Fear the cute ones

Okay, I never thought I’d be doing this, but for you, Internet, I will go the distance. Personal sacrifices must sometimes be made for the greater good. That’s right, sacrifice.
I’m not usually prone to fear for many things. I’ll hug snake, pet a spider, run around in a tornado, play with fire and so on and so forth. But some things are far more diabolical, far eviler than the human mind can comprehend (more specifically, mine). So, without further ado, I give you:

Top Five of my Personal Fears (with pictures)

1. Wasps
Let’s start off with a normal fear. And nothing is more normal than being afraid of little black and yellow flying insects with personal vendettas against the human race. Bees? Bees are ok. You don’t bug them, they don’t bug you. It’s a beautiful natural coexistence between fuzzy flying lancer and squishy hairless ape.  But these guys:

Ugh. I’m shivering right now as it is. I will quite literally walk 30 feet around a group of wasps (or even 1, who am I kidding here) in order to avoid their malevolence. Not only do these guys attack without reason, they keep going. Bees sting you once, and they die. You have time and natural selection on your side, and more importantly, hope. But wasps just keep biting and stinging until all that’s left of you is a pathetic shell of a human being curled up on the sidewalk, blabbering and crying like an idiot.

Okay, I can’t take this, on to the next one.

2.  Nutcracker Soldier Dolls

Oh. Oh God. Just… make it stop. Those dull, lifeless eyes that drill into the darkest corners of your soul. The stiff posture of discipline that threatens to beat you down into a pulp with its tiny wooden sword. The upturned mustache that both taunts and mocks you like a half-breed demon’s smile. Not to mention the gritted teeth just waiting to tear your life to pieces with a massively disproportional mouth. Everything about this “doll” is wrong. Everything.
It’s an annual tradition on Christmas for me to get THIS close to buying tickets to the Nutcracker ballet; then bailing out like the wimp I am once I see the advertising posters.

3. Clowns

Okay, even you, the average person, must admit that clowns are downright scary. To this day I refuse to go to the circus because these guys are always there, roving around the audience. They’re always smiling, always laughing, always wearing ridiculous outfits that don’t belong on the streets and dancing out of rhythm to some cacophonous melody in their head. You know who else does that?

     Psychopaths.
The socially unacceptable. The mentally broken, twisted,  pathologic criminals that have no empathy, no fear, no understanding of right and wrong. They paint on smiles and put make up all over their entire face to cover up the fact that they’re merely robots with flesh. Cold, unfeeling, Terminator-esque robots that laugh at people’s misery while squirting burning water out of flowers into our eyes.

Why in the world are we letting these monstrosities near our children?  In packs?

4. Dolls that move on their own 
Have you ever ridden the attraction at Disney Land where you take a nice relaxing boat ride “around the world”? There are dolls dressed in clothes distinct to different lands, cute little dance routines their simple animatronic  bodies perform and colorful backdrops full of culturally distinguishable landmarks and architecture. It’s not the best ride in the world, and truthfully there are only so many times you can listen to “It’s a small world after all” before you lose your mind, but overall it’s not that bad. At least you’re out of the California heat.

Have you ever had the ride stop mid-way?

What was once mildly entertaining is now thrown into the chaos of hell. Your boat steers to a halt, and for a moment you gratefully notice that the blasted music has stopped. Immediately after, you realize with a sinking heart that the dolls are still moving. They continue to dance on their multi-colored stages, bopping up and down and waving around their little arms and blinking. Sweet mother of pearl, the blinking. Staring. Watching. Waiting.

Madness. Utter madness. The only sounds you hear beyond your pounding heart and rapid breathing are the clicking and whirring of their accursed parts… until you begin to scream and your 5 year old cousin has to calm you down.

5. Dolls that stare, in general

<whimper>

 

When your life is lorem ipsum

Life as we know it is unfathomably complex, and because our puny little minds can only comprehend so much, we do what we do best as a human race – we ignore most of it.

Think of a street you walked down recently, or a neighborhood you drove past. Can you remember all the colors? Any faces you saw? The millions of blades of grass or pieces of gravel? There’s this pretty little phrase called sensory overload that explains what happens when we actually pay attention to everything: something breaks. Usually your brain. Whether this is your train of thought or mental health doesn’t really matter, the key point is that it’s not all that healthy to feast upon every detail of life. Just the yummy portions.

But on the other hand, ignoring everything can’t be all that healthy either.

That’s basically me nowadays. Ignoring everything. Sure, I’m productive at work, I socialize with friends, I read books and write my stories and play video games and bake goodies. I even work out (sometimes…when I remember). Life is actually quite full of stuff. Whoopee! But there’s that fuzzy disconnect between life being full, and life being engaging. Moving through the days one hazy footstep at a time, I think I’m consciously ignoring everything that doesn’t require my direct attention, and everything is a Mad Libs line where I’m inserting lorem ipsum into the blanks. The game is much more fun to play when you can fill in the words to read “… and the blue kangaroo drunkenly flew down to the beach in hopes of jumping a spiky mattress.” See? Quirky. Odd. Amusing.

Instead, I’m looking more like “… and the ut aliquet dolor flew down to the scelerisque in hopes of nullam a sem consequat ac.” I mean.. yeah, it’s filled up, so I technically did it right… but it doesn’t make sense. While it’s a far cry from being sad or negative, it’s not even remotely funny. What’s Mad Libs without humor? This is the epitome of failure without actually losing.

Oh good. Because even in our most epic of failures, grammar still remains a priority.

Pop quiz: If sensory overload breaks your brain, what does sensory deficiency break?

 

Office eavesdropping

Human social groups are amazing things. The way complete strangers can come together because of some need (work, religion, social cause, hate of zombies) and interact with each other is quite extraordinary considering the personal barriers we tend to put up around ourselves.

