My cat is gross and useless but I love him (theoretically)

Apology #4: Capu

Cat, I like to think I don’t have favourites, but we’ve all noticed that I much prefer your brother over you. I suppose that saying “That’s Kato, he’s the better one” whenever strangers meet you two might have tipped you off. I know that introducing you as ‘the one who scratches all the hair off of his back because of his flea allergy and likes to wipe his nose on people’ doesn’t help you to make a great first impression. Here is the thing, though: you are a cat. This means you will survive, because, as xkcd has so wonderfully illustrated, human intelligence is inversely proportional to the human’s proximity to a cat. Ergo, by the time a human is near enough to realize that you are bloody, half-bald, covered in scabs, and like to use humans as your facial tissues, these humans lack the intelligence to realize what an unbalanced cat-human relationship they are about to enter into.

For instance, a week or so ago, a friend of mine insisted on cuddling with you even after I warned him that you were ugly and Kato was better then you. Then, this friend lay down on the living room floor and began drinking water out of an old cardboard juice can, even though I offered to get him a perfectly good glass of water from the kitchen. Considering this is peak shedding season for you, I can only assume that this juice can was full of clumps of your cat hair, probably coated in a mixture of dead cat-skin flakes and old concentrated juice droplets. And he drank water out of that. I can only blame you for this lapse in his judgment. Not only are you scabby, snotty and bald, but you also diminish the intelligence levels of my friends.

Anyway, as you can see, what I’m trying to say here is that I’m sorry that you are so gross. I am sorry, kitty! Remember that I do still pet you, knowing what you are. And I love you! Though not nearly as much as your brother, or most other things on my kitchen table, including the half-used pad of college-rule paper you are sleeping on top of. And when you’re in the kitchen sink and I turn the water on full blast, that’s always most definitely an accident—I just didn’t notice your 15 pounds of hairy kitty flesh sitting directly beneath the tap! And so I’m sorry for that, too.

Love,
Amy
who still doesn’t quite seem to get what an apology is.

Welcome!

Hello everyone! Welcome to my new blog! It is exactly the same as my old blog, except slightly narrower, and of a sandier colour. Also there are birds in the margins! You may wonder what birds have to do with coffee or Tuesdays, and what coffee has to do with bizarre stories about my life. One day, I will explain it to you. One day, I will do a lot of things with this blog. But for now, all you get are backposts you may have already read, and a letter to my nephew (below).

Enjoy!

Amy

Apology 3: My Dear Nephew

Dear nephew,

I am sorry that I have repeatedly described you as a hairless mouse, a monkey, a disturbing body infestation, and an alien. I may have overreacted to you slightly. Let me explain about the latter two insults. You see, when my sister described the way you were trying to claw through her ribcage with your tiny fingernails, my mind immediately leaped to such pop culture classics as the Alien series (while I am aware that you are currently too young to know the Alien series, I am sure you will one day see and appreciate the magnitude of the early insults I heaped upon you). I was aware that you were, in fact, a human, and not a razor-toothed extraterrestrial worm, and I managed to avoid describing you as such in my sister’s presence. However, I could not avoid describing you in this way to a few of my friends, co-workers, and a variety of strangers at a bus stop one day.

As for the hairless mouse and monkey metaphors: most mammals arrive on this earth after being crumpled up into a tiny ball and forced through an opening roughly 1/16 the size that they are. For this reason, I do maintain that, before they are properly unfolded and ironed flat, most smushed-up little newborns look relatively the same: something like a deflated red balloon dipped in honey and rolled on the floor of a hairdressing salon-- regardless of size or species. However, I will admit that, when I saw the first photos of you, I was struck by how cute you were (even though you had been out in the real world for less than an hour!). And, now that I have met you, I can agree that you are very sweet—adorable, even!—and positively humanoid.

