Legally Blind Observations

Can we just take a moment to register how much of a fool the guy who instituted Catholic school girl uniforms was?

“Boys and girls will be together in school, hormonal and horny and wild, and we will dress the girls in short skirts and knee high socks. Yes good.” Like even if they weren’t integrated at first, have some gotdamn foresight dude.

…ask them to make you food n’ shit after the restaurant is closed. 

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Just now we got a call on the restaurant phone from our delivery girl, saying that she was at the address and calling the number, but nobody was picking up. So we called the customer and told them that our delivery girl was outside and had been trying to call them for the past five minutes or so. Their response?

“Oh we didn’t pick up because we didn’t recognize the number.”

Are you fucking kidding me? You order food FOR DELIVERY and then get a call from an unknown number about forty-five minutes later, and you’re at a TOTAL LOSS for who it could be and why they’re calling?

Fucking idiots, I swear

Like have you ever seen something happen or heard about something happening and thought “well no duh it happened that way, because of x and y” and then been like “holy shit I never thought of that but I knew”? For example, I watched a movie a couple weeks ago wherein these three guys were fighting (two partners vs. one guy). One of the partners got a gun and pointed it at the other guy at a little more than arms’ reach, and the fighting stopped. He told his partner to go check the guy for weapons, and instead of going around the gun, his partner crossed in between the gun and the guy at gunpoint. At that moment the guy at gunpoint pushed the second partner into the gun, there was a struggle, and the original gunman partner and the other guy ended up dead. As soon as he stepped in between the gun and the guy at gunpoint I thought “NO WALK AROUND WTF.” I can’t say I’ve ever been in a situation like that, but common sense told me that walking in between the gun and the prisoner at such a close range is stupid.

This was a really dumb post but bottom line is I think success at life is correlated with your common sense and your ability to act successfully on your common sense. Which is why we have a lot of idiots. 

Bullshit. In a perfect world, violence wouldn’t be necessary, but we don’t live in a perfect world by a damn sight.

Violence is rough. It’s messy and dangerous. It’s scary, and usually unpleasant. Most people don’t like violence (and liking violence is diagnostic criteria for a couple mental disorders, according to the DSM, for whatever that’s worth). Even the thought of violence brings negative connotations to mind. But there are situations where violence is necessary — although, that said, there are also situations where violence is not necessary. For example:

Situation #1: You’re walking down the street with a friend when someone jumps out from a shadowy corner and punches your friend full in the face. You respond by picking up a metal trash can on the sidewalk and cracking the assailant over the head with it as hard as you can. He goes down, you help your friend to his feet and you both escape. 

Situation #2: You’re walking down the street with a friend when someone walking towards you on their cell phone, not paying attention, bumps into you and makes you drop your books. You respond by picking up a metal trash can on the sidewalk and cracking the person over the head with it as hard as you can. He goes down, you pick up your books, and you and your friend continue on your merry way.

Do you see the difference? It’s about situational, proportional response. In the first situation, there is overt, obvious violence that requires a violent response in order for you and your friend to escape safely. In the second situation, it’s just a rude person, and violence is not necessary. You become the aggressor in the second situation, whereas you were responding to aggression in the first situation. That said, sometimes (hopefully not often) being the aggressor is necessary (for example, in the first situation, if you had seen the assailant in the shadows with a weapon, ready to pounce, and had struck first in order to stop him, you’d be the aggressor, but only to pre-emptively stop the attack in the first place). 

The bottom line is this: if you honestly feel that someone is going to harm you or someone you’re with, and you believe yourself to be possessed of the ability to do something about it, and that something just happens to be violence, YOU GO RIGHT AHEAD AND FUCK SHIT UP. It’s better to be in handcuffs at the scene explaining to the police why you had to beat the shit out of someone, than to have to explain to your friend’s parents that their child is hurt — or worse — because you believe that “violence is never the answer.”

