People are strange, and my celebrity twin

About a week ago I learned something in a crowded room full of (mostly) strangers. People tended to be drawn to those who looked or seemed most like themselves. The few blondes in the room always sat together. The guys in plaid with baseball caps stopped talking whenever a man wearing a tie sat near them, or a female. Leather jacket people (unfortunately not the biker kind) had their own little group, and so on. I mostly sat next to Pat since I knew him, and there wasn’t time for idle chatter so it worked out. Talking to Pat is like talking to a rock.


He just can't do it.

When we took breaks the strange behavior continued as people congregated in the hallway, lounge and outside. For the most part people were polite. No one I spoke to ever snubbed me, except for one of the blondes. It was like I was invisible. In that moment I felt… so… black. Damn cracker.

Now here is the list of brave people who initiated conversation with me:

· The only Native American woman there, who sat next to me and sought me out on breaks. I was the only one she talked to and her bff that week. I’ll just say I know more about her family than I ever will about Pat’s. I don’t think he even has one.

· A red headed woman who thought I was funny, but then again, it could’ve been gas. You never know.

· When I was a few minutes late one morning a really spiffy and happy man said, “Hi! There’s an empty seat right here. Sit.”

Damn, I didn’t get his name or number.

· Pat said, “How about Perkins?” and “Let’s go to KFC,” and so on. He was definitely the bravest.

I’m a tough one to figure out thanks to my dark hair and peachy/pasty skin. Whenever someone meets me for the first time and tries to label me or guess my ethnicity they are usually wrong. The upside is being able to blend in just about anywhere. The downside is… Well, there really is no downside. When they are wrong I find it amusing. One time I’ll never forget was back when I was married and living in my husband’s home town. I’d just started making chicken-fried steak (which is the only thing I can cook well) and we were almost out of cooking oil so my husband went to the store. He returned with an old friend he had seen walking along the road carrying a 12 pack. I hadn’t even met this guy yet but here he was, at our dining room table waiting for dinner and drowning himself in his beer. They called me out of the kitchen. Right after we were introduced he blurted out, “You look like a Jew!”

I smiled and said nothing.

He turned to my husband. “She’s not Jewish?”

My husband just smiled and shook his head. Then his friend turned back to me, “You really look like you’re from Israel or sumthin’!”

To this day I’m still not sure if he was racist, ignorant or just thought I looked like Anne Frank.


Anne


Me

She's definitely my celebrity twin. Now if anyone needs me I’ll be hiding out in a house full of white kids.

McCain attacks Barack Obama, and it smells poopy

Now that it’s official, McCain is wasting no time attacking Obama any which way he can, which is in the rear since McCain is behind him in the polls. It turns out Obama has a fundraising friend who was convicted yesterday of fraud and some other things, and now McCain is using this as an opportunity to imply that he wouldn’t be a good President based on this friendship. Actually it was the Republican Party’s national committee who were responsible for the negative statements, but it’s probably not a stretch to assume McCain is pulling the strings or at least having a good evil laugh over it. I could easily imagine him stabbing an Obama voodoo doll in between its cloth buttcheeks for some reason. Back when this issue first came up, Obama donated more than $150,000 raised by the friend in question to charity. I guess McCain and his friends can’t find anything of real substance to use against him. When I look at it that way, the whole thing is pretty damn amusing.

I live in a town where most of us know each other, so life would be very different for me if everyone judged me by my friends. I wouldn’t have any friends if that were the case. For example, I have a couple of friends who smoke pot. Now they try to keep it on the DL, but it’s impossible because word gets around. It’s almost as if everyone in this town knows who made a poopy and when they did it. Personally, I don’t care what my friends do when I‘m not in their company. Their poop is their business. But let’s just say for the sake of comparison that they decided one day to start throwing poop at people. And that this went on for a period of time without me knowing about it. Random poop attacks in the night on passersby. And let’s say I found out when they were eventually arrested for their poop rampage. How can I, a law abiding citizen, be held accountable for their poop? That would stink.