Yet Another Topical Rant

I will not stand for this

Everyone Feels This Pain
Show your support

Even if we were still in the heyday of colour-bars-for-causes, where any given friends list looked like a Life Savers display, I'd still be doing this one. I think most of the people I know could relate to this particular issue -- namely bullying.

This may sound cruel, but I think the worst thing about being the target, particularly when I was living in Bumblefuck, NJ, was that there were people who were ... well, I hesitate to say it, but better targets. A lot of kids, usually boys, would call me fat -- repeatedly, with as much invective as Good Little Suburban Yuppie Types who won't use the word 'fuck' can muster. And I was. Hell, still am. The thing was, though, that there were at least two girls in school who weren't just fat but gargantuan. I mean the kind of morbid obesity that you just know is going to kill these kids at 30 if they don't go on a diet or get their stomachs stapled or something. And yet these girls were left alone, and I was the one they picked on. Now, I don't know if the bullying was on other factors and the 'fat' thing was just an excuse, or if they actually knew what they were doing. After all, being called fat is bad enough, but being called fat when compared to the female equivalent of Lard Ass Hogan is the ultimate blow; really distorts your body image and makes the whole thing hopeless. Results were the same either way.

The other thing that seemed completely random was the physical violence. It was different when the resident bad-girl did it -- girls beating up on girls is ... well, not expected, but at least it's perceived as something like a fair fight. What I didn't get was the guys; most guys don't beat up on girls. When guys want a punching bag, they tend to pick on their own gender, but for some reason, no one in my year bothered with any of that. Instead, they just waited until gym class and then beat the living crap out of me with impunity.

It lives with you, that's the problem. All the name-calling and slights and hurtful 'practical jokes', the vandalism and outright theft, the violence ... ten years of it is going to live with you. Making peace with it is one thing; forgetting entirely is something else. And some people don't even manage to make peace with it, because some things you can't without a lot of therapy or intense efforts of will. You have to admire the people who get through it alive, at least a little.

You also have to admire the people who'll stand up, draw a line in the dust and say "no further". I like to think I did that in school; I tried, anyway. I had two male friends -- one in grade school, one in Bumblefuck -- who got picked on almost as much as I did, and while I wouldn't stand up for me at the time, I'd fight like hell for them. Then when I was fifteen, I started fighting for myself as well; there was no one else to fight for, and I had the idea by then that it was fight or die. I wasn't ready to die, so I fought -- and surprisingly, I got some respect. People looked closer at that fat kid with the weird clothes and the fucked-up taste in music because, shit, she slammed some varsity guy's head into the turf at 'touch' American football; that's new! Turned out I was interesting to them, and they kind of liked it. Took them long enough, but then, it took me long enough, too.

Anyway, the point is that I won't stand for it. If you need to grind someone into the dirt to make yourself feel big, then you deserve a good hard smack across the face and the most vituperative bitch-rant I can provide -- and that's probably enough vitriol to burn your face off. We're not in the jungle anymore, people -- diversity is what keeps us alive and on top. Destroying a valuable member of your 'pack' just because they look different is not a viable option; having someone different among you won't attract predators because we don't have any. And why? Because we supposedly embraced diversity, that's why.

*sigh* Anyway. Bullying sucks. Don't do it, or I'll kick your arse. And if that sounds like bullying ... well, I'm against bullying but I never said anything about hypocrisy.

The Accidental Tourist

So in two weeks, I will be on a plane to San Francisco. From the 8th to the 17th, I will be in San Francisco. Two days of that (11th and 12th) will be spent in Japantown at the Anime Faire, but that still leaves a week. Then, after a long weekend stopover in Santa Barbara ... well, I'll probably spend a lot of the 21st travelling and I fly out on the 22nd, so I'm thinking that it's all a bit of a write-off after that.

Anyway, there's a week in which I'll be in San Francisco and, quite apart from wanting to know cheapish but nice places to eat and the kinds of places I'd want to shop besides Haight-Ashbury, I'm going to need to have some notion of how to entertain myself. After all, I can't really expect nightskywarlock to drop everything and haul arse to SF day after day just to keep me company. And even when he does visit The City, it'd be nice to have some idea of what to do besides sit around 'that Starbucks' and gab.

To cut a long story short ... I bought a travel guide. Fine, it's Lonely Planet, which has its rep as being more student-friendly than straight-out touristy, but it's the principle. I hate looking like a tourist. Hell, I hate being a tourist, with everything that entails. See, I might not mind so much ordinarily, but I've been living in London for years. I work near St Paul's Cathedral. My mother lives a literal stone's throw from Tower fucking Bridge. I know from tourists; I know how fucking annoying they can be to anyone who actually lives in any given city.

I hate how they stand around -- singly, in pairs, in families, in massive fucking tour-groups -- right in the middle of the fucking pavement, like they own the bloody place. It never occurs to them that there might be people, I don't know, trying to get to work or anything; they just stand there like stoned orangutans, peering at their travel guides like the stupid things're written in Aramaic. Or they decide that they have to be standing right there to get the perfect photo to take home to their families, which might be nice if they couldn't buy the exact same view on a fucking postcard for ten pence at a shop ten feet down the road. Or worse yet, they just stand there yammering at each other -- I don't care what language they're speaking; you do not obstruct traffic unless you have a damn good reason! And I don't think the architechture qualifies!

I hate the arrogance. I hate the ridiculous assumption that because it's a place that tourists like to go, a place full of history and culture and entertainment and God only knows what else, that people don't fucking well live there. Where do they think the people who run everything live, anyway? The moon? It's a city like the one they live and work in and I don't see what's so hard about acknowledging that and behaving like a civilised human being instead of a stunned baboon. Is that the way they behave at home? No, wait; don't answer that. I read customers_suck.

I think I got sidetracked here. The point I was making was that I don't want to be a tourist. I don't want to even look like a tourist. And yet I have this fucking travel book because without it, I'll just be wandering around, sheeplike, and stuck eating at fast-food chains and overpriced hellholes unless I get excrutiatingly lucky. So I'm going to have to read it over several times before I get there, tear the maps out of the back and stuff 'em in my handbag, make copious notes in my little "evil notes" notebook and hope to God I don't fall into the Tourist Trap.

Being me is too damn complicated. Sometimes I think it'd just be easier to be one of those Bermuda-shorts-wearing arseholes with the wraparound shades and the idiot-proof camera, talking about how "cute" the buildings are.