Love,

Amy

Apology #2: a REAL Apology

An Actual Apology

In the theme of Apology Week, I’d like to frame an actual apology for my incredibly angry Virgin Mobile post. It was mean-spirited*. Virgin Mobile needs to get its act together in the Customer Service department, but the Virgin Mobile Reps themselves are not where the problem lies. And, as a Virgin Mobile Rep pointed out when they responded to my angry facebook complaint (where I told them their customer service was deplorable, accused them of dressing their reps like…er…whores, and then linked them to this post, which they read), there’s no need to disrespect the angels** (the women handing out the sandwiches). In reviewing my post, I am rather surprised at myself. I hold that women should be able to wear whatever they want without being harassed publicly for it, and here I was harassing them publicly for it. I do question the appropriateness of Virgin’s salacious “enter the virgin” marketing schtick and all the mildly suggestive content that goes along with it, but in the end my real problem was with the company’s inability to get me my cheque within 9 months (let’s see if it’s here within the year?), and putting me on hold constantly, and rarely managing to get all my bills and services right; not the fact that they had women giving out free sandwiches. Also the women weren’t dressed nearly as suggestively as I’d have you believe. They were wearing skirts and t-shirts, something that I have been known to do on numerous occasions. And I got free food from them! And also they were very professional! I also got a free sticker! What’s not to love?

So, Virgin angels, I am sorry. There was no need to attack you all over the internet like that!

And Virgin***, you do need to work on your customer service. I’ve come across quite a few dissatisfied customers on message boards, facebook posts, and blogs over the past few days. But me writing incredibly angry blog posts (in which I refer to your company as...what was it, demon spawn?) about it won’t help. I hear your customer service used to be descent. I hear that some of my friends adore you. I just want my money back, and, hopefully, to never have to go through something this frustrating again. Maybe next time I’ll just say that instead. It only took a paragraph.

*This whole incident reminds me of the months that I spent rehearsing for The Glass Menagerie. One of the main reasons why we had an assistant director was to keep the real director from flying off the handle (alright, maybe the main reason we had him was because we desperately needed him and he kept things running smoothly and filled in for the director whenever she was having a hectic time. But the second main reason was to be the hate-email bouncer. I'll explain). I myself got along very well with the director, and never did see her have a melt-down (though she did have this amusing habit of impersonating a bear during rehearsals. I still can't think why), she was apparently very fond of sending incredibly angry hate emails to anyone who happened to be unavailable to act/finance/attend/help set up for her shows. So she always sent her emails to the assistant director, who would proofread them and send them back with comments like "maybe instead of the phrase 'I hate you I hate you burn in hell', we can just say 'sorry you couldn't make it to rehearsal today, hope the antibiotics are working'...and it looks like you accidentally put the caps lock on for this entire post!" Looks like I'm becoming my old director. I'm so proud!

**One might argue that Virgin hiring attractive women in short skirts to promote their company opens these employees up to objectification, and airing a tv commercial that shows a Christmas angel in a mini dress giving out phones and winking, followed by the caption “enter the virgin” could be deemed as disrespectful towards women also—not to mention insulting to certain religious groups—but my statement was a more personal attack.

**Whom I doubt will read this

Beware the Virgin

On Thursday and Friday, Virgin Mobile was handing out free sandwiches on the corner. They had two ‘virgins’ dressed up in microscopic skirts the colour of the Devil himself, trying to convince people that free pork sandwiches were somehow an incentive to sign away their souls to the most vile of cellphone companies I have ever had to deal with*.

As I scarfed down my free sandwich and pasted my Virgin Mobile sticker onto the “Trash In Here” sign for one of the public garbage cans, I began to wonder. Why exactly do I hate Virgin? During our 14-month relationship, what exactly was it that irked me so much about them? Was it the monthly phonecalls to ask why they had screwed up my bill this time? Was it the fact that, during these monthly phonecalls, I was put on hold for at least 20 minutes and subjected to a putrid mixture of the hold-line “pumped up mix” (badly dubbed rap beats) and the smooth, sultry voice of a sex-line operator reassuring me that someone would be along to “take care of” me any minute? And that, once I was finally taken off of hold, I would, without fail, discover that whatever pathetic little virgin lackey had been forced into dealing with me had absolutely no idea what to do with me and would immediately put me back on hold again? The fact that they didn’t end my contract when they said they were going to, and I didn’t find out until I got the bill for 2 months of phone time I hadn’t used? That, when I called to get that fixed up, they put me on hold for so long I finally hung up on them and just paid the *$%@ bill? That when they finally realized I was leaving them, they passed me on to the one competent, polite, amusing, useful service agent they had and that the matter that no one else in the world could solve was settled with one single push of a button?

