...tell me your dreams. "Oh, my god," you say, "I had the weirdest dream last night!" and I say, "I find other peoples' dreams deeply boring," and you say, "Yeah, aren't they? But my dream, wow, I'm telling you, it was weird!" And then you tell me the whole thing in mind-numbing detail.
Newsflash: we all dream. All dreams are weird. All other peoples' dreams are boring. There are no exceptions.
I do not give a shit about your dreams. Ever. I will not listen. If you force me to listen (if, say, I'm naked on the massage table, or my mouth is full of dental implements, or I'm in the back of your cab) I will cross you off my Christmas card list. For life. The only person with an exemption to this rule is Kelley because I love her and twenty years of delight buys a certain amount of leeway--but even she knows to use her exemption sparingly.
So don't, just don't.
And while I'm at it, here are some other things that piss me off:
- people who misspell Ursula K. Le Guin's name, or Samuel R. Delany's. Take a minute. Look at those names, look at the vowels, look at the spaces, look at the initials. If you can't be bothered to get it right, don't bother to talk to me. These are giants of the field. Show some respect.
- people who talk as though their conversational partner is two miles away in a howling gale. Use your inside voice. Better still, just shut the fuck up and die. You're as fun to have around as the moronic dream-tellers.
- people who answer the phone in the middle of a conversation or a film or dinner. It makes me want to hurt you. And I warn you: my social conditioning doesn't always hold.
- people who let their dogs bark. I can't even talk about this one without getting homicidal. Insert the vitriolic diatribe of your choice.
- people who feel the need to have the last word, who just can't resist the last little stinging verbal slap. My new resolution: you slap me verbally and I'll punch your fucking teeth out. Fair?
If I spent another five minutes on this I'm sure I could double my list, then double it again, but right now there's a cold beer singing my name and batting its eyelashes. So I'm going to walk away.
32 comments:
I think that if you walked into one of my dreams, my whole mid-section would be sore from uncontrolled laughter by the time I woke up. You're hilarious!
The best--and worst--part is that you do mean those warnings you're handing out. I know I'm giggling partly because I'm nervous. I'll get my writing pad out and do six whole pages of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany.
Really getting comfortable in that red Cardinal-person hat, aren't we?
Duly noted.
Do we even want to know what you would do, if you didn't exercise social conditioning, when someone spells Kelleys name wrong!
Even more boring than hearing about real-life dreams: reading them in fiction.
I always skip lengthy italic passages. They rarely add to the story.
karina, I'd prefer a crown
janine, you know this is my way of exorcising the rage so I don't actually have to hurt people, right?
jen, best not to know, at least until you've absolutely digested your breakfast...
ssas, but the joy of fiction, is that you *can* skip them, skip skip skip, no one gets hurt.
.grin.
I completely relate to the rage exorcisms. Most of the time, though, when my rage about things like what's in today's blog gets high, I lose all that beautifully violent eloquence.
I kick things. I chop wood. But oh...I read today's blog and thought: damn. If I could only make my words feel like a high-velocity jab in the solar plexus...maybe it would help.
Thanks for the clarification, though, Nicola. I did spend about an hour wondering if I ever wrote on this blog about my dreams. .wry smile.
I just wonder what set you off??
I am in 100% agreement with your list.
The one thing I would like to expand on is dogs barking. Big dogs, can be a annoying, but it's little shake and piddle ankle biters that are the worst. People who let their ankle biters bark all day should be locked in to a room and forced to listen to a really bad bagpiper for 24 hours.
I think someone might be having a bad day....hope that cold one helps!
Rant and rave and then ram that car into that VW. No wait your not Cathy, Cathi, Kathie, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh...
Everyone, here's the thing: I'm not in a bad mood, nothing set me off, per se. I wrote this last night and it published on a time delay.
About a week ago I read a blog where someone who should have known better spelt Le Guin's name wrong. I stamped up and down, and grumbled because, y'know, I can. And then the other night, having dinner with the neighbours (we have several sets of really fine neighbours) we did one of those table questions: what really pisses you off about people? And I thought of the name-spellers, and then the idiot dream speilers and I thought, huh, that would make a good blog.
So, as I've said, I'm not having a bad day. Quite the opposite in fact. I'm currently feeling all slitty-eyed with satisfaction. Life is good. And for tomorrow I've already prepared a cheerful little blog.
It definitely did make a good blog post.
I keep reading and muttering...yeah!...every few words.
Other people's dreams bore me too. I'm content to entertain myself if you need to talk about it, so you can tell them to me; just don't expect me to repeat it back or marvel that it's some kind of omen.
And the cell phone thing as well; never understand what is so important that can't wait, or why the phone has to be answered just because it rings. Incredibly rude.
The thing that's bugging me right now is the neighbors in the house next door; they let their kid cry and scream non-stop. I hate to think what they are doing to that kids psychological development. I usually just respond by turning up the music, but one of these days, I'm going over there....
I thought the post was pretty funny/entertaining. :)
Best. Rant. Ever.
Aaaahhhh, I feel better now for having read that.
