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Dragonlady7's Journal

dragonlady7
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03/10/2010 14:38 #51147

Parker Blvd
Oh wow I hadn't realized I capslock-updated this weekend. Sweet. I left little capslock bombs all over the Internet for myself, somewhat drunkenly.

Anyway, what I came here to say is that Parker Blvd. in Tonawanda is full of crazy people. It's one of those lane-and-a-half in each direction roads, with parking in that half lane intermittently. Speed limit is like 30, and there are stop signs every like two blocks.
I go down this road every day, and I generally go as fast as 35 in the blocks with no stop sign, then cruise up and stop at the signs. It's reasonable. Sometimes you get assholes who don't have anywhere to be and just roll down the whole street at 15 miles per. What can ya do. It's OK. I try not to flip out. Sometimes I pass judiciously on the right or on the left if I can.

People drive crazy on this road. I have had people go road-ragey on me before, and last night some chick totally fucking flipped out and tried to force me into a parked car. Really. I don't know why; I can't figure it out. I was doing 35 and then stopped at a stop light. Sue me?
The best part is that after she'd done this, I basically followed her home. Guess who drives on Parker? People who fucking live near there, dumbass. We're neighbors and next time I see you I'm going to cut you the fuck off, asshole. Jeez.
Then this morning I saw a guy on a crotch rocket motorcycle do a wheelie.
A wheelie.
WHAT?
Yeah I know.
I hereby propose that we just abolish Parker. Just shut it down. Blow it up. Get it gone. It's a hazard to humanity. That's my thought of the day.

03/07/2010 02:16 #51121

DRUNK
I TOTALLY SAW (E:ENNKNOT) AT THE ROLLER DERBY.
ALSO I AM TOTALLY DRUNK.
ALSO I HAD A BUNCH OF PEOPEL TELL ME THIS WAS MY BEST GAME IN FOUR YEARS AND I WONDER WHAT KIND OF AN ASSHOLE I'VE BEEN FOR THE LAST THREE YEARS THAT HTIS AWAS SO GREAT. BUT WHATEVER.
ALSO I AM TOO DRUNK OT FIGURE OUT CAPSLOCK. OH WELL.

03/06/2010 00:57 #51116

So cute
image

So my mom knits. She knitted this sweater for Z to match his measurements, which are hardly normal. It has a hood and a kangaroo pocket in front and is super cute and stretchy and comfy.
It came in a small square box.
Chita Rivera fits perfectly into the box. I took the sweater out and gave it to Z, and he put it down and went about his business. But Chita? She went right into that box. And she sat there for like an hour and a half. Z finally put the sweater on for me so I could take a picture for my mom, but Chita needed no prompting. He picked the box up and relocated it to the coffee table by the heat vent and she stayed in it for hours. It is the Best Box.

So I am sending my mom a thank you note on Facebook. The sweater is nice, Mom, but the box? The box is freaking AWESOME.

02/23/2010 23:51 #51068

a couple of small things about fat
1) Tonight we were doing a drill at roller derby practice wherein we had to kind of gallop. (The idea being, run sideways on your skates without the wheels turning-- a very basic agility thing.) I was thumping along doing this, and looked down, and realized that my tiny-ass booty shorts and nude stockings made it look like I had this enormous expanse of bare thigh hanging out. Not very long ago I would have been mortified at the very thought of this, let alone the idea of engaging in an activity wherein said thighs would *move*, but here I was galumphing along, probably jiggling all over the place, and I really didn't care. (There wasn't a whole hell of a lot of jiggling, though, I'll allow my vanity that much-- my thighs are pretty diesel at the moment. Work on your feet 40 hours a week and then skate 10, and get back to me on the jiggling issue.)

2) My work pants haven't been fitting right recently and I look like a schlub. It's winter, and my store isn't really what you'd call "insulated", so I generally wear a pair of stockings, some spandex capri leggings, legwarmers, and possibly booty shorts underneath my work pants. So the odd fit could be explained simply by the fact that my trousers are over at least three, often four layers of clothing. The problem is that they still fit *loosely*, which doesn't make any sense, and worse, is a severe issue since while I'm a bit pear-shaped, I don't really have what you'd properly term an "ass", so clothing doesn't really stay put around my waist. It slides either up or down. And my pants? Down. Not Hot At All.
So out of curiosity I weighed myself tonight and while my scale is hardly anything remotely approaching accurate, or even consistent with itself, it is approximate. And for the first time in several years (since starting derby, in fact) the needle was under 200 pounds.
Given my height, if I'm over 200 pounds my BMI is 30 which makes me officially, medically, obese. (That's 100% the criteria they use, btw, in all the media hullabaloo about the Obesity Epidemic. There's no adjustment for muscle mass or even such trivialities as, you know, gender. A human who is 5'7" and 200 pounds is obese and that's that. A bunch of the Olympic athletes are obese, for the record. It actually has absolutely zero to do with fat. You can be obese with a body fat percentage of like four; it's a meaningless statistic, but there it is-- babies get denied health insurance for it. It's the very definition of bullshit. Oh, am I digressing?)