See, signing a contract with Virgin Mobile is like committing yourself to a relationship with a worthless skeezebag. A skeezebag named V. V seems nice and reasonable when you first meet him. Maybe you say you’re looking for something casual—something pay-as-you-go, if you will. But V is so charming that he eventually convinces you that you want to be with him always. Or at least for a year-long contract. See, V is a controlling bastard. He doesn’t want you to be tempted by anyone else’s services. He wants you to be all his. As soon as you agree to be exclusive with V, though, he seems to forget you exist. As long as you’re his on paper, as long as you’re stuck with him, as long as you’re paying the bills for him, he doesn’t give a damn about you. V doesn’t call you when he says he will. When you call him, he reassures you he has no idea why you’re angry, or what you’re talking about, and of course he’d never go behind your back and charge you for some other girl’s minutes, and of course he’ll call you later to sort this all out. He doesn’t call. You try to email him, but he seems to have forgotten who you are, and that you two were even in a relationship to begin with. Until he needs money, that is

So you put up with it for a while. You put up with it for longer than any reasonable person would. After a year, you think it’s over. You guys have stopped talking, you never text anymore, you’ve put your phone in the drawer and called it quits. And then, you get a phonecall from V. Asking for money. And, like an idiot, you give it to him. And when you call wanting to break it off with him and get your fifty bucks back, well, then he’s all smiles and promises. He begs you to stay. He promises to buy you lots of minutes—free! When you finally get him to realize that it’s over between you two, he assures you he’ll give the money back pronto. You guys can still be friends. And then...he doesn’t.

I was with V long enough to get wise to all these little tricks. Virgin Mobile have created a wall of bad music, slutty voice recordings and dazed, clueless customer service agents, a wall of frustration so impenetrable that no one can stand to stay on the phone line with them long enough to ever settle anything the first time round. Which is why, 8 months after saying goodbye to them, Virgin Mobile still owes me $53.67. I cut my service in December, and was assured by the one service agent of shockingly moderate competence that my cheque would be arriving in the mail within the month.

January came and went, and I phoned them again. After spending 30 minutes listening to the worst Black-Eyed-Peas remix known to man, I was finally informed that it actually takes 90 days for a reimbursement. So much for moderate competence. So I waited. And waited. And waited. And eventually, mercifully, I forgot about it. My blood pressure resumed a healthy level. I no longer waited in fearful anticipation of the day when I would once again have to wrestle with those virgin bastards.

And then yesterday, I saw the sad little Virgin streetwalkers** with their stickers and sandwiches, and 5 months of past-due rage was once again awakened within me. A BBQ sauce-soaked sanwich the size of a loonie couldn’t solve this one.

For an entire day, I resisted the urge to phone. I tried to convince myself that $50 was worth it to never have to deal with those demonic con artists again. But it was the principle of the thing. And $50 can buy a lot of things. Things that have nothing to do with Virgin Mobile. I sat in anticipation of the moment I would get home and phone the sexed-up customer service phone line for the umpteenth time. How long would I be on hold today? Which innocent service agent’s soul would I crush this time? There were enough horrifying possibilities to make my head explode.

I’ll give you the abridged version of the 43-minute runaround V gave me today. The long and short of it is that the man of mild competence who finally cut my service in December clearly doesn’t work there anymore. They still play the shittiest hold music known to man, except now it has skips in it, as though they ripped it off of some Columbia House Music CD their 12-year-old bother bought 7 years ago and left on the kitchen table for the cat to sleep on and the dog to eventually eat. Their service team has been lobotomized. On top of this, while their records show that I cut my service in December***, their records ALSO show that they only actually terminated my account in April. For 4 months, they sat there waiting for me to have second thoughts and come back to them. And then, to top it all off, when they finally realized that I wasn’t coming back and cut me off, they took all that money they owed me and they mailed it to HALIFAX.