Sometimes though, I do wish we’d hold onto our barriers a little longer. There is a stark difference between conversing with purpose, and conversing to fill up the empty space between two people. Usually, office banter is of the second species. What do they talk about?

Well, fortunately for you, I have conducted a highly scientific and precise experiment revolving around this phenomena, by means of sitting around and eavesedropping on everyone’s conversations (hey, science isn’t always pretty, we must push the boundaries to find the truth!).

And so, my results, in no particular order:

Food
Apparently, humans love food so much, even when they’re not eating they’ll talk about it. Talk about what one’s going to eat for lunch, what one actually ate for lunch, where one got his/her lunch, and how one’s lunches just aren’t cooperating with one’s dietary tract. Amidst all this food-talk, humans are still capable of ingesting extraordinary amounts of fast food. Fascinating.

TV
It appears that when humans are not working, they all deviate to one single past time: watching television. For people who theoretically have only a few hours of free time once they get home from sitting in front of a computer screen all day, a large percentage of that time seems to be taken up by sitting in front of an even bigger screen. How else would they constantly be up to date on the latest American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Food Network shows, and hilarious GEICO commercials? Some subjects even peruse Youtube for the latest week old videos sent by their tech-savvy children. How they have time to eat their precious meals or intiate personal hygiene rituals is beyond the scope of my understanding, and will need to be researched further.

Children
Even after filling up after-work hours with eating and TV, the subjects are still capable of conducting intra-familial rituals throughout the week and dutifully report back to the office. One can often hear the life story of a child through the eyes of their mother/uncle/grandparent, who evidently lacks any need to minimize how annoying/adorable/stupid/smart said child is, with various examples to support their thesis. With my methodical researching style and eavesdropping abilities, I can say with 95% confidence that, yes, your granddaughter’s candy eating habits will indeed result in type 2 diabetes, and your son is probably on some sort of recreational drug.

Clothes
This appears to be not so much a conversation filler, but a sub-group I have deemed “conversation-starters”. Office subjects (usually, but not exclusive to, women) will initiate conversational protocol by expressing heightened excitement at the cuteness factor of one’s blouse, or the fashion sense of a new pair of shoes. At this point, the paired subject usually responds with tales of hunting down sales, matching outfit ideas, and lamentations of the shirt lost that looked almost like this one but that they loved so so so much better. Speaking of which:

Complaints
The glue that holds mankind together, the universal conversation topic and glorious social bonding staple that predates written history: complaining. Whether it’s complaining about the weather, aching body, stupid landlords, broken down cars, poor customer service, or basically anything that proves just how unfair life is, it’s all up for grabs. No conversation gets as passionate, no individual gets as talkative, than the ones that include some sort of gripe about life. Not just life in general, but their life. Why their life sucks, why something is wrong in their life, why something negative is undeserved in their life. It continues to amaze me just how much human beings can talk about only themselves – while in a conversation with other people, who are probably talking about themselves as well.

Granted, these results are not as conclusive as I would like and requires a bit more research, but generally I do believe these topics take up about 98% of the time spent talking in the work environment. The question of why is a whole different matter all together, and will be analyzed in a future report.

Stay classy, office folk. Science thanks you for being such willing subjects.

 

Typing my way into insanity

Having a dull job that also causes you to sleep less than the recommended amount of hours can take its toll on you. And since corporate culture frowns upon bringing PS3’s to work, there’s only so much you can do before your mind starts “entertaining” itself.

Working with huge lists of names and accounts all day, you’re bound to stumble upon what I call “repeat offenders”. The accounts that never match. The insurances that never get through the system. The checks that bounce like Tigger on ecstacy. Nothing ever works right with such accounts, and like many other things in this world, it follows the 80:20 rule; 80% of your work comes from dealing with these 20% of people.

After a little while, you take it personally.

Mental conversations arise when you run into one of these offenders, and can go something like this:

“Ah, Mrs. Boyd, we meet again. What’s this? Another payment charge? Indeed, do you want to do this the easy way, or the hard way? <click. click> They always choose the hard way.”

<Insert menacing knuckle crack. type type>

“Oh, acting tought now, aren’t we Mrs. Boyd? Let’s see you handle this! <click type type click> Well aren’t we a fighter, but I have more up my sleeve~”

<click click type click type type type>

Nothing is working. At this point a maniacal grin seems to grow on my face, my mouse is cracking under the pressure, and I’m smashing my keyboard with blinding speed (APM 400!). I’m yelling threats now, mostly in my head, that is.

“You can’t hold out forever Mrs. Boyd! None shall pass through to the land of clean credit without my approval! You! Will! Balance!”

It’s become an epic battle of good vs. evil, light vs. dark, red vs. blue (anime fighting backgrounds are always strikingly similar). I hardly notice my coworkers scooting away as their eyes shift between each other in a mixture of concern and fear. I’m too preoccupied with throwing every weapon in my arsenal at Mrs. Boyd, who so far has exhibited remarkal willpower and refused to budge. An ominous growl escapes my throat and my face shines with perspiration as this battle of wits begins to reach the turning point. It’s all come down to the big guns now, and every motion taken is calculated down to the tee.

The final click. The perfect keystroke. Success! Take that, Mrs. Boyd! Your wiley ways and crooked numbers were no match for my brilliance!

Brilliance, I say, brilliance! Mwhahahahahaha!

With the battle over I lean back in my chair and sigh with exhaustion. Fighting for the good of mankind sure is tiring. I don’t think I can handle one of those again. Hopefully the rest of my list is more willing to submit to the general rules of finance.

Ah, Mr. Mason, we meet again…