Archive for the ‘Life in General’ Category

Admittedly, this post has been building for a long time. I had first discussed this issue some months back, when I had the distinct displeasure of shaking hands with a co-worker that I had talked to dozens of times, but had never met in person.

That particular individual wasn’t exactly my favourite person in the world to begin with (read: he was a complete asshat) but after having shaken his hand, I realized that my image of him had taken a nosedive into shit-on-shoe territory.

Why is it so difficult for some guys to shake a woman’s hand properly? I am not just talking out of my ass here. I have, in the course of my life, shaken hands with perhaps thousands of men, and very few of them ever really get it right. They look uncomfortable, they are awkward and their faces scream that they would rather shake hands with the public urinal cake than with a person of the boob-having gender.

Seriously, guys.
It’s not that difficult a task.

I’m going to put it right out there for you, easy-peasy:

If you wouldn’t do it to your dick, don’t to it to a woman’s hand.

It’s really that simple.
For example:

The Death-Grip.
Don’t do this. No woman likes to have her fingers broken and bruised by a brute in a suit. Or by an ogre in overalls, for that matter. You wouldn’t choke the life out of your precious, so please don’t do it to our fingers. While we aren’t nearly as delicate and breakable as some might think (see the next paragraph), we also aren’t expecting to have our fingers put through your hand wringing. If you think we’re impressed by your show of strength, think again. All we will be thinking is that you are a douchebag who has to prove his manliness and superiority by making us cringe. And that is not the first impression of a good guy.

The Wimpy-Wimpy-Wimpy.
In a lot of ways, even worse than the Death Grip. This barely-there meeting of hands will prove not that you are a caring person who would never hurt a fly. It will leave every woman thinking that you do not believe her to be worthy of a real handshake. Worse yet she will feel dismissed, which means that she, in turn, will dismiss you. As a douchebag. I can’t imagine that your manly monster likes it limp. Trust me, we don’t either.

See what I mean?
Like your dicks, dudes.

So what’s the right way? Take matters firmly in hand. Reach out with a smile, grasp firmly and warmly, smile and shake hands. Stop worrying so much and just shake our fucking hand. We will forgive a multitude of lesser sins – sweaty palms, hanging on just a bit too long – if you just take our hands and shake them with the kind of grip that you would grace your gremlin with.

Go forth and heed what you have learned.

Just one final note.

For fuck sake, don’t start stroking our hand.

Because ew.

Some of you might not like this post.
Some of you will deem it inappropriate and disrespectful.

I invite those of you who do, to please click here and entertain yourselves for a while, because “off” is the general direction in which I am going to tell you to fuck, should you leave a comment stating that you find this post disrespectful or inappropriate. I not only warned you, I gave you a perfectly acceptable link with which you could get your world-wide-wocks off.

I recently lost someone very close to me.  Someone that I had known my whole life (not an exaggeration) and someone that mentored me and taught me things that I could not have learned anywhere or from anyone else. A very great man, indeed (also not an exaggeration). He was a unique and special person, one with whom not everyone could relate.  A dry, sarcastic wit; a heart that belied his gruff and often frightening (to those that didn’t know him) demeanour.

In short, he was my Yoda.

And on May the Fourth – Star Wars Day, fittingly enough – I shall bury my Yoda.

Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you? ~ Yoda, Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back

I did judge Arnold by his size.  Everyone did.  He was huge. His hand was almost alien in it’s size.  Fingers as big as any two of mine.  He was truly a mountain of a man.  He was also missing an arm. In place of his right arm, was a prosthetic. Complete with a hook for a hand.  Arnold had lost his limb long before I was born.  He had it torn off after getting caught in a conveyor at work. And while Arnold never seemed to see this as a problem, other people did.

I remember once a new operator got his machine stuck in mud. Not just stuck, but fucking stuck. Mud up over the tracks. He tried for an hour to get that thing out. All the while, Arnold watched through a window chuckling quietly to himself.  Eventually, the dude gave up and came in for a coffee.  Arnold went into his office, got into his coveralls, and trudged out to the Cat. The operator was very derisive in his comments as he watched Arnold walk out.