Personally, I don’t let this type of shit fly around me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you get a hankering to hurt someone physically in public, don’t do it around me. You won’t like how it ends for you. 

I always find it funny when they tag a picture A) with everything possibly conceivable and B) with some conceited shit. Like a chick will take a picture of herself (“selfie” they call ‘em now? gracious) sitting outside in her back yard and we got the normal tags like #pic #me #girl #summer, and then shit like #chair #backyard #back yard (gotta get the alternate spellings) #outside #sun #sunshine #grass #sky #air, and then conceited shit like #cute #adorable #sweet #gorgeous, and then of course, the ubiquitous #yolo. 

And I’m just sitting there going through your laundry list of tags, 95% of which are either superfluous or inaccurate (girl you ain’t that fine; confidence is sexy, conceit is not, #TrustFred), and I’m thinking #can you shut the fuck up?

I just saw this news report about some guy who was grilling, and then the next day had some unidentifiable thing stuck in his lower intestine. Turned out dude had scrubbed the grill pre-grillin’ with one of those wire bristle grill brushes, and some of the bristles had stayed behind on the grill and got embedded in the food, and the little metal bristles got stuck in his intestine. 

You fucking idiot.

First of all, they showed the brush on the news story. That shit was clearly missing bristles. Use your head, dude, where the hell do you think those bristles went? On the grill? Maybe? Yeah. Idiot.

Second of all, who just brushes the grill and doesn’t wipe it down after? Nothing fancy, just a paper towel or a clean rag to wipe down the bars on the grill after cleaning it. If you don’t do that, you deserve to get whatever shit is on there still in your food. 

Literally, my Dad and I are just fuming right now because people are stupid and grilling is supposed to be intelligent and this guy could’ve killed himself or his family or whoever else ate his tainted bullshit meat and ugh. Idiot.

legallyblindobservations:

Readership, the fact that this feature is in its tenth installment is a testament to the stupidity of the average person. When I posted my very first “Why Do You Say Such Stupid Shit?” back on Blogger, I had no idea that two years later I would still be going strong with my tenth iteration. Of course, I was also a hell of a lot more naive about people back then.

But anyway.

First off, we have “that’s the coolest thing since sliced bread!” Who the hell thinks sliced bread is cool? And moreover, who the HELL thinks it’s cool enough to be some kind of “cool landmark” - on whose Timeline of Cool is sliced bread an important point? What does the rest of their Timeline of Cool look like? Something like “Lightbulb->Television->Sliced Bread”? Who couldn’t think of anything cooler than sliced bread to have as their Timeline of Cool’s 1928 representative? Charles freakin’ Lindbergh got the Medal of Honor in 1928 for his transatlantic flight! The first ever Disney cartoon featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse was broadcast in 1928! Mr. Rogers was born in 1928, for God’s sake, Penicillin was discovered in 1928 - is none of that cooler than sliced bread? I mean shit, my little sister is cooler than sliced bread, and she’s a loser!

If sliced bread wasn’t an integral part of sammichcraftery, I would go so far as to say “FUCK SLICED BREAD!”

But it is a pretty important part, so all I can do is just shake my fist menacingly and mutter “damn bread…!”

Secondly, courtesy of my Twitter follower JesusIce: “Is the bus coming?” No, dumbass, I just love standing in the rain with wildly ignorant, annoying people such as yourself. It’s sort of my thing.

Seriously? Is that a serious question? Why the hell else would I be standing here, a spot CLEARLY MARKED as a bus stop, with my Metro Card/bus fare in hand, looking down the street at where the bus would first enter my field of vision so I could get all of my shit together and board the bus with as little fuss as possible? I mean, if the bus ISN’T coming, then I must be retarded for standing here listening to you ask stupid questions and try to make smalltalk, right? Thanks for stealing oxygen that could’ve been used by someone who wasn’t useless. Dumbass.

