Total Bitches

Okay. I know I’ve been gone for a while. I am not promising to be back all the time, either, but today I had a story. I went shopping with my mom at the fabric store (I’ll take “Super-Faggy” for three hundred, Alex.”). There were insane discounts going on. Every cart was taken; mom snatched one from an elderly woman who had just put her merchandise up on the check-out counter. When she saw my look of horror, mom said “Well, she was done with it.” This alone should have clued me in to the hour of sheer shopping hell ahead of me. There were women everywhere, the type of women who do crafts and sew things and are generally kind. But today, today was different. The discounts excited them; they became frenzied, like sharks scenting blood in the water. Bolts of fabric were rammed into me; one woman almost put my eye out with her tube of ugly upholstery. No apologies: only blank looks brimming with barely concealed hostility. I was a stranger in a strange land, and not welcome. The women clung to the areas they shopped in like they were cholesterol deposits on an arterial wall, and were more ferocious than rabid wolves in defending their personal space perimeter. Mom and I were shopping for me and for her. I am about to receive more fabulous beaded pillows; she is making pillows also. Just let those bastards at Bed Bath & Beyond try to steal these designs! (They’ve already taken my monkey pillows, my beloved monkey pillows, and made them available to the great unwashed. Bastards.) Anyway, we were looking for beads and/or fringe. We like things like that, and they are an absolute necessity for fancy pillows. Mom and I were at the one display, testing the beads against the fabrics as unobtrusively as possible, when this young woman comes up with her young friend. She is regaling her friend with a story of how her grandmother had bought her only a tassel for Xmas last year, and that she thought it was two for one, because her cousin got a tassel just like it, and her grandma was all like “You can do fancy things with a tassel” and the girl was all like “Yeah, if you have a great big house to decorate and aren’t some starving art student” and continued to blather on in this manner until I realized that she probably wanted to look at something we were standing in front of and was choosing to use the same tactics employed by the military to drive off the insurgents (although instead of AC/DC she was using a banal story told very loudly). I also realized that she must be an ungrateful little bitch to be talking about her grandmother this way and that, further, she was unlikely to possess even the barest modicum of manners and simply ask if she could reach for what she was trying to get. Rather than endure her voice any further, I turned and inquired “Do you want to look at something here?” She said yes. I wanted to say “Well, that’s why Jesus gave us the words ‘Excuse me, may I look at that?’” but before I could even think of saying anything, she used her personal space as a kind of repellent and moved me aside so she could reach what she was looking for (which she quickly discarded as apparently it didn’t meet her standards for whatever purpose she intended it for). Mother and I did find fabulous fringe and beautiful beads with which to adorn our new pillows. Now, if only mom will get them sewed before Easter, the whole experience will have been worth it.