Author : MiscreantMinx

Writing about life generally through the lens of my own, I’m not afraid to share my unconventional outlook or my unpopular opinions.

I’m an optimistic agnostic with cynical atheist tendencies; I lean to the right and wave my middle finger at the left. After graduating from college, I fled the suburbs and my good Christian upbringing for a major American shithole city, where I now live in a happily uncommitted relationship with a cantankerous foreigner.

Additional bio can be found on the about page.

My posts:

Sprint: the not right now network

May 1, 2013 8:48 pm•By: •What say you?

The 4G gods have stopped smiling on me, if they ever did.  I wish the least of my problems over the past few weeks was that sometimes facebook photos took too long to load.  Forget about 4G.  I’m happy if my 1 bar of 3G sticks around, because too often my service magically evaporates and I’m left with nothinG.  Texts show up when they feel like it, which is usually a few hours after the Russian lover has determined I am almost certainly tied up in a trunk somewhere.  Sometimes calls don’t come through at all, and I don’t even have a missed call alerting me to the fact that someone was trying to get in touch.

The first few times he couldn’t reach me he thought I was being a jerk.  The next few times he couldn’t reach me, he went into a panic.  The times after that and Enough was Enough.  I called Sprint and learned that there were “service upgrades” happening and hopefully the disruptions would cease soon.  In the next week or so.  Probably. They apologized for the inconvenience and asked for my patience and offered that they could credit me 25 bucks for the hassle.

I called back, because missing important calls from people for whom I am the sole point of contact on certain matters is not a hassle.  It is a potentially career-ending, relationship-killing huge fucking problem that only Sprint customers in this city seem to be having.  And I talked to some supervisor’s supervisor and I got nowhere on being let out of contract without an ETF or being credited an amount of money would offset that ETF.  As far as Sprint is concerned, this level of service falls within their acceptable bounds.

Sprint CS explained that they couldn’t guarantee service everywhere people go. I explained that if they couldn’t guarantee service smack-dab in the middle of the fifth largest city in the United States, then they should stop pretending to be a major national cellular carrier.  Maybe get Candace Bergen back and try to sell people some long distance minutes again.

4G Phl

Sprint 4G map of Philly via sensorly.com

The circled areas are where I happen to spend a good deal of time, in the center of the city, where coverage is looking a little sparse according to this map.  The other areas of Philadelphia that have similar-looking coverage on this map are places where people regularly get shot.  Sprint 4G: The social equalizer.

When I was with the Russian lover in NYC, I thought I was pretty good with 4G for much of the time we were bumming around Manhattan.  But there, too, it didn’t seem consistently good.  So today I also pulled up the 4G map for New York; the circled area is where the Russian lover’s crash pad is located, and where we spend a fair amount of time:

NYC 4G

Foiled again.

And now I think I understand the main reason people want to be famous.  Because if there is one thing celebrities are not, it is helpless consumers in the face of inferior products and services.  If Beyonce called Pepsi saying “This new soda of yours I just tried is gross”, Pepsi would not be like “Thank you for your valuable feedback.  We are so sorry” and leave Beyonce out a couple of bucks.  They would respond by dispatching a team tasked with creating a new soda to Beyonce’s specifications.  Meanwhile, when Coke got wind of her displeasure, they’d offer her a billion dollars to abandon her Pepsi endorsement.  A bidding war would ensue.  Beyonce would be gifted with endless amounts of gratis superior cola product.  That is consumer power.

Somehow, I don’t think any service provider is going to try to hold Beyonce hostage to her cell phone contract.  The rest of us?  We just have to yell and tweet and blog and try to band together until enough of us add up to one Beyonce.  Because the only hope we regular people have against incompetent corporate tyrants like the now network is the momentum of our human networks.

Posted in Celebrity, Culture, Science and Tech
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Envy and entropy

Apr 30, 2013 8:58 pm•By: •What say you?

For the most part, I am happy with my life to date.  I am and have been largely content with my longtime corporate gig, That Which Pays the Bills; I have had a nice run at my company and while it is not the most exciting or lucrative career path, it’s been stable.  Stability is a nice thing to have in a recession that doesn’t end and just changes its name to “recovery.”  In my personal life I’ve also achieved a number of milestones and enjoyed many experiences that my younger self found terribly ambitious and scandalous when she was writing that essay in tenth grade.

But I am not, it would seem, an adventurer by nature. I take calculated gambles that sometimes seem crazy to even more wary folks, but for the most part I prefer to play it safe.  Sometimes, far too safe.  And this is something about myself which I loathe perhaps the most of all.  Even more than my intractable cellulite.

This week I was reading a story in a weekly city rag about an old acquaintance of the Russian lover’s; she has gone on to make a infamous name for herself doing infamous things that may one day limit her career options in politics or early childhood education, but she has found success and happiness and lives with authenticity.  She’s beautiful, intelligent, and well-spoken.  She does not play it safe.