Third, there’s the always classic mainstay “Can I help you?” No. Absolutely not. There is nothing in your power that you could possibly do to help me - shit, there’s nothing OUT of your power, legal or illegal, real or imaginary, that you could do to help me. The fact of the matter is, I’ve been standing in this fucking stationary line for the past three hours, JUST so I could get up here and tell you, “no, there’s nothing you can do to help me.”

What the fuck do you think? After all this time I’ve been standing in line, you’d DAMN SURE BETTER be able to help me, or else I’m gonna be six different kinds of pissed, and small children might be in danger of being kicked if they cross my path. The saddest part is, after all this dumbassery and all this standing in line and shit, by the time the words come out of your mouth, either A) I’ve discovered the solution to the problem myself, B) I’ve completely forgotten whatever it was I had to ask you about (only to leave the line and mere seconds later remember the entire thing), or C) YOU REALLY CAN’T HELP ME, meaning that shits get flipped and small children get kicked.

Lastly, we have something said a lot by my parents as an excuse for not wanting to buy me something when I was little: “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

Well I’m glad ONE of us is a fucking botanist. Here I was - silly me! - just about to go plant a couple quarters in my back yard and grow me some money. What kind of retard would even JESTINGLY presume to believe that through some manner of germination and photosynthesis that a MAN-MADE MATERIAL CURRENCY could be produced? I didn’t ask you if money grew on trees, Mom - I’m not a retard - and if you didn’t wanna buy me the fucking Pokemon cards just fucking say so instead of insulting my intelligence with that stupid bullshit!

Whew.

Stay classy

Going through my rants and laughing at how angry I was. This one jumped out at me hahaha

Whenever I’m home alone and the phone rings, I don’t pick it up unless I recognize the name or the number. My reasoning is twofold.

First off, if someone’s trying to get a hold of me specifically, they most likely have my cell phone number or know somebody who does (and if they don’t satisfy either of those conditions, I probably don’t want them contacting me directly anyway, ya dig?). The only thing I can think of is they broke their phone and needed to call me off their house phone and looked me up in the phone book, at which point I’d pick up the phone because it would say their name after the second ring or so. 

Secondly, given the fact that there’s a high probability that the phone call is for my parents and not for me, any callers can leave a message on our perfectly capable answering machine. Because what would happen if I answered the phone? They’d be informed that my folks aren’t home, and ask if they could — that’s right — leave a message. We got the answering machine for a reason, let’s let it earn its keep, y’know?

Now, it’s one thing if my folks are waiting for an important call and tell me about it before they leave, or leave a note about it if they leave before I’m awake (which, given the fact that I seem prone to falling asleep at 5 in the morning and waking up at noon, is highly probable). If I’m asked, I’ll do it, because that’s common courtesy (and it’s not like I’m doing anything else). But if I’m not asked, I’m gonna just defer to the answering machine’s expertise and keep on eating or napping or doing nothing. 

I was grading tests for Momma Duran last night (I’m such a cool dude, I know). She teaches 6th and 8th grade math in an inner city school. 

Anyway, I really wasn’t paying attention to the test questions beyond looking to see if the question I was looking at on the answer key matched the one on the kid’s test, but if you look at the same bunch of questions in succession for a couple hours, you start to remember the questions and the answers. I started to notice that a lot of the questions had distractors in their answers. I hate that practice. 

In test-making, distractors are answers that look right, but aren’t right, put into the answer choices purposefully to “throw you off the scent” of the right answer. For example, say the question was something like “this triangle has base length 6 and height length 7, find the area” and the answers were 21, 42, 36 and 18. To get the right answer you have to multiply the base (6) times the height (7) and multiply the product (42) by 1/2, leaving you with 21. But 42 would be a distractor in this case, because if the kid knows enough to do base x height, when 42 shows up on the calculator and he sees that 42 is a choice, he may think “holy shit there’s my answer” and think he’s done and move on to the next question, and then get it wrong. 

