I am way too easily offended by bad customer service. A waitress once slammed down a bottle of soda and a cup, and now her face is burned into my head. Should I ever pass her on the street, I am very likely to punch her. The amount of scathe within me is level 11.

I feel like I’m fairly nice to people in general. I have an open face, love being chipper, love talking to people. But the flip side of this is that should someone treat me with disrespect, I go batshit evil.

The most recent offender to make my shit-list is an evening shift manager at CVS. This is the CVS I pass on my way to and from work. Sometimes I stop in twice a day. I’ve gotten to know the employees, and they laugh at my lame jokes. I know about their families, and they know about mine.

On the evening in question, a woman I’ve not met before was working the register. Jaqueline. I plopped my bottle of whiskey on the counter and she asked for my CVS card. I said “I’m just buying this. No need.” and she rolled her fucking eyes at me. Man. I have been rolling my eyes since I was a fetus. I hate it when people roll their eyes at me.

Then she bagged the whiskey. I said “I don’t use plastic bags. I have my backpack.” To which she said, “It’s the law. I have to put it in a bag.”

Too many people believe this. It’s not the law. There is a state law that says you can take home an open bottle of alcohol from a restaurant, but that needs to be in a bag in your trunk. They did that to prevent people from feeling like they needed to suck down a full bottle of wine at a restaurant.

As for unopened containers, they don’t have to be bagged. You can walk down the street clutching a bottle of whiskey so long as it’s un-opened.

So, I felt kind of like I do when I tell people about it being legal to park in loading zones during non-business hours. Here was my chance to educate. I told her it’s not a law.

To which she put on that special smile you reserve for people you can’t stand and said, “Yes. It is.”

At this point there was a rather large line queued up behind me. I’d slid my card already. And I told her, “I think you need to look it up when you get home. People think it’s the law. But it isn’t.” Her reply was to loudly say, “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

I grabbed the bag, walked to the entrance, removed the bottle from the bag, and threw the bag on the floor. Because I’m childish, that’s why.

All the way home I crafted my email to CVS. They needed to know that this lady was a snot-ball. I emailed them as soon as I got home. It’s been four days, and they haven’t replied. Guess I’m taking my business to Rite-Aid. Suck it, Jaqueline.

It’s not the end of the world, you’re not dead, you have plenty of time and everything is gonna feel better as soon as you have a drink.

— Delicious Tacos (@Delicious_Tacos) May 2, 2013

Animated by Henry Cram and hand-lettered by Alex Savakis. Voiced by me and Henry. We needed a better post roll for our online video. We had so much fun.

I have been Yelping for years now. I recently got invited to be Yelp Elite, and it’s all I could talk about for a week. My Yelp reviews once got me a marriage proposal.

A bar in South Carolina printed out my Yelp review and hung it on their wall. That’s not just a South Carolina tradition, by the way. They just liked the review that much.

And so I’m finding it really hard to deal with the email I just received from Yelp. And I’m finding it really hard to deal with me trying to access their site to try to contact them and getting this:

The email, short and sweet, says,

Hi there, 

I’m writing to let you know about our Support team’s decision to close your user account. Your account has been closed because of Terms of Service (http://www.yelp.com/static?p=tos) violations, including using your account for commercial or promotional purposes.

Please note that we do not provide further details on account closures.

In other words, “We decided to close your account and we don’t need to tell you why. Oh, and since we decided that, we’re blocking your IP so we never have to talk to you again.”

Can someone queue that Gotye song, please? Yelp just dumped me and I’m feeling fragile. No explanation. No talking about it. They just peaced out on me, and they could care less.

I checked out their terms of service from another IP to try to see what they were on about. The infractions they eluded to are explained as such:

Your account is for your personal, non-commercial use only. In creating it, we ask that you provide complete and accurate information about yourself to bolster your credibility as a contributor to the Site. You may not impersonate someone else (e.g., adopt the identity of a celebrity or your next-door neighbor), create or use an account for anyone other than yourself, provide an email address other than your own, or create multiple accounts. If you use a pseudonym, take care to note that others may still be able to identify you if, for example, you include identifying information in your reviews, use the same account information on other sites, or allow other sites to share information about you with Yelp.

And I just don’t get it. I’m not impersonating anyone. I’m not promoting myself. I’m clearly who I say I am. I had a bunch of friends on Yelp. I checked in at places I was at. I reviewed regularly. What did I do wrong?

And I don’t take issue with them trying to make sure there aren’t any fake accounts or people dogging other businesses to try to make their own look good. But I do take issue with them not even bothering to consult me about it. They could have cleared this up with one email. “Hey, dog, are you real? Are you a business owner?” I know they have employees. Have the asshat who sent me the kill email instead send me a preliminary email explaining the concerns.

But now I’m left with nothing. And just as I used to love Yelp; as much as I was a huge supporter and defender of Yelp? I now hope they burn to the ground. I spit on them. I hope one of the many lawsuits regularly filed against them takes them down. And I will miss them very very much.

