Rude Bitches Make Me Tired: Slightly Profane and Entirely Logical Answers to Modern Etiquette Dilemmas (14 page)

Question: Wow. That sounded really sensitive and smart. You’re not so bad at this advice-giving thing.

I know, right? I mean, “Thank you.”

chapter 17

Road Sage: Accept the Things You Cannot Change, Like Idiot Drivers

The driver in front of me had inexplicably left at least three car lengths between his car and the one ahead of him. WTF?

Okay, here’s something the Emily Vandersnoots and so forth never wrote about in
their
etiquette books: Most drivers are basically inconsiderate assholes. And that includes you and sometimes me.

But usually it’s you.

So here’s the scenario: The light has turned green at this hugely busy intersection in my hometown, and Slowpoke McDumbass is driving very sloooowwly toward the intersection. Remember, he’s still got three car lengths to catch up. I’m right behind him, and guess what? That’s right! He cruises sloooowly through the intersection just as the light turns red.

So here I sit, pissed beyond all rational behavior, as I watch him totter on in the distance, leaving me to sit at the head of the line waiting for another 2.5-minute cycle to pass.

I want to disembowel him. (Using the correct cutlery, of course.)

I hear you: “What’s your hurry?” or “Life’s too short to sweat this small stuff!” or “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I
have
had a lobotomy.”

Normal people don’t drive that way. I realize that some of us have personal-space issues (more on that in another chapter), but the highway is no place to work through them.

Do not leave three car lengths; hell, don’t even leave one! Proper driving etiquette demands that you basically get close enough to the car in front of you at a busy intersection that it would mean that in certain third-world countries, or South Carolina, you would have to get married.

One of the things that irritate drivers who are new to life in the American South is that we natives don’t use turn signals. This is not only bad driving etiquette; it’s also unsafe. What can I say? I’ve spent a lifetime explaining that we don’t use turn signals because we know where we’re going and it’s nobody else’s damn business.

But I know it’s rude, and I’m gonna stop. It’s just that, like making the transition to turkey bacon, it hasn’t been easy. (I’m just kidding, of course; that shit tastes awful.)

So, my own sin confessed, let’s return to yours: Drivers who don’t use the turning lane. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed this violation of driving etiquette. Once, I witnessed a frustrated driver flip off another driver who turned left from the “motorway,” as the slutty-sounding British chick inside my GPS likes to call it, without using the turning lane.

Question: When confronted with rude drivers such as you have just so cleverly described, is it ever okay to indicate annoyance and displeasure through the use of obscene hand gestures?

No. Let me put it another way.… Hell no. This is because, as Aunt Verlie reminds me almost daily: “He could have a gun under his car seat and he could reach down there and get it and blow your brains out all over your leather-look vinyl seats.”

In the South, because we are all, frankly, packin’, this is not an entirely baseless fear, this notion that road rage will result in death or, at the very least, a good old-fashioned case of what Verlie likes to call “your basic permanent disfigurement.”

It goes without saying that you should never do what my friend Sam did when a rude driver pulled out in front of him, forcing him onto the shoulder to avoid a collision. Sam, catching the other driver’s eye, simply mouthed the word “Douchebag!” and, well, it was on like unto
Donkey Kong.

DB responded by mouthing the word “Cocksucker!” and the two of them drove along like this, side by side, for at least a couple of miles, finally exhausting their somewhat limited vocabularies.

Ultimately, Sam had to resort to “Turtlehead!” which lacked the impact of his earlier expressions and left the other driver mouthing, “What? What did you just call me?” At this point, it really was over. And high time.

Teach Your Children Well

It’s hard to believe, but we’re already teaching the Princess how to drive. As we hovered over her crib fourteen years ago, watching her sleep and listening to the stuffed bear that made
whoosh-whoosh
womb sounds (kinda gross, now that I think about it), Duh Hubby and I never gave a thought to driver’s education.