He remained derisive right up until the time that Arnold – one arm and all – got the machine out of the mud in a matter of a few minutes.

Do, or do not. There is no try. ~Yoda, Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back

There were so many times that I recall hearing this sentiment over the years. It wasn’t spoken like that, and was generally either preceded or followed by a ‘what the fuck’, but it all amounts to the same thing.  It was this very thinking that allowed my co-worker and I to perpetrate somewhat of a miracle one day.

Arnold was upset because the bushes in front of the office were brown and dead.  He very clearly – after whatthefuck-ing us – expected us to DO something about that.  Seeing as how the man wouldn’t take any excuse for anything, we figured we’d better damn well figure something out.  And we did. My co-worker brought in some green spray paint the next morning and we painted those fucking bushes back to life. We painted the bushes. We painted the branches. We probably painted the dirt.

But god dammit, they looked vibrant.

And yes, Arnold noticed when he showed up.
Let’s just leave it at that.

Twilight is upon me, and soon, night must fall. That is the way of things. The way of the Force. ~Yoda, Star Wars Episode VI, Return of the Jedi

Much the way that Luke told Yoda that he couldn’t die… well, I was always of the mind that Arnold couldn’t die, either.  He was too big.  Too strong.  Too… pig-headed to actually die.  And yet, while strong he was, with the Force, he was not that strong. And I was left repeating Luke’s own words:

But I need your help.

And oddly, or maybe not so oddly, I hear Arnold’s voice in my head.

“No more training do you require.”

Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. ~Yoda, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Ah… but I will mourn, and I will miss.

But the Force is strong with me.But I need your help.

Cuz I am a Jedi.

Arnold helped make sure.

So, yeah.

Not the best little blogger, am I.
And apparently, the time away from blogging (read: ranting) has made me start talking like Yoda.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

There. Random Star Wars reference is out of the way.
Combined with a random Seinfeld reference.
I still got it.

I haven’t blogged with any regularity for a while. I make no apologies, because it’s my blog. And because life was happening all around me, and I was taking part in it, and next thing you know, I’m titling a blog post, “Like, OMG! I have a BLOG!”

It’s like when you go grocery shopping and you bring home a whole bunch of lovely fresh veggies to make a stir fry with and then that night you’re too tired from grocery shopping to cook so you order a pizza, and then the next night there’s still pizza, so you have that as leftovers and then finally on the third night you think, shit I’m gonna have me some stir-fry and you go to the fridge and the veggies that looked so lovely are now looking like the dog’s breakfast and then you just stand there and look at the fridge as if it’s going to puke out some awesome ready made meal like the replicators do on Star Trek, which of course never fucking happens, and you kick yourself realizing that you didn’t cook the veggies, but since the pizza totally rocked, it’s all good in the hood.

It’s totally like that.
Except with fewer run-on sentences.

So anyhow, I’m blogging.

And I also accepted a challenge from the lovely and talented (she is) Chrissa over yonder at A Little Wicked (she is). As both of us need to get back into our blog-girl panties, we found a list of bloggable questions that we’re going to use as fodder for our brains and fingers.

There was only one problem.
The list was fifty questions long.
Yeah, no.

So, we decided to split the list up, one of us taking on the odd numbers, the other of us taking on evens.

All that was left was figuring out who took which.
And in true ‘we don’t want to pick’ fashion, we conjured a way for us not to have to decide.

We posted on Twitter and Facebook.
“Odds or Evens”
The number of answers each of us got decided.

(Insert thanking of friends and twitterers for unknowingly taking part in top-secret project, code-named “virtual coin flip”.)

To no one’s surprise whatsoever, the overwhelming majority of MY responses were “Odd”.
Fuckyouverymuch, friends and twitterers.

50 questions.
25 posts each.
2 posts per week.
2 friends pulling up their…

Blog-Girl Panties.

Many thanks to Tom Slatin and his wonderful blog for the inspiration for this challenge.