I can’t stand that shit. It’s sneaky, it’s tricky, and it’s not helpful. From an educational standpoint you’re tricking this kid instead of teaching him. Why not just put the right answer and three equally incorrect answers? Using the example above, why not take out 42 (the distractor) and put in something like 24, or 57? Looking at it now, as an adult, it’s easy to see that 36, 18 and 24 have nothing to do with the problem because they’re not related to 7 and 6 in the way they need to be in order to be correct — but as a kid just learning the concept, it’s different. They don’t have the kind of number sense we’ve learned because they haven’t learned those techniques that we’ve learned. Personally, I remember when I would take a test and do some calculation and come up with something that wasn’t anywhere near any of the answers, I would know that I screwed up somewhere and start again. That knowledge that I messed up meant more than me thinking I got it right when I was actually wrong, because it gave me an opportunity to go back and find where I messed up and then actually get it right. 

And from a psychological standpoint, this kid thinks he just got a difficult (for him) math problem right, and then finds out he got it wrong later? That sucks, and now he’s gonna be second-guessing himself in the future. It’s like going to the ATM to check your balance and seeing $100,000 and getting really excited, only for the faulty LED in the ATM screen to flicker back into existence and show you it’s actually $-100,000. Or to find out you’ve won an all-expenses-paid trip, and then find out it’s a one-way ticket to Iraq or New Jersey. That fuckin’ sucks, y’know?

A random Mom-looking lady came up to me on campus today and asked for directions to the office of admissions, and honestly I have no idea where that is. It’s been five years since I’ve even interacted with that office, let alone been there. I ended up pointing her towards one of the campus maps that just happened to be nearby and felt like the equivalent of that Home Depot employee who answers your simple question about nails with “sorry bro, not my department.”

But even when I actually DO know where the place in question is, and could get there personally from any place on campus, actually giving directions to someone else is difficult, especially if they’re not familiar with the campus. Directions turn into either extremely specific shit that only someone who knows the campus would get (e.g., “In order to get to the mailbox near the Law School from Marillac, you have to use the second floor Marillac breezeway exit, take a left at the Freshman Center, walk past St. John’s Hall and take a right at the Law School”), or something vague and bullshitty that isn’t helpful at all (e.g., “In order to get to the nearest on-campus mailbox from where we are, go up four flights, go out onto the windy walkway, take a left at the sweeping stairs, go past the building with all the flags, and walk past two or three buildings until you see the mailbox”). 

Plus, there’s the fact that at any given moment I have like a zillion different things running through my head, and how to go somewhere that isn’t part of my daily plan (e.g., breakfast, walk to class, walk to second class, take shuttle back to apartment, nap, etc.) isn’t one of those things. Thus, it forces me to stop and drop everything mentally and figure out first how to get wherever you’re going and then how to explain it to you. 

And I’m a senior and I’ve just about checked outta here, literally and mentally. I mean, I’m proud that I’ve still got the drive to actually go to class. Asking for directions? Do you want a vital organ too? 

Because with prices like these, I’m willing to negotiate.

Enough already. It’s ridiculous. The most clothing can do on its own is draw attention. We can argue all day about whether it’s good or bad attention, but that’s what it does by itself. It draws attention.

By this logic, if a woman is out and about dressed provocatively, she’s gonna get attention. That said, it takes another person’s conscious decision to act on that attention. Clothes don’t cause rape, rapists do.

Or, if a man is out and about wearing a large hoodie and baggy pants, he’s gonna get attention. That said, it takes another person’s conscious decision to act on that attention. Clothes don’t cause murder, murderers do.

Those are extreme examples and people don’t seem to get it, so here’s a simpler one: you’re a die-hard Yankees fan and you see someone down the street with a Red Sox hat on. You immediately drop what you were doing, chase him down, and beat him to death. As you’re getting hauled away in handcuffs, you earnestly repeat, “but look at him! Look what he’s wearing! He was asking for it!” Sounds ridiculous right?