But here we are. My kid will be a well-mannered driver if it kills us. I have to admit, so far, she’s almost obnoxiously cautious, placing her hands on the wheel and muttering “ten and two,” adjusting the seat, all the mirrors and—
for God’s sake are we ever going to go somewhere?
Sorry. That was me. The truth is, I have been relieved of my coaching duties, owing to some tearful accusations that I told her to run over a squirrel.

Which I did, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

“Always remember,” I said, buckling in for safety, “if something jumps in front of you, run over it. You have no idea how many people die every year, trying to avoid hitting a squirrel or something. You are more important than a squirrel.”

I know! That kind of parental wisdom just oozes out of me like cheese out of an Egg McMuffin.

I didn’t tell her about the time I was so sleep-deprived as a new mommy that I strapped her to my chest in a BabyBjörn and drove all over town doing errands with her attached to my front like a really well-dressed little air bag.

I did, however, tell the Princess that a recent study found that children watch how you drive, and if you’re steering with your knees while you add cream to your coffee, texting and curling your eyelashes, they’ll do the exact same thing.

Which means I’m off coffee for a while. Also eyelashes.

After an hour or so of driving around a church parking lot without incident, I took back the wheel and drove us home, feeling happy and sad at the same time. Happy because the Princess seemed to be a cautious, etiquette-conscious driver in the making. Sad because I forgot to TiVo
Breaking Bad
the night before. What? You were expecting something more introspective?

Okay, how about this? Did you know that in Saudi Arabia, women aren’t allowed to drive? I’m not sure who does the carpool every day at Riyadh Preschool Learning Environment (“Where Every Kid Is Terrific!”) or who picks up the burka at the $2.25 Cleaners or who takes little Abdul to the orthodontist for the eighty gazillionth check on his spacers. Not to mention who takes
his
mother for her podiatry appointment twice a year.

The reason given for not letting Saudi women drive is that the male leaders believe it will lead to premarital and extramarital sex. What the hell is on that driver’s test? It must be a lot more challenging than parallel parking.

I told the Princess that she was lucky to live in a country like the USA, where she can’t be jailed for simply “driving while female.” Rage on, Saudi sisters. We have your back.

Parking Lot Do’s and Don’ts

Oh, where to start? Oh, I know! With a true story …

Last week, we had twenty-four inches of rainfall in two days in my hometown. I needed groceries because we were down to having toothpaste for supper, so out I went, into the storm, with the dedication of a pioneer woman forced to forage for high-quality frozen lasagna for her family.

There were lots of fools like me out in the rain, but I chose my store carefully because it has a marvelous overhang thingy that helps you stay out of the rain while loading your groceries at the curb.

I left my filled cart at the curb in the clever groove that keeps it from rolling into the parking lot, presumably in search of a happier life. But when I drove up, I discovered a van parked smack in the middle of the loading area. A woman sat in the van, unaware that her Very Own Private Parking Spot, uh, wasn’t.

I tapped gently on my horn. Notice I said “gently.” I hate it when people honk like you’re getting ready to run over a toddler. Even if you’re getting ready to run over a toddler. So, yes, I tapped gently—almost Zen-like, if you can imagine that.

No response.

More gentle tapping, and, well, finally I had to approach her window, where I wanted to shout: “Move your car, you mouth-breathing malingerer” but instead said, “Please move up; I’m going to get soaked.”

She grunted, polished off her Funyuns, crumpled the bag, tossed it into the back of her odious van, and moved up. Just a little. Bitch.

I still got fairly much soaked. I looked, with sympathy, at the line of cars forming behind me, then made huge circles in the air beside my temple and pointed at the van. The man in line behind me smiled softly. What had he been smoking?

The moral: Think of others, all the time. Not Funyuns. Others. See? Not so hard, is it?

Driving etiquette may be even more important in parking lots. How many times have we staked out a spot in a crowded lot, turned the blinker on to signal our intentions, waited for the car to back up, and watched another car whip in ahead of you and claim your space.

She didn’t even signal!