Honest mistake, you say? I did buy the phone in Halifax to begin with, you say? The fact that I’d been in Winnipeg since the previous April and had told them that twice can be overlooked, you say? I swear, the service agents aren’t even given computer keyboards over there. They sit in front of black screens clicking their clicky pens to make it sound as though they are actually transcribing the information that customers are giving them.

I have once again been reassured that my money will be here within a month. We’ll just see about that, won’t we?

The worst part of all this, though, the absolute worst part, is that when my MTS contract runs out in September, I want to sign on with a phone company that actually works outside of Manitoba. One that does prepaid phone plans. One that is cheap. And I already have this Virgin Mobile phone... apparently the Virgin Mobile Frontal Lobotomy can be performed through a phone line.

What do you think? Should I call them and see if they want to be friends with benefits? Or should I just ram my face through a cheese grater several times in the hopes of regaining some of my dignity? I just don’t know.

*Granted, cellphone companies are inherently evil to begin with. It’s funny, they seem to be one of the only services left where the concept of ‘customer service’ remains completely foreign.

**Gee, maybe your employees would care a bit more about the quality of the service they give if you gave them the dignity of not dressing them up like Buffy the Vampire Layer and stick them on downtown streetcorners during rush hour so that 60-year-old business men can ask them if those sandwiches come with a free handjob.

***Citing Buyer’s Remorse. At least they got THAT right.

Because It’s Easier to Beg Forgiveness When Your Victims Never Read Your Blog Anyway.

The Apology Series

Some time ago, I was faced with the task of writing a one-page MB Conference report. The ensuing procrastination resulted in 5 Secret Reports. This week, I was supposed to work on a project with a friend of mine, but he decided that we’d get a lot more work done if he contracted some sort of flesh-eating bacteria and went to the hospital instead, so I am left to procrastinate from working on that project all by myself.

Thus, I have decided to create another series. Since the Secret Conference Reports went so smoothly**, I can only assume it would be a good idea to continue. And so, for my next addition to my series of series, I present to you Amy’s Apologies: Because It’s Easier to Beg Forgiveness When Your Victims Never Read Your Blog Anyway.

Apology #1

The first victim of my apology series will be my sad, unemployed brother.

A little while ago, I was surprised to discover that, apparently, my brother is ‘actually really nice’. Being described as ‘actually really nice’ generally implies that people have been led to believe that Ben is not nice. I was at first perplexed by this statement. Why would anyone think my brother is anything less than awesome? It couldn’t have anything to do with the things I say about him, could it? I might go around telling people how he doesn’t have a job, doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t go to school, comes home at the most ungodly hours and sits around playing video games and collecting energy drinks, but surely this couldn’t tarnish his wonderful reputation at all, could it?

Sadly, it seems to have done just that.

It appears that when I describe Ben to people who have never met him, they envision him as a useless, angry blob who sits around the house guzzling energy drinks like a hyper-active version of a white trash alcoholic, refusing to speak to anyone who is not using World of Warcraft as their communication medium of choice. "I once killed a puppy because it woke me up before noon", Lump-Ben would say, before sluggishly sliding out of his bed at five pm and sliming his way down to the kitchen to inhale a 5-person roast beef dinner, leaving his poor, angelic sister to satisfy herself with 5-year-old wonderbread crusts.

In actuality, if anyone of my friends were to meet Ben, he'd most likely be the cheerful, muscle-bound one, dressed as a pirate, obediently carrying a heavy object, be it a couch, a table, or a large crate of canned meat, from one location to another because someone asked him to help them move out/move in/feed the world. After Ben is done carrying heavy objects for helpless people, he dresses himself in a bright-orange suit, picks up a sledge hammer, and goes to something vaguely referred to as a piergoi party, where he will amuse all of his friends by trying to fit his head into a very large glass jar. Oh, life is so much better when Ben is around!