I think I start at least three sentences a day with “When I was little..” I guess a lot of weird stuff happened when I was little. One guy I dated (a lot of sentences start that way, too) would physically brace himself when I started a sentence that way, because who the hell knew what would be coming out of my hamburger-stuffed mouth if I started out that way. Could be some dark stuff. Could be how I ate a bug. Luck of the memory draw on that one.

Anyway, when I was little my mom used to leave us with different people fairly often. She’d call them our relatives, but we weren’t related to them at all. This one woman, Aunt Jane, had hair like a horse’s main and hips like a freight train. She was mean and crude, and she gave people tattoos in her living room with india ink.

So, once Jane and her husband, Greg, who I remember little about other than white t-shirts and a mustache, took us out to run some errands and on the way back to their house, we picked up McDonald’s. Man, did I love McDonald’s. My whole body would shake as I stuffed all my fries in my mouth at once.

So, we get to McDonald’s and Greg asks Jane what she wants and all she wants is a hamburger. Which, what? A woman that size? Didn’t add up to me. So when Greg ran into the McD’s to order our food while we sat out in the car, I asked Jane, “Why are you only getting a hamburger?”

Jane told me she was on a diet. I kind of knew what that meant. My mom was always on a diet. I was 4 years old at the time, so my definition of a diet was a thing that fat women did where they ate less for a few days. But, I gotta say, I didn’t see much point in it. Why would you do that to yourself? And I also thought that any food was going to turn into fat, anyway.

So, I said to Jane, “But if you eat that hamburger, you’re still going to be fat.”

I probably deserved that massive swinging slap on my face. I didn’t even get to explain myself, but what would I have said?

We got back to the house and Jane and Greg made me stand in the corner and they wouldn’t let me eat my happy meal, but my brother and sister sat there crying and eventually they joined me in the corner and protested by not eating their meals.

Solidarity.

There are all these small moments in life that hit me in the face with vivid memories of how something felt. This morning my co-worker and I walked over to the hospital next to our building. We were hungry and it’s the nearest place to grab a bite to eat. We were chatting, doing fine, and then I saw this gift shop and I turned pale and stood still.

The rest of my day was super-charged with sadness. Because of a memory.

Sometimes you’re inside a place for so long that you’re sure when you leave that place, every part of you is going to go flying off in different directions. Jail, for instance. You get released at 4:30 am, and some friend of yours has to pick you up, and you go eat your breakfast, but the world is too big for you, and you’re not sure how to act.

When I was 12 and on my 3rd stay in a mental hospital they wouldn’t give me my clothes back for 2 weeks. They needed to be sure I wasn’t suicidal. Your clothing is a privilege in a place like that.This woman came in, some outside do-gooder, and like, wanted to give everyone make overs. Mary Kay. She was a round-faced, sweet woman who’d imagined that a little bit of toner would improve the quality of the lives of the mentally ill. I remember how uncomfortable she was looking at my face, how it registered that I was a child. I was a child in a hospital gown without a will to live.

That place sucked. My roommate was an obese stinky old woman who kept punching me in the tit. The staff would take away my soda privileges for making jokes about death. There’s no room for humor in mental wards. They want you to learn to cope by taking pills and deep breaths.

Once I demonstrated to them that I could handle myself, they let me have visitors. Or visitor. I only had one. Debbie. She was my case worker. I’d been there two months, and they said that for Debbie’s visit I could go off-unit to the gift shop.

Once we got there I felt like that stupid little shop was the biggest place I’d been in my whole life and I started to cry because I knew I’d always be alone in the way I felt. I’d always feel a thing nobody could possibly understand. Debbie bought me a bookmark with some quote about the importance of life.

A month later I got to go back to the group home and back to school. The lights were brighter than I’d remembered and while I didn’t want to actively try to kill myself,life still didn’t seem important. Bookmarks aren’t always right.

How To Make His Arm Want You

Cosmo tells me that what makes men fall in love is doing stuff like putting my hair in a pony tail one day, wearing it down another day. That way he doesn’t feel trapped with one person. That way there’s no need for him to worry that we’re in a rut. You gotta trick a guy into feeling like you’re multiple people, because lord knows he’s going to get tired of banging you really quickly.

Cosmo tells me that I need to tell him if I’m afraid to commit, because that will make him happy. Cosmo tells me men think we’re all out to get babies put in our bellies and rings on our fingers. But if I’m afraid to commit, that’s because I don’t really like the guy. So I guess I shouldn’t tell him. This is so confusing.

When I first met Alan, we lived an hour away from each other. A Wisconsin hour away is no small thing. In LA, that’s just like, “She lives in Silver Lake, he lives in the valley. There’s traffic.” A Wisconsin hour away is dark and cold and full of black ice and deer running out in front of you. That drive will age you.

So, when we weren’t together, I would write to him. The emails were long, beautiful, streaming narratives. I vaguely remember writing something about elephants. There’s irony in me forgetting what I wrote about elephants.

When I first met Josh, he lived in Chicago and I lived in Waukesha, WI. Our first morning together was so beautiful that I cried when I woke up. I’m that kind of girl. When I couldn’t see him, I wrote to him.