Reading about her – her life and her approach to life – I couldn’t help but feel envy.  I am sometimes mildly jealous of other people for having things I don’t have, or for not having to deal with things I do, but full-blown envy only happens when I encounter someone who seems to have figured out how to live their life better than I could ever hope to live my own.  I feel especially gutted by those women who seem to have not just all the things, but more importantly be all the things, that somehow I just can’t.

I think at its worst, envy is not actually about wanting to be someone else; it’s about wanting to find a way to be yourself as well as someone else has found to be their self.  At the core, I think very few people actually suffer from genuine or total self-loathing; in fact, although we’re culturally conditioned to be publicly self-abasing, most people believe themselves to be pretty fucking great. Low self-esteem is not what plagues us; if anything, we have too much esteem.  What we don’t have is the ability to translate that esteem into lives fully lived.  We hold back.  Most of us do, anyway.

The Russian lover does not hold back.  In classic relationship motif, this was something about him that attracted me at first and then began to annoy me as the years went by; in my eyes, his most endearing quality became his fatal flaw.  I contemplated the future of the relationship.

And then I asked myself why this thing about him that I used to love was bothering me so much, and I came to the conclusion that it was because I felt so separated from his unfiltered, unafraid engagement with the world.  In those moments where he boldly had a confrontation or took action toward the future, I felt timid and lost beside him.

And I reached the realization that at least one person in a relationship must have if two people are going to stay together: I decided the problem was with me. I was the one convinced that he should try to be a tamed version of himself while fighting my own demons of repression.  Where I was not succeeding I determined he should, a little bit, fail.

That is the most toxic dynamic that can be introduced in a relationship.

I snapped out of it because, in the end, I wanted to be with the Russian lover.  And I wanted the Russian lover to be the Russian lover.  Finally, I understood that I was trying to censor him because I was afraid to be the uncensored version of myself.  Playing it safe was becoming who I was, not just something I preferred to do.  And it damn near destroyed not just my relationship, but both of the people in it.

So, envy. Stumbling across the paper last week made it obvious that I haven’t quite reached a place where I am convinced my choices are entirely based on knowing myself and my desires and not based on fear and avoidance.  Because what I envy about that other girl isn’t her looks (and yes, she’s prettier), her success (and yes, she’s richer), or her fame (and yes, you’ve heard of her).  I envy the pure sense of freedom she has about herself.

I think if I can find that, the rest will take care of itself.

Posted in City Life, Unrepressed woman
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Someone slipped me a date rape drug.

Apr 8, 2013 9:14 pm•By: •What say you?

I was in NYC this weekend visiting the Russian lover, who has been staying there more on business. On Sunday evening we headed to a place in Soho that’s known for getting a raucous international crowd – even and especially on Sundays.  We expected to have a raucous time, and we were not disappointed – the debaucherous chaos inside was unreal.  To wit: I now know that Scottish men do not wear anything under their kilts and following an afternoon of heavy drinking they will be more than happy to prove that to any ladies who may innocently inquire.

There were pitchers of mojitos being consumed all around– the Russian lover grabbed one for us and a girlfriend.  Sometime later he grabbed another one.  But I ended up drinking relatively little, since the pitchers were crammed with mint leaves and lime slices and sugar cane and not all that much alcohol.   Packed in with so many people having a good time in a small space, it was impossible not to lose some (or all) of your inhibitions.  I let my hair down literally, and then I let it down figuratively; the Russian lover socialized nearby while I danced with the aforementioned kilt-wearing exhibitionists.

After a couple of hours we decided we were hungry and it was time to go someplace where we could sit down and eat without the possibility of drunk girls trying to climb up and dance on our table.  As we left together with our friend, I was happily buzzed, flushed from dancing, and ready to wind down the evening with some good Italian food in a more relaxed atmosphere.

The minute I sat down at the bar at Cipriani, I knew something was wrong.

While the Russian lover ordered drinks, I decided it was probably best if I headed to the bathroom to figure out what I was feeling.  At first I wondered if I’d managed to drink more than I thought, in which case maybe I just needed to vomit a bit and switch myself to water.  But by the time I sat down on the toilet in the ladies room, the nausea was eclipsed by a wave of total confusion.  And then my whole body went numb.

I don’t know how long I sat there on the toilet.  It can’t have been so long that the Russian lover started to worry, but it was long enough that the ladies waiting for their turn did.  But I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t move.  Finally, gathering all of my effort, I was able to get to my feet and stagger out of the restroom.  I stood by the back service station helplessly.  I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know where I needed to go.  If you had asked me in that moment, I could not have told you my name.  I didn’t know it.  But I wouldn’t have been able to speak it even if I did.

A woman – I think maybe she was a hostess or a server but she could have been a patron or an angel – took me firmly by the arm and led me to the bar at the front where the Russian lover was drinking and conversing.  Seeing the familiar form