CLUMSY
I can no longer stand it. Goddamn clumsy idiot woman.
Trying to define things as 'natural' when talking about the
behaviour of humans is rather
unsteady ground, what with our having so distanced ourselves from our
forraging simian
ancestors. But it's probably pretty safe to say that extreme acts of
violence for reasons not
to do with continued prosperity are not natural.
However neither is it natural to be
Ghandi, and thus I do not feel
guilty about what is going
to be a truly venemous bit of
ranting.
I have been doing
karate for 13 years, and I've been
teaching for the last 4 or so. That last
point isn't really so relevant except that it implies that I'm not overly crap at it. In so
doing (karate, not going off on a
tangent), I have become skillful with my bodily movements.
It is in the nature of the art. Perhaps not as much so as a life-long
ballerina or some such
but nonetheless I have some skill. (
resist the matrix quote resist the matrix quote
resist...)
Whilst I am maybe more nimble than the average western human, that doesn't make the rest of
you
shuffling clods. Just a few of you. And it is these few that are about to bear my
wrath.
How can a person cross a room without at some point looking at the floor?
How? It's
insane. At least a perfunctory glance to make sure that there aren't any toddlers, kittens,
bear-traps*, shards of broken glass, dog turds, etc in your path.
I work in an
office with a number of rooms. Unfortunately I share one with a
woman who is an
idiot. She seems to have no
concept of her body as a part of the physical world. She moves
as though she believes she is some kind of ethereal
spirit for whom physical objects are no
more a barrier than
clouds are.
Collisions. Mother-fucking
collisions.
How are people
like this allowed to
procreate? They
abrade our world. They
break every damn thing they
come into contact with. They are unthinking
destructors of the engineering of man.
This woman varies her position on her
handicap. Generally there are three modes:
(1) - It is just a humourous facet of her personality - She is
clumsy.
(2) - It is
my fault for putting things on the floor/on the edge of a
shelf/anywhere she can bring her
bloated frame into
contact with them.
(3) - Everyone is like this (at least some of the time).
No, no and
NO. I am
aware of the world. I am aware that I am part of it. I know that
on a physical level the only special thing about my body is that it is MY
responsibility if I
collide it with things. If things
collide with me then that is different. Of course in most
cases I
move out of the way when possible. But moving through an area of
space which is
filled with
things is an
artform, and an easily mastered one at that. Never mind
advanced topics such as
using parts of your surroundings to assist you in more complex or
faster movement, simply
not hitting things will do to start with.
But if that were all. I could probably learn to put up with this great swollen sack kicking
over an hours worth of careful
sorting on one of her many (pointlessly and inefficiently
numerous) trips to another room, I could probably handle the mental
transition to consider
the edges of shelves/tables/worksurfaces as
unsafe for items (thereby cutting the effective
workspace by about 25%). It's the
stamping. The
crunching,
booming,
thumping of her fucking
feet. Every time she walks behind me on entering or leaving the room, the
floor, my
chair,
the
desk, my fucking
monitors SHAKE.
boom boom boom BOOM
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM boom
boom boom
It's like
Jurassic fucking Park, yes that
shit with the
glass of water really does happen. The
physical world can sense her approach from the
tortured cries of the parts she is currently
pummelling with her
hooves, and trembles in
fear.
Now, note that I am not talking about
fatness here. I know fat people who are capable of
crossing a room without disturbing those glass office toys with the snow scenes in them. Sure
they may bow the floor on their way through, the
joists may creak and
little showers of
plaster dust may fall from where the walls and ceiling meet, but it's a gentle
crescendo of
strain. The world bears it and accepts it. But when you want to seriously fuck with the
structural integrity of something you don't apply a steady constant force. No, you get out
the
piledriver and you thump it
over and over and over until it gives up and crumbles into
easily moveable detritus. Every
footfall is like a hundred
elephants stamping on the
ground simultaneously. Or something.
When I move through a place I like to leave as little of a lasting impression as possible,
save possibly for the
memory of how gracefully I slid through the scene in the minds of those
who happened to catch it. I like to use the word '
motion'. Say it. Notice the complete lack
of hard
consonants. It's more like 'moshun'. It slides off the
tongue nicely. Now try
'stamping'. Or better yet, yell 'STAM-STAM-STAM-PING' at the top of your voice whilst
knocking things over and
kicking things. Very
disharmonious.