In this circumstance, and only this one, you have only one possible response, and that is to key the offender’s car. Discreetly, of course. You don’t want to end up in one of those ghastly mug shot magazines with your startled face and bad hair right beside the child molesters, Lohans, and those wacky Amish beard-cutters. When you do key the car, be sure to bear down and go super deep so they can’t just get the half-price fix at Maaco. Not that I would know anything about any of that.

Summary Because You Know You Won’t Remember All This Stuff

• Tailgate at all intersections.

• Use turn signals and turning lanes unless you don’t wanna.

• Squirrels suck.

• Refrain from cursing at or gesturing at other drivers, no matter how much they deserve both, because they could kill you and, thus, make you super late for work.

chapter 18

Foreign Affairs: Stop Making Me Feel Stupid with Your Fancy Multilingualism

One of the vilest breaches of etiquette is to speak to others in a foreign language while in the company of people who speak only English. Yeah, I said it.

Please save your righteous indignation. I don’t want to hear that if we were European, where even the average dumb-ass (Russell Brand) can speak four or five languages, this would be less of a problem, so of
course
it’s our fault for being so hopelessly bourgeois to begin with.

While some of you might consider this brutally unenlightened, I’m afraid that this would come under the category of a “you” problem.

I’m not asking for fluent English at the Korean nail salon, for instance. I’m just asking for good manners. In other words, why must you scrutinize my pitifully rough heels and then scream very loudly to your coworker something that sounds like
“Dong chow hok wad ho!”

It only makes it worse when the coworker scurries over, glances down, and laughs out loud. I mean doubles the hell over, she’s laughing so hard. Not cool.

Ah, laughter. The universal language. So I laugh, too. And then they abruptly stop. For a horrible second, they might think that the one yokel in Eastern North Carolina who speaks Korean has landed in their mall spa, and ain’t they got all the luck?

I can only imagine that
“Dong chow hok wad ho!”
is Korean for “Oooh, birthday pedicure. Big spender! She gets her toes painted once a year whether they need it or not!”

One time, after one of these foreign exchanges with her coworker, the technician giving me the pedicure returned to look at me with something approaching genuine sorrow:

“You work in garden
all
the time, miss?”

See? She might not speak English, but she can speak fluent bitch, am I right?

I truly love these nail places because they’re fast, reasonable, and there’s a better-than-average chance that one of the pictures on the wall will have one of those moving waterfalls in it. I love that shit. And I love how, if they’re busy, they just text more techs, who magically appear in under a minute. Are they beamed in from the pretzel kiosk? How is that even possible?

As an aside, there is one very odd aspect to a visit to my mall nail spa: The TV is always on. It’s a huge flat-screen, mercifully closed-captioned, because it’s always playing the same DVD of a young samurai slaying a village, and really, it’s a tad violent to see while you’re getting your calves massaged with eucalyptus oils.

Wordless bloodletting overhead aside, customer service wise, we’re all good. It’s just the language thing that needs to change.

I realize that there are a few English phrases that are memorized, but what amazes me is that there must be a list of “possible responses from the bossy American” who happens to be at your station.

“New glitter acrylic?” a technician who can speak almost no English inquires.

“No thank you,” I respond.

She assumes a big, oversized look of sorrow, as if I just strangled her kittens. Trust me, there is really nothing sadder than the face of a Korean nail tech who experiences the firm decline of a service upgrade.

She looks so sad that I hastily explain that I’m a little “long in the tooth” for that sort of stuff.

The idiom only confuses her further, and we are off to a very rocky start. I’m afraid she might apply yin–yang symbols to my teeth, at this rate. I decide that if she does, I won’t complain. And overhead, the young samurai has just disemboweled another villager at the exact moment I’m offered “soothing sugar scrub no charge?”

“Uh, no thanks. I like my disembowelments with an eyebrow wax usually.”

She looks confused, and I realize that I have been kind of a shit, so I say, “Sorry. Yes. Sugar scrub, please.”