Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: joysaphine

I have this joke with my bff S. that comes up pretty regularly nowadays. It all started the morning of January 1, 2009. She’d had a party at her apartment and I’d stayed over to avoid having to fight for a cab home at 4 am. I was lying in bed rather hungover/groggy, and she was reading the New York Times—in particular, a story on people found guilty of the torture and sex trafficking of young girls.

“Can you believe it?” she said. “Horrible!”

Roused slightly from my stupor, I attempted to agree. “Yeah,” I said. “People are weird.”

“People are weird?” asked S. querulously. “People are weird, that’s what you have to say about pedophilic sex trafficking torturers?”

“Um…yeah?” (Okay, yeah, it was the understatement of the year, even given the 364 days we had left.)

But now, whenever someone does something disgusting, deplorable, so vile and awful that one can’t even bear to say it, we say, “People are weird.”

Because they are.

People are especially weird when you’ve posted something on a rather public blog, say, maybe, AOL, and they decide they don’t like it, and they don’t like you, and they wouldn’t even deign to spit on the grave of your grandmother. And they’re gonna TAKE YOU DOWN cause you deserve nothing other than their pooed-on shoe in your face, or some other means of public humiliation. You make them sick!

Given that aggression, instead of going on their merry way and never reading something by you again (or even looking at your byline to see that actually, the story was told to you and you are neither the subject nor the creator), they like to take potshots. I guess they figure they don’t know you and never will—the forum for comments is, of course, by nature anonymous in Web world—so they say (verbatim) things like…

“Your grammar is atrocious. Read Strunk and White,”

“This was a horribly written story. If you write and edit like that on the job, no wonder you were fair. Honestly.”

“This article is shit. Plain and simple. Shit.”

“Using phrases like ‘Needless to say’ and ‘gonna’, I would have fired you weeks before she did. Be thankful you were paid at all.”

And my personal fave: “Thought this story would never end. I could’ve covered those facts with ten less paragraphs.”

See what I mean? People are weird!

PS. All you positive commenters, and even the negative ones who have a right to your opinions but at least didn’t resort to name calling or grammatical/copy criticisms about things that aren’t actually incorrect or pontificating on topics you know jack shit about, thank you. You give me hope.