The other day a friend called me on her cell phone and yammered at me about I-don't-even-know-what for about 20 minutes before saying, "Well, I probably ought to go, I'm walking with (insert name of mutual friend here) and I think she's starting to get annoyed."
WTF?!
(A quickie note to Jennifer: as a parent of two wee ones, I must point out that there are times when kidlings just have to cry and scream. My own are famously mellow, but I have no doubt that my neighbors have been tempted once or twice to call child protective services on my ass...)
Linda has left the building to go be in charge of some saintly activity...
janine, I hope you also got to thump the table to your 'yeahs!'
jennifer, yes, it was designed to entertain, not frighten. Well, maybe to be just a little repressive :)
stephanie is the friend who phones while with another friend well-mannered in other ways? I find that people rarely have just one blind spot/bad habit.
linda, I hope you're having fun with your bad saintly self.
I would like to have boring dreams but I tend to have dreams that wake me straight up out of a decent sleep saying WTF? So please crawl inside my brain and tell it to be more boring when I am out cold; ya know, when I'm supposed to be boring.
Just for fun, here's a partial list of things that make me crazy:
* Smokers
* Getting trapped behind slow walking smokers on a New York City sidewalk
* People who write the words "fictional novel" in a query letter
* People who insist that I listen to their inane reenactments of some television show from the previous night
* People who tell me that I'd like (insert your favorite sport here) if only I'd learn more about it. I know the rules of most sports. Growing up with a dad and two brothers saw to that. And I still HATE SPORTS! Hate talking about sports, hate watching sports. (Yes, that includes the Olympics.)
colleen, people ask me: what do you do? I say 'I'm a novelist.' 'Well, cool, fiction or non-fiction?' 'Novels. Big long stories. Stories. Fiction.' Tuh. Also 'very unique' gets my goat.
Alas, I can't say that my cell phone-toting friend is particularly well mannered. So you're right, it's not her single blind spot. But that was exceptionally rude, even for her.
What I really couldn't wrap my mind around was why the friend she was with didn't tell her to hang up the fucking phone after five minutes of blahblahblah.
Sometime rudeness is so shocking it's almost awe-inspiring--and certainly gob-stopping. It's appalling to be badly treated by someone you think is a reasonable human being--it's literally unbelievable for a minute or two. We don't want to believe it.
I think that's why sexist/racist/homophobic (etc etc--oh so very man ceteras...) remarks are so difficult for the recipient to counter. We can't believe it. That's why allies are so very necessary.
But, yeah, twenty minutes is just astonishing.
That was quite a list.
Pet peeve 1 - rude able-bodied people on public transport. Awful, asshats sitting and watching while some poor person who actually needs the seat flails and lurches about.
Pet peeve 2 - ill disciplined children. How difficult is it for people to train their children?
I know I couldn't describe my dreams because I would never be able to find the words that could conveey what it was like in the dream. If I knew someone who could do this, I would listen to their dreams.
Barking dogs get to me, too, except when they are barking at something that I really need to look at. That is part of socializing the dog. I hate it when my neighbors don't know how to do that.
I think i will look into Ursula K. Le Guin because I have heard so much praise for her. My first lover was a fan, but at that time in my life I didn't like scifi that much. I'm glad my horizons did open...
Duff
Depending on your taste I'd start with either The Wizard of Earthsea (fantasy) or The Left Hand of Darkness.
Dreams are interesting to the person having them, just like memoirs. Please confine telling of them to your girl/boyfriend, mother, best friend...anyone with a vested interest in paying attention.
An addendum to the cell phone rule. Do not continue through any retail sales transaction while remaining on the phone. It is rude to the sales person, to the people in line, and to the person you are talking to. If I were the cashier/sales person I'd ask you to step aside until you were finished with your call so the other people could go through the line.
But that's my own pet peeve.
As for dogs, endless barking is a pain in the ears but I do appreciate a dog barking to let me know that something is going on as the beagle next door does. Just because a squirrel raiding the bird feeder is as important to said beagle as the occasional drunkard in the alley is a matter of perception. I find that praising the beagle for letting me know of any trouble works to quiet her down.
For problem barkers I offer to train their dog for them...
Anon
Absolutely. Talking on the phone in the presence of other real live human beings is just plain rude, in almost every circumstance.
Ok. This pisses me off. People who cannot drive/navigate. Please just stay off the road; give it up or get a nav unit. I know, LA is a Big City. Lots of freeways, lots of roads, but if you haven't figured it out after many years of living here -- just call me up, I'll tell exactly which freeway, which exit, which road to take. (Where to go.) It's really not that hard to figure out. Please don't make it worse than it has to be. Jeez louise. I really don't get it.
So. You had a good time with your commute...?
Yeah. Sorry about that. But that venting stuff really seems to work. :) I had blown off steam by the time I caught up with my friends. And it's really true about a lot of drivers in LA. They never seem to learn their way around.
Hey, no apology necessary. Ranty pajamas R us.
Do you consider In Cold Blood a non-fiction novel, or have a different designation for it?
I don't have a designation for it, but the term 'non-fiction novel' is, to me, an abomination. Something is either non-fiction or a novel. It can't be both.
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