I know I've lost weight because I've been eating like shit, so I'm not actually happy about that. But I'm also perversely sad that I'm no longer in the "obese" category, and I'm probably going to keep rounding myself up to 200. People double-take and refuse to believe me when I say how much I weigh, and I think it's sort of important that I keep saying it. Because otherwise people really believe that the headless fatties they use to illustrate The Obesity Epidemic are what actual obese people all look like, and what's even funnier is how many people believe that 200 pounds looks like that. Nobody has any idea what obesity actually means, or looks like.

Me, I feel like it's my duty to jiggle those thighs all over town. This is what 200 pounds looks like. Well, 196. And it will crush you like a walnut if you say anything stupid. C'mere. Or don't-- I can catch you. :D
theecarey - 02/25/10 00:57
I love that, "this is what 200 lbs looks like".

heidi - 02/25/10 00:23
yummy diesel thighs! and booty shorts! and great writing about the absurdity of the BMI. Here's an illustrated BMI slide show. :::link:::

:::link:::
janelle - 02/24/10 11:34
Love the confidence!

02/20/2010 21:53 #51053

tales from the print lab
So I just clicked on Jim's link over there, which was a horrifically-badly-designed website for a webdesign firm touting itself as "your website's cosmetic surgery team".
And I immediately flashed back to the photos I printed today, which were plastic surgery before-and-afters (and some durings). And I threw up in my mouth a little, which was extra-distressing since I just drank a bunch of absinthe. Yechh.

So yeah, we have this regular customer. He brings in a memory card and hands it to the clerk and says "one each, glossy please, four by six." And the clerk nods and drags him/herself to the back room and pops the card in and knows what's coming. Except last night, the clerk was a goddamn coward, and put it in an envelope and left it for me to do this morning.
And I saw the customer's name on the envelope, and sighed. Should I be mean, and make the new girl do it?
No, I wasn't mean. I just went ahead and did it.
99 photographs of horrid physical deformities, pre-reduction breasts, post-reconstruction breasts, tummies in need of tucking, and most awfully, some truly disturbing bedsores being reconstructed, and in-process photos of surgeries. Those have to be the most disturbing photos I regularly encounter. I have never seen so much of the underside of human skin.

Thursday I had another disturbing photo experience, but it was not so much truly disturbing as it was annoying. So we got like forty rolls of film from an educational organization. I set to work on these. Buncha grade-school kids had been given cameras and apparently nebulous assignments. Mostly they were out-of-focus shots out of bus windows, and pictures of laughing friends, and pictures of ceilings.
Two kids took pictures of flushing toilets.
One kid took a picture of his junk.
Yes he did. Out of focus, indistinct, but definitely the flies of a pair of pants and, yes, sticking out...
"Oh come ON," I yelled out loud when I realized what I was trying to adjust the brightness/contrast on.
And the I thought about it for five seconds, and was furious. I have no info on this educational organization, and don't know who these students are. The kids in the pictures are not babies, but are almost definitely under 18. So what I'm looking at right now? This is child porn.
I took the offending photograph to the acting manager. "What the hell do I do with this?" I asked.
When he stopped laughing, he also said "Oh for crying out loud." He investigated the photo. "That's totally not a penis," he said.
"It totally is!" I said.
"No," he said. "It's probably the tail of his shirt."
We went around in logical circles for a brief timespan, narrowly avoiding an uncomfortable dive into the disturbing thought of which of the two of us had more experience with penises, before I headed it off at the pass.
"The fact that we're having this debate means that it's a problem," I said. "What the hell are we supposed to do?"
Where I work is totally not a corporate kinda place. I asked the district manager once, is there anything we won't print?
Absolutely, he said. Nothing illegal. No animal cruelty. No kid porn. Nothing breaking any laws.
But regular porn, I said.
Well, he said, that's not illegal, so it's not my place to object. I may think it's totally gross, and I don't have to like it, and I suppose you don't have to look at it if it offends you, but one of us has to suck it up and do it because there's no law against it and it's not my place to judge.