Then there's the '
searching'. She has a
pen she likes. When she
loses it (too frequently for
sanity) she proceeds to
slam her meaty paws repeatedly into the surface of the desk and
anything thereabouts. Maybe she is hoping to
scare the
damn thing into un-losing itself.
Personally, if I was that pen (if you'll pardon the foray into
anthropomorphism) then I would
verily
scoot myself into the deepest, darkest hiding place my
inky little mind could
conceive of.
This woman is a walking
dodgem driven by a
parisian psychopath, with randomly swinging
pugil-stick attachments. She is a human
stampede with none of the subtletey, a
heffalump that
could squash
T-rex, a
standing wave of
white noise amplified beyond the realms of
reason, a
CLUMSY - FUCKING - SOW.
Then there's the
God thing. I can handle people who have a
faith in something, regardless of
how silly and non-sensical it may seem to me. Even if the implications of what they believe
in somehow suggest that I and my way of life are
deficient in some way. But then there's
evangelism. Now I really can't put up with that. Finding ways to directly
inflict your views
on others such as to explicitly state that what someone does or doesn't is impirically wrong
or bad.
No. Fuck off with that. Of course now I'm doing the very thing I'm
criticising but
you see my point. My beliefs are
irrelevant to you and I imagine you have a
value system of
your own. Provided you don't start fucking with my shit then I'll trust you to govern
your
own life, regardless of whether I think that you are hindering your enjoyment of the world,
withholding goodness from others or setting yourself up for a good eternity of
infernal
torture.
Now this woman isn't as bad as they come. But it's there. That self
righteous air of 'my god
is going to kick your ass because you don't live like me'. She has these stupid little post
cards with 'and all the world is filled with His Glory' in big frilly writing over some
clouds and so on taped to the wall beside her desk. She started to
have a go at one of my
colleagues (her superior) about considering not going home to his
family at
easter.
The problem is that once you start thinking like this then you
assume you're right about
everything, and that the people around you need to be commanded how to live. For example,
when
programming or some such, I get
nervous. I don't know why, but I get a sort of nervous
tension thing going on. I'm not worried about anything, but I become extremely
irritable if
disturbed, and I need
munchies badly. If I don't have munchies then I
bite my nails. Only
god-woman has opinions about nail-biting and seems to think that I am in need of her
wisdom,
and thus
tells me to stop biting my nails. A couple of times she has actually told me
to show her my nails, as though I was her (
long-suffering)
offspring or something. That
thought is about the most
abhorrent idea I can possibly conceive of. I just ignore her at the
moment. Another little gem is her inability to understand the '
Bad Mood Rule'. If someone
is clearly in a bad mood
do not talk to them about anything to do with the bad mood
they're in. If you do you are absolutely gaurunteed to make them angrier. This woman is
a one-stop fury generator.
I think the worst of all though is that she is about the worst
computer operator I have ever
known. I am including my
mother in that statement. She just causes things to break.
I don't
understand it. I spent an entire day sorting out an
email problem on her machine, and then
finished up and started working on mine. It then took her
three minutes to
delete six months
of emails. Annoyingly I hadn't
backed these up (
my bad). But BAM, they were just deleted. Just
like that. Also she's well versed in Idiot Know-Nothing
IT Jargon Bullshit. This is where
people who know nothing about IT assume that people who know enormous amounts about IT really
don't actually know
that much, and that the jargon can be made up
on the spot. As such
when they tell you that the 'windows is causing illegal errors on the hard drive' or
something and you say 'what?' they then get all superior because they somehow think that
you're the idiot for not understanding
them. Never mind 12 years of dedicated study and
the astonishing amount of brain power required, no all you need to do is string together a
few
buzzwords you've picked up and WHAMMO, you're a computer
expert.
Anyway, I think I've
burned out for now, but I'll probably add more to this the next time
she does something really stupid.
'Til then...
=Retina=
* Soon to be a real possibility...