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.

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.

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.

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

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.