20 minutes, which sounds suspiciously like the one which went off for at least half an hour starting at 1:30am.

"i dont like people!"

lol I feel that stronger as I get older VG, I said that aloud to a professional person the other day when she was telling me I would love x person, it killed the conversation dead.

haha

the full name thing on FB is not to tag me, these ppl are not my FB friends! Like, this one kid is the son of an ex coworker, I have met him in person once like TEN years ago, have never had a conversation with him ever but he is bff friends with my friend. And he left a comment after something i said "Oh, [my full name], you always know the right thing to say" and my first thing was like step off kid, you don't fuckin know me!

i just need to not be around ppl

Haha, wait until I tell my co-workers about what VegemiteGrrl's having to deal with now!

Oh these are millenials,VG? They're all about numbers. I asked my 13 yo niece about her Instagram account thinking she would give me her username but instead she proclaimed the exact number of followers she has

when somebody turns one line that then filters to the next available cashier into two separate lines, one for each cashier.

The single superline is hardly ever space efficient though.

When people from the back of the queue go to the front of the newly opened queue. FUCK YOU

I have started doing this in Aldi if I have like 2-4 items (which I usually do, because I go past on foot on my way home from work) because if I don't do it someone from further back in the queue with a week's worth of family shopping goes to the front of the newly opened queue, every time

if someone from ahead of me in the old queue arrived in the new queue directly behind me I'd let them ahead but so far it has only ever been people from right at the back of the queue with heavily laden trolleys

shopping at my local Co-op is far more sedate and less full of weekly shoppers, at least on weekday evenings, so it's safer there to hang back a moment to see who moves, make "after you" gestures and hope you're not taken up on them, etc

nah i dunno - if a new queue opens and nobody notices, have at it - but if somebody barges ahead simultaneously that'd be pretty bad.

one thing which really gets me is people stopping immediately outside or inside doorways. it is the behaviour of the worst kind of moron.

YES. Or even worse at the bottom/top of an escalator. Which happened to me today, some clueless twat checking his phone oblivious while I had to keep stepping backwards up the escalator in order to avoid bumping into him. Still better than last week when a passenger 6 or 7 steps behind me on a downward escalator let go of their suitcase which proceeded to bump down a few meters and crash into the back of my legs.

Loud people on morning public transit. Shut up, this should be a quiet transition to the harshness of work. A final moment of peace ruined.

I will confess to being the guy that stopped at the jump off point for a ski lift once. It was my first time and I was shaky on my skis. Oops.

Ha I am the person who just falls off the ski lift like a fainting goat. Which is why I haven't been skiing since the mid-90s.

I'm sure I've said this elsewhere, but those times when people stop at the tops/bottoms of escalators are the moments when I come closest to putting my hands on a stranger and moving them out of the way (I actually took a tumble on an escalator once because the lady in front of me didn't consider the logistics of moving her granny cart off of the escalator step until she was already at the bottom). That shit is the ridiculous extreme of the increasing lack of attention people pay to those around them.

you can kind of do a gentle "sorry" and edge past someone with a hand on them, sort of.

you have to cup them very hard otherwise they won't take you seriously.

you have to do an ear clap

or simply prod them with a knife

too much mustard on a sandwich

when you keep hitting the wrong letter over and over and over on iphone keyboard