Entries from June 2005 ↓

When I was in high school I worked at a video store. It was in a small town and was really the only decent movie rental place in the whole of the city. Every single day, every day, a man named Orville Belcher would come in and ask, "You got any more a-them women in prison movies?"

And every day I would say no.

We had no true porn to speak of, but we had lots of Playboy videos and sexy, car wash cheerleader camp videos. But we only had one women in prison movie. And Orville Belcher was the only person who had ever rented it.

Fourteen times.

Orville, apparently, had a women in prison movie fetish. And we weren’t going to be his enablers. He would repeatedly ask if we would order him some more, and repeatedly we declined.

I wonder if Orville Belcher ever discovered the internets.

Dear Mr. Spielberg,

I was going to go see War of the Worlds, but now I am not. I was willing to forgive the turd pile that was A.I. because the trailer for your new movie was intriguing.

Then Tom Cruise went motherfucking batshit all over my television, dragging that skinny, empty-eyed Katie Holmes behind him talking about the evils of psychiatry. I am completely fed up with looking at his creepy center tooth and his evil, shifty eyes.

I know you might not miss my $8.50, but in case you do I thought you should know why.

Your boy is a serious wack-job.

A.I really was abysmal, man,
brittney

You so can’t use the "I was stuck in traffic" excuse when you are late to work if the guy who does the traffic reports sits in the desk next to you.

There is so much I could say, but can’t. Everyone and my father reads this blog now. I walk past co-workers on the way to the john and see this blog up on their screen. So strange.

I used to pretend that just a few people I know read this site. But now any snarky comment or pissy observation is inevitably going to come back to haunt me.

I’m seriously considering starting an anonymous blog. I’ll keep this one going for film reviews and essays and photos and other harmless observations. But I need a somewhat private outlet to get out all the good stuff I can’t say here.

Don’t come looking for me. I know how to lay low.

I was buying a sugar-free Red Bull (I’m so Britney Spears, right? Only less pregnant.) at the Mapco at Harding Rd. and Kenner, and while I was in line I snagged a New York Times from the bin. Diagonally in front of me was a woman scatching off her freshly purchased lottery tickets right there at the counter. Directly in front stood a young man holding a slip of paper. He handed it over to the cashier.

"This is a ten dollar ticket," said the graying man behind the register. He wore a smock and a look of sheer contempt. He waited for the young man to speak.

"Naw, that’s a five and a five. Five for this week, five for next week," the guy finally said. So the chashier took the slip and looked it over again, then went to his computer. It was about this time that the woman scratching her lottery tickets at the counter decided she needed to leave. So she just turned around and nearly ran me over without so much as an "excuse me" or a look in my direction–nothing. I tipped off balance and grabbed the candy rack to keep from stumbling. The two men in line behind me laughed at the abusrdity of this situation.

The cashier had finished studying the slip, so he handed back to the guy he was waiting on. "That is a ten dollar ticket," the cashier repeated.

"No, it’s a five and a five. One is a five for this week’s drawing and one is a five for next week’s drawing," the young man repeated. It was as if they were speaking different languages and neither one of them had ever taken a math class. "See, five and five," the customer said as if that clarified everything.

"FIVE AND FIVE IS TEN!," yelled the cashier in frustration.

It was about that time that the gentleman in line behind me caught my attention with a stretchy bracelet he’d pulled off a display right next to him. The bracelet said INTELLIGENCE on it and with both hands the man tugged each side making the word  INTELLIGENCE expand and contract.

I laughed loudly until I realized tempers were flaring and I might get punched. The man behind me put the bracelet away and grabbed my work badge that was hanging off the car keys in my fist.

"News 2, huh? I was wondering why you were reading The Times," he said.

"Nobody reads the newspaper," I said. "So that is how we do it in TV news, we steal their stories."

He laughed. By that time the guy in front of me had settled the 5+5=10 debate with the cashier and it was my turn to pay. If it weren’t for the Tennessee lottery I would totally miss out on coversations like that one.