When I first met Lee, he lived in England. K was in Santa Barbara. Ted and I talked via email for 6 months before we met in person.

Cosmo, a printed publication full of words about how you can get a man to love you, is missing out on something pretty major. It’s called words. And it’s not some stupid bullshit where you try to get crafty and play it cool and be evasive. It’s just, what are you thinking about?

Now, I get that this isn’t going to work across the board. Because sometimes what you’re thinking about is really boring. I think about boring stuff all the time. Just earlier I spent a good long time thinking about what it would be like to work in a pretzel factory and if that would make me not like pretzels. Yesterday I thought about my hair for a good chunk of the day. Sometimes I’m thinking about some conversation I had and how I should have said something different.

But, when I’m still, and I look around, or when I’m walking to the bus, my head is just full of stuff. Memories. Something I saw on the sidewalk. And that stuff is just going to go away. It’s not going to end up anywhere other than my head. But if I write it in a letter to someone I adore-if I just write all that stuff I was just thinking exactly as I was thinking it, I’ve just communicated in a rare way, thereby sharing parts of myself that the recipient isn’t going to see on some date.

It’s not a manipulation or a game or waiting till he texts me three times to text him back or not always being available when he wants me or whatever nonsense women are supposed to do. It’s the opposite. It’s honesty and communication and giving him something raw and vulnerable. It is intimacy. And it really, really works.

That said, a handie ever now and then doesn’t hurt. Whuhtwhuht.

This post contains Nicholas Cage

I’ve been using OkCupid since 2008. If you don’t use that site, you don’t know how it works, but it like, totally encourages you to stick around. It’s like an aggressive version of those little creatures popping up behind Sarah in Labrynth, “Should you need us…” Only it’s like “Listen, we’re really happy that you’re off the market, but if you delete your profile you can never use the same username and all the hard work that went into creating this stunning profile will be lost, so how about you just click the “Disable” button. Then, if things don’t work out, you can just pick up where you left off.”

And over the years, I’ve become protective of that profile. I love my username. That profile is one of my finest works, always evolving. That profile gets me so many messages that I’ve never been at a loss for anything to do. If I’m bored, I just make my way down the list and find someone who’s not busy right then. Bad or good, that profile has been a huge chunk of my self-esteem for years.

“Don’t forget to text me when the race is over so I know you’re not smashed to bits.”

Yesterday, as the hours ticked by and I hadn’t heard from him, I realized that if there was an accident, I wouldn’t know about it. He races bicycle for a living. I don’t know how to say that. He’s a pro-bike guy. A professional racist? He goes out on these big races with a team and they race and they get hurt and all of a sudden I feel like I’m in Jerry MacGuire and I am watching a football game and my husband Cuba Gooding Jr. gets smashed into by other football guys and I don’t know if he’s going to get up and dance around. Only I can’t watch *his* race on tv. Or can I? I dunno. Never checked the channels for this kind of stuff.

In the past, when I’ve met someone on OkCupid and I really like-like them, I’ve changed my status to “Seeing Someone”. This is a thing you can do. You can say “Seeing Someone” and that you’re only looking for new friends. Or you can say “Seeing Someone” and if you say you’re looking for casual sex or dating, that shows up to other people as “Available”. So, I’d change it, as a gesture, as a way to say “Look, I think you’re pretty great.” A few times I even disabled that profile. That was when things were really going full-steam. Like, when Josh and I moved in together. Or when K and I started dating. Hell, I didn’t even disable my profile when Lee moved across the ocean to live with me.

We lay in bed one night trying to figure out what we’re going to hate about each other. He’s gone a lot. We both have a bit of the crazy in us. I post about my personal life on every imaginable platform. He’s fairly private. This is a thing I usually do by myself. Whenever I feel especially drawn to a person, I start to think of the things that won’t work about it. “He dresses like a dweeb.” “I already can’t stand the way he chews.” “He dances. I hate that.” It’s not a thing I try to do. I’m just the kind of person who thinks long-term about everything. I worry it into the ground.

But now that worry is replaced by a new worry. I’m terrified that now that I’ve met him, something will take him away. One of my co-workers got hit by a car on his bike Friday night. There were 618 bicycle riding deaths in America in 2010. Remember when Nicholas Cage became a human so he could hang out with Meg Ryan and then they are super happy? What takes her out? That’s right. She’s riding a bike and gets hit by a truck. Bikes are death-traps.

I woke up because I had a dream he was telling me goodbye in the morning. I woke up smiling. What a twit. That keeps happening to me. My face hurts from smiling. I keep staring off into space, thinking of him, looking like someone just plunged me full of morphine. My friends are downright sick of my infatuation phase.

I opened OkCupid, gazed at a few of the faces of people who’d sent me messages. No interest. I clicked on my settings, got to the disable profile page. They let you do this thing where you can tell them why you’re going. You can tell them who you met on their site. They say this improved their matching abilities. I guess that makes sense based on the numbers system they use. And I entered his name, and was about to hit that disable button. Then I thought better of it and hit “Delete”.

Now I’m waiting for the hours to pass, the text message to come, and reading too many articles about bicycle deaths. Everyone loves in their own way.