Friday was like a Carnival of Suckitude. And by Carnival of Suckitude, I mean that it was like a traveling circus came to town, and after you excitedly give the person at the ticket booth all of your money, you are struck on the head with a club and awake bound and gagged on the dusty ground of the big top, and a clown car pulls up and clown after clown pour out of it, all with horrifying clown rape on their minds. And they all have herpes. It was just like that.
Firstly, I checked my email to see that three new comments had been made on my video, all of them debating exactly which display I belonged in at the large mammals section of the zoo. These people are lucky they can be so brave on the internet. If they said something like that to my face, I would kick them apart.
Secondly, I spent 45 minutes styling my hair and getting ready to go out, immediately after which Napoleon demanded that he needed to go outside RIGHT NOW, and I ran out with him only to have it start pouring while he was sniffing the ground disinterestedly, ruining the hairstyle and the makeup, and soaking my clothes.
I then went back inside to start the process over, and when I took my glasses off, they broke. I’m not eligible for another pair through my vision insurance for another four months. I’ve been wearing glasses for going on 19 years now, and this is the first pair I’ve broken, so it’s not as if I don’t know how to treat eyewear properly. I’ve since managed to superglue them back together, but I doubt they’ll hold for four months. Special.
While out and about, the guy who stood me up a few months ago decided he was going to try to make up with me by repeatedly asking if he could come home with me. I have no interest in being someone’s quick fix for a desperate need to get laid, and all of his pathetic “I’m so sorry, let me make it up to you” whining repeated OVER AND OVER AND OVER just irritated me and added another reason to the mental ledger to trust my instincts when it comes to people who approach me. The new golden rule may have to be “Freaky until proved normal”.
At that point, it had just been a sort of crappy day. I should’ve known that it was building up to something spectacular and just stayed home, because the best part was yet to come.
As I was trying to merge on the freeway to drive home, there was a car in the lane I needed to merge into, pointedly blocking my way. I sped up to merge ahead of it, and it sped up. I slowed down to try and merge behind it, and it slowed down. This car had a completely empty lane to the left and could have moved over to allow me to merge, but chose not to. So I did what I felt I had to, and sped up as quickly as I could, as much as I dared, to merge ahead of it, as the road was open ahead and quite crowded behind me, so even if I slammed on my brakes, I couldn’t have gotten onto the highway.
Less than a minute later, I was being pulled over. I mentally tallied the reasons I could have been getting pulled over—my license plates were current, my brake lights were fixed, and my carpool lane mannequin, Captain Magnifico, was safely stored in the trunk, so I was baffled. I rolled down the window, and the police officer scolded me for essentially cutting the guy behind me off. When I tried to explain what happened, the officer asked if I had been drinking. I told him I hadn’t, and he replied “Well, I sure smell something, are you sure you haven’t been drinking or someone hasn’t spilled alcohol on you?” He repeated this line of questioning over and over again, and my answer didn’t change—No, I hadn’t been drinking, and no, I didn’t know what he smelled. I bit back the suggestion that perhaps he should go get his nose checked out, and the follow-up question as to whether he believed he had been a bloodhound in a previous life, because even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I didn’t want to go to jail because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
He then asked me to step out of the car. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there was no doubt. I was participating in my very first field sobriety test. Now, I figured that if I ever had to participate in one of those humiliating displays, I’d at the very least have had the decency to do my part earlier and actually been drinking. As I stepped out into the slow drizzle with flashlights shining on me and cars blasting by on my left side, I had a moment of surreal “This is not happening right now. This is not happening. I must be dreaming this” but the flashlights in my eyes and the rain splattering on my face proved it all too real. The cop then asked me if I needed my glasses to see, and once again, I swallowed my sarcastic responses. “No, I wear them for decoration,” “I like the sexy librarian look,” “Actually all I need is my bat radar,” and, of course, the ever popular “fuck off, I haven’t been drinking and don’t deserve to be treated this way because you want to feel like a big man.” I said none of these, because I didn’t want to have to find out that part of the sobriety test involved flinging myself down a muddy embankment.
“Unless you want me to read letters at a distance, I should be able to do whatever it is you want me to do without them just fine,” I smiled sweetly, which directly translates to “Fuck you” if you don’t have your Mellzah Body Language-to-English dictionary handy. He had me take my glasses off and set them on the hood of my car, and while his partner shined a flashlight on me, he had me follow a pen with my eyes, and then open my mouth so he could look inside. I can safely say that I’ve never been as humiliated in my life as I was at that moment. And yes, I’m posting about it on my blog for your entertainment—because what use are stories abut humiliation and degradation unless you tell others about them?