So can we stop with the bullshit?

There’s a difference between being affectionate in public and PDA. If you see your significant other in passing and give him or her a quick kiss on the way by, that’s being affectionate, and I have no problem with that.

But if you guys plan to meet up in the middle of the hallway and make out and bat eyelashes and shit, that’s PDA, it’s obnoxious, it’s gross, and I’m pretty sure I can make an argument for it being a fire hazard. 

Don’t get it twisted now, I’m all for lovin’ and showin’ love and all that stuff. It’s all well and good. But there’s a time and place for all of that. If it’s going past a kiss goodbye/hello, or if there’s visible tongue, you need not to be doing that in public. Get a room. 

I get that it’s getting warmer out more consistently these days and spring love is in the air or whatever have you, but I’m sorry, if I have to wait in the middle of a hallway because I can’t get around you and your significant other tonguing in front of me, I swear to God I’ll boof right between the two of you without so much as an apology, and if you have a problem with me doing that to you, you can either say something about it or just, I dunno, not be tonguing in the middle of the hallway.

Shit.

Stop with the commercials about that guy at the Dominoes in Ohio that “invented” those parmesan bread bites things, and his stupid used car salesman friend. “Did the Dominoes test kitchens come up with this? No, but the guy in Ohio did.” Shut your idiot mouth and go swindle someone stupider than you are out of a couple thousand dollars for a shitty used ‘98 Civic and leave intelligent thought to people capable of it.

First, you’re an idiot. Nobody cares about you or your used car salesman friend. Or that idiot chick that suggested he be the new CEO. Shut up.

Secondly, Dominoes sucks. They always have sucked. They did that little “oh apparently we suck, let’s try to fix our pizza” thing a year or so ago and I’ll be honest, I gave them a try. I applaud someone trying to better themselves. Total failure. There was a marginal decrease in suck, but not enough to warrant me ever having another Dominoes pizza again. Why am I gonna get 16 of your little bread bite things for a dollar after spending $12 on two of your shitty medium pizzas when I can not do that at all and save both the money and my mouth from having to eat your pizza/go to Pizza Hut and pay $10 to get one of those sexy boxes? 

Third, you didn’t invent shit, so there’s no need to feel so proud of yourself dude. You sat down and brainstormed an amazing new food idea and you came up with “small piece of bread with parmesan cheese on it”? And you’re over the moon about it? This is the type of guy that would fix the problem of nobody having money by printing more of it (and we all know how that turned out). 

So shut up about your “new” parmesan bread bites. That shit’s been done already, you’re not innovative, Dominoes still sucks, and your used car salesman friend has the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen in my life.

Stay classy

I’ve been seeing a lot of people talking about the friend zone like it’s some awful shit, and then I read how they define it and see that their definition of it is wrong, and isn’t what used to be the accepted definition of it. 

The friend zone is when Person A is friends with Person B, and Person A would like to be more than friends, but Person B sees them as just a friend. That’s where it should stop. 

But then I see people who are all “shit man, I’m her friend she should wanna be with me wah wah wah” etc. etc. and I’m like dude that’s not being in the friend zone, that’s you being a bitter little prick. You have to qualify under the definition of “friend” to be in the friend zone, and if you’re only being a “nice guy” in order to have “a better shot” at being with someone, then newsflash dude, you’re not her friend — AND, you’re not even a nice guy. 

The point is, if you’re in the friend zone, you’re a friend. Yeah your friend may go out with assholes and then come crying to you when she gets hurt, and yeah you may think that you’re better for her than those assholes and yeah, you may even be right in thinking that (and you probably are!). But it doesn’t matter what YOU think, it matters what SHE thinks. And if you can accept that, then yeah you’re in the friend zone, but you’re a decent person and a good friend. And if you can’t accept that, you’re not in the friend zone, you’re in the bitter entitled asshole masquerading around as a friend zone.