Saturday, August 23, 2003
(5:49 AM) | Anonymous:
Truculently Yours
(As a note of explanation, I posted this and one other post thursday night only to find no trace of them now. I'm not sure what happened, probably my error, but I will re-type them now. But, I give that as a way of explanation for my lack of posting up until this moment. All apologies.)
Earlier this week, wednesday to be precise, I was having a rather enjoyable day. I'd found out that a class at Olivet would sub for one of my major requirements, thus allowing me to drop that class from my current schedule. I'd stayed up virtually the whole night attempting to finish reading both The Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West for two seperate classes. I'd managed to get most of the reading done somehow and had intelligently discussed both as well as aced the respective quizzes. To top it all off, I'd finally found a radio station in Oklahoma City that does not entirely suck some balls, 105.3, The Spy. In fact, it may be the best radio station ever. All of my top 10 bands from my last "real" post are featured rather extensively as well as the rest of the "indie" breed I love so much.
It was a good day. It was a fine day. And yet with a few strokes of a pen, some person, some girl, managed to ruin what was shaping up to be something beautiful.
I came out to my car to head for work after school and found a piece of paper attatched to my windshield wiper. At first I thought I'd gotten a parking ticket, which would have been assinine since it was the third day of school. But oh no, it was worse. It was a note, a note which read simply this:
"Hey,
Learn how to park your car.
Get A Clue."
I'd like to take this chance to respond to the writer of this note personally.
"Dear ma'am,
I assume that you are of the female persuasion due to both the form and structure of your notice to me, but also primarily because the note itself was written on the back of an Estee' Lauder receipt, and the comma after "Hey" was represented by a heart. If I am incorrect in this assumption I apologize.
When I first got your value judgment of my parking skills, and throughout the rest of the day I felt a certain anger towards everyone I encountered. I think this anger was not generated by the content of your note, so much as its very essence.
You see, what strikes me most is the lack of any sort of ferocity in your message to me. Besides the non-sarcastic heart/comma, one can see this evidenced in several ways; the lack of cussing, the opening greeting, and the practiced and non-harried caligrophy quality writing style.
I appreciate the fact that you did not jump to the hasty generalization many would have about my parking skills from my apparently "less than stellar" performance on the 20th of this month. The fact that you do not rush to assume that I have a deficiency in parking all cars, making sure to insist on my learning how to park "my" car, rather than the more expected "Learn how to park a car." I can only assume you noticed I drive a Mercury Sable, which is slightly longer than your normal 4-door car, and thus harder to maneuver. Your concern is well-noted and appreciated.
But honestly now, I simply must know, really, why did you write this note?
I can't find any traces of anger here. The tone is almost matching that of one who simply wanted to provide me with some guidance along the way. Even the attempt to "Spice up" the letter with the after thought, "Get a clue" simply does not ring true. Come on, Lizzy McGuire's "cut downs" of her brother Matt carry much more weight and do far more damage than your cliched attempt.
What's more, your letter was written in incredibly well practiced caligrophy quality handwriting. I can't find any evidence of being frenzied, late for class, "all in a tiff", or generally any recognizable signs of you being "miffed off" at all. Your note gets a good old Michigan "E" for this effort ma'am. This means I require you to mock up a topographical map of the UCOK parking facilities for extra credit if you hope to pass.
If you were angry at me for my lackluster parking job, I demand proof. I demand cuss words, I demand a loss of grammatical control while writing. I demand at least slightly wavy writing. Dangit woman, at least give me an exclamatory punctuation mark! Give me a "Hey Buddy!" or a "WTF??!?!" or possibly some sort of "This driving thing's a lot easier in GTA3, eh?" But, "Get A Clue"? I think not.
As is, I can only assume that writing this note was not a recourse of anger for you. You merely wrote it because you felt society warranted that you write a note after having a particularly hard time in parking. I almost want to assume that you said to yourself "Oh gee..I've always wanted to leave a hateful note on someone's windshield wiper...tee hee" as you got out of your car. Maybe you have a friend who drives a similar car to mine and were leaving the note as a joke for him/her. Heck, perhaps your mother was with you and, not wanting her to find out just how much you spent on Beyond Paradise Perfume, you came up with a creative way to get rid of the receipt without her noticing. These things seem unlikely, but are highly more believable than you actually being upset, judging from your note.
If I am mistaken and you were indeed upset at my parking skills so severely that you needed to leave a note that had me questioning myself in addition to every anonymous face that walked by, I want to help you for the next time. This experience was a failure. You expunged no demons, and you left me somehow unfulfilled. Call me a pugilist, but this lukewarm browbeating is terribly harder to take than if you had actually said anything slightly in coherency with the anger you seem to have intended. This isn't simply sending cold food back to the kitchen at Denny's anymore honey, the step up to the level of leaving notes on cars carries with it certain expectations. The sort of thing you did leaves me with the same impression I had the first 50 times I read "Archie and the Gang" Comic Books: "There must be a reason Jughead wears that crown all through school, baseball practice and his date with the oafish moose looking girl..." Screw Jughead lady, be Archie.
No, forget Archie. Be freaking Reggie Mantle. Be that rich kid making fun of Archie's second-hand clothing, dating Veronica and Betty. I heard weird things about Archie and Jughead and Mr. Weatherbee anyway.
I hope you don't mind, but as one final measure, I took the step of going to TheSpark.com's "Burn Maker" and submitting your letter to get their revamped and "burnified" version. I think they make some decent changes that should be followed. So as not to cuss and scare the woodland creatures, I shall rhyme the actual suggestions they make, but I suggest you go with the original:
"Eat (Wit),
Learn how in the (Dell) to (truckin') park you and your hand jobs' sorry car. (Mass Soul).
Look around you! You are a (Lit hag). Get a (Cod Ham) clue."
See..their version leaves me somehow better equipped to face the challenges that lie ahead.
Yours in tenderness,
-Robb
"Think of it this way: In India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against 'untouchables', against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the U.S.? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?"
- Arundhati Roy, "Come September"