I was grumpy all day today. Not gumpy so much as annoyed. Pissy. Definitely pissy.

Then I came home and watched the trailer for this movie called March of the Penguins and now I can’t stop smiling. Even if you are currently eating ice cream, getting head and money is falling from the sky, stop what you are doing. (You know you are lactose intolerant.) You must watch this movie trailer. It can always be better.

(Thanks to bikeboy.)

I don’t miss waiting tables even a little bit. But, oh man, has my ass gotten huge.

• I have never successfully completed a crossword puzzle. I’m too impatient. And I never have a pencil.
• When I went in to have my tonsils removed I was four or so. My mom tells me that I was prepped and taken into the operating room, so she went to wait. Several minutes later the doctor came out to meet my mother with me draped across his arms. My lifeless-looking body was limp , my head hanging backward, sagging. Much like a groom carries a bride over the threshold, but with much less effort. When my mother saw us she thought I died. Turns out I just had a really low white blood cell count and they had to delay the surgery.
• My sister breaks my heart. I love her very much.
• I saw Wild at Heart for the first time. I’m going to write more about that very soon. Maybe after seeing it again. I can say this, though: Too many titties.
• The boyfriend always stays up later than me even though he gets up earlier than me. But rather than go to bed I just fall asleep on the couch reading or watching television. Dressed, usually, in whatever I had on when I hit the sofa. He wakes me up, and I follow him bleary eyed to bed when he turns in. I collapse on the bed, jeans on, bra, all of it. The other day I slept in socks, blue jeans, a tank top, a bra, and underwear and on top of that a hoody zipped all the way up. On occasion I won’t wake up so he leaves me on the couch. I usually wake up around 3 am feeling confused and abadoned, and I always ask why he didn’t wake me, even though the answer is always "you wouldn’t move."
• When I worked at Outback Steakhouse the guys would make top ten lists of Prettiest Waitresses or Best Legs and write the names in dry erase marker on the board that was visible to every employee. It was tolerated, even encouraged, by management. Sometimes it would make girls cry.
• Sex education in my rural public middle school was taught by a woman attended my Southern Baptist church. A church that would sneak a scolding about no pants in the sanctuary into the sermon if a woman dared show up in slacks.  It was during sixth grade science that we had this so-called sex ed class, but actual sex was never once mentioned during the course. We spent a single day, if I recall correctly, talking about zygotes and fertilization and sperm. No mention of body parts was ever made. Not a single penis or stray fallopian tube anywhere. I honestly think the first time I ever heard this word was when I was sixteen! You won’t be surprised to learn the next year in 7th grade one of my classmates became pregnant. At thirteen. And my senior year I knew two girls who only thought they had two openings in their genitals. Imagine my astonishment that the boyfriend’s class included video and large photos of actual doin’ it and close ups of hoo-hoos. Blows my mind.
• Risotto might be the yummiest thing in all the world.
• I’ll be getting glasses and moving in the next two months. ‘Spensive.
• A guy with a smoking fetish was the major reason I started the habit. Then he got mad at me when I became addicted. (I quit over four years ago.)

Hope you are enjoying your vacation this week. Things are running smoothly in the newsroom. The news days, as they say, have been slow but that Michael Jackson thing is gonna come to a head soon, so at least we have that to look forward to.

So, I was thinking we should sit down and talk when you get back to Nashville. You see, it seems a gentleman was just hired to blog professionally for CMT. His job is to watch "The Dukes of Hazzard" and blog about it. It’s only been a little over a month, but judging from the linked article I’d say it’s high time for a raise.*

Hope your trip is lovely.

Sincerely,
Brittney

*My boss actually does read this site, so I can’t help but stress that I’m totally kidding. But this does change my thinking on that upcoming 90-day review.

My profile page was desperately out of date for some time. So I updated it.

That is all. At ease.