But this, then, is against our admittedly very not-strict anti-corporate policy. This is totally some kid's junk. Which nobody is allowed to have a photograph of, not even him.

So we had to put the offending photo into a separate envelope with a note stating which roll it came from, and send it back addressed to the teacher of the class. What an idiot this kid is. Did he think nobody was going to notice? Who does he think develops the photos, robots? I know he probably only gave it like a second's thought because he's a kid and that's what kids do, they don't care, but it still annoyed the shit out of me.

It was pretty funny, though, because whether or not the offending object was really a penis, it was definitely not something the kid should've been proud of.
libertad - 02/22/10 13:58
I'm not really sure how that picture would be classified. I think if there is evidence of sexual arousal it changes things. I bet Paul's thought might be correct...someone grabbed his camera and took the picture without their knowledge.
dragonlady7 - 02/22/10 11:11
Oh, the body grossness was business stuff-- the guy is actually a plastic surgeon and keeps these printed photos as legal medical records. That's not porn, that's his job. But it means we see him coming and we know what he's got on that disc and it's going to be nasty.
Actually one time he dropped off a memory card and I dragged myself in, all reluctant, to print it, and instead of grossness it was the most gorgeous Hindu wedding you've ever seen, with this stunningly beautiful bride all arrayed in henna and gold face jewelry and sumptuous robes and it made me cry, she was so beautiful. It was a lovely shock.
But mostly he takes gross photos of his work. It's not porn, it's work. So I don't mind, I just don't like it.

Child porn: well, there was all that Wal-Mart kerfuffle recently about the people who dropped off a roll of film that included adorable photos of their kids playing in the bathtub, and the clerk turned them in to Child Protective Services. So it's a hot topic currently, and that's why we erred on the side of caution.
lauren - 02/22/10 10:58
First, thank you for that mental picture James. Really, really appreciate it. :) that's right up there with a youtube video I saw of a kid who jumped about 15/20 feet into the water but missed and hit something else, splitting his skull in two, right down the center of his face, which they showed so close you could see inside.

(e:dragonlady7)
I think there are some really interesting talking points in here. You said "This is totally some kid's junk. Which nobody is allowed to have a photograph of, not even him." So I can't help but wonder, why can't a child have a pic of his own junk? Is it indeed porn if it belongs to the person? And then, at what point does a picture of a child's body become porn? At the moment it is taken? How do we define porn? I mean clearly, the person with all the pics of the body grossness is probably using them for pornographic purposes, but most of us wouldn't call it porn, we would just call it gross. I dunno, I don't necessarily have answers for these questions, just what came to mind when I read your post.
james - 02/21/10 21:50
Before The Learning Chanel turned to "Nostrodamus: Seer of the future, or wizard of time?" programs, they had a show that would take you into the OR while they performed surgery.

One episode, they did a gender reassignment surgery. The best moment is when they pealed the guys face back to shave down his brow and cheek bones. Then they pealed it back the other way to shape his jaw and chin.

At least the dick they were cutting into was over 18, yikes.
paul - 02/21/10 19:26
That is so awkward. I just can't see why anyone would do that full well knowing the teacher would find out. Maybe he thought the developer would be too embarrassed to say anything. At the same time, maybe he doesn't even know the pic is on there or that someone else took it to get him in trouble.
metalpeter - 02/21/10 11:11
I Mean Print Lab, Photo Lab I think was a dark comedy movie with Robin Williams, where he becomes obsessed with this family. I forget how it ends but these photos come out that look crazy but they really aren't .
metalpeter - 02/21/10 11:09
Wait Did you just say the kid had a small Dick? HA. Well if it isn't something to to be proud of that is what is implied, HA. Sorry. In Terms of the person's thinking I'm guessing he had no idea that he wouldn't get the picture back. I do think some places print them out with out looking at what they are, but not sure about that. But I do have a question what is sending it to the teacher going to do? In Fact it seems that if you give it to her instead of back to the kid then aren't you becoming a distributer? I have no idea what the right thing to do is, since I don't know who brought the film in and who it was going back to.

I can say 2 things for sure
1. your job isn't boring and stays interesting
2. I think this topic of things from the photo lab should be a regular blog