A shock, I know. But true! And so, Ben, I would like to apologize for all of my closed-minded friends who assume that being an unemployed caffeine addict makes you a lowlife. I know, they are ignorant and judgemental, but we can’t blame them for this. It’s not my fault that they misinterpreted my limited, largely negative and biased descriptions of you! They just haven’t been exposed to any of the wonderful, unemployed video-game playing insomniacs there are in the world. They don't understand that you treat being unemployed like a full-time job.

Once, I tried being unemployed, and it turns out that it’s really very hard! With no one there to demand that I appear in a certain place at a certain ungodly hour of the day wearing a certain combination of bleach-stained clothes so I can create dangerously sugary semi-edible food concoctions for the general public in exchange for something slightly above minimum wage, I soon lost interest in getting out of bed at all. My ability to be productive is directly proportional to the amount of hours I spend doing things I don’t actually want to do, it would seem.

But Ben, he knows how to be unemployed. Joblessness is a veritable art form for Ben. I used to wonder why it was that, when I decided to take a few months off from job and school, my greatest form of entertainment was lying on the couch eating excessive quantities of lemonade cake. Why didn’t I come home at 6am wearing a bright orange suit and a green top hat? How come millionaires in colorful suits never wanted to pay my entire bar tab because I was wearing a pirate hat? Why did I never wear a pirate hat? Or make myself a suit out of bubblewrap? Or somehow acquire 5 cars and still rollerblade everywhere I went? It takes talent to use free time like that—talent that I just don’t have.

On top of this, for some odd reason, Ben is willing to use his free time to help others when it is required of him. If asked nicely, he will carry a variety of heavy objects for you—for free! He will carry your couch out of your house, your vast quantities of tinned meats into your shipping containers destined for disaster areas, or, even, his own very large tv out of his bedroom and into the living room so that his sister and her friends can watch movies on it. And he may not drive all of those 5 cars that he owns, but he WILL put gas in the tanks and then let you drive them****! The man does everything!

And so, the next time you hear me describing my brother in a way that seems at all deprecating, remember this blog post, and realize that it has nothing to do with me exaggerating the negative aspects of my brother’s character for no good reason, and everything to do with you closing your mind to the reality of the talents of the unemployed. That’s right, it’s not my fault, it’s yours.

Whew. I feel better now.

* illegally, disgracefully early, and against my will, according to last week’s blog hiatus announcement

** For me, the writer, who dashed them all off in a single afternoon; not for you, the viewer, who had to slog through them for an entire week.

**** Even if he insists on disconnecting the windshield wipers so he that the CD player can work and you end up in the car, blinded by rain on a busy street during a thunderstorm. I have bad luck with windshield wipers.

e-theology? (backpost)

Does God exist on the internet? I see this place as something inane, superfluous, and largely self-indulgent. There are some very useful things on the internet, but to get to them, one generally must sift through a putrid swill of pornography, cats with deplorable grammatical skills, and a mishmash of sites created by people who think they’re more intelligent than they actually are. While I can accept that God floats around at frat parties muscling His way into conversations so creatively that no one even realizes he’s there, and I can see God collapsing under a copse of trees in Sudan and watching a photographer taking shots of a dying child being stalked by a buzzard, and I can see God flickering around in my English lectures and on the street corners where some of us work and in the gutters where some of us sleep and in the coffee shops where some of us shell out $7 for a frappuccino, I turn on my computer and God disappears.

Does God have a use for the internet? Does he go on 4chan* at 2am and shake his head at the creators of the infamous 2 girls 1 cup video? Does he leave spiritual hooks embedded in the coding for weight-loss pop-up ads? Trying to imagine God on the internet feels like sacrilege. And also pointless. Surely God has better things to do. But at a time where so many people live out their lives floating around cyberspace, posting pictures of themselves on facebook, writing cruel comments on rating sites, watching youtube videos, creating disturbing internet memes, trying to level-up on world of warcraft, surely God must be out there somewhere too...

* 4chan: ‘the asshole of the internet’. When you come across something particularly heinous, and you wonder how on earth this depravity made its way onto the internet in the first place, the answer is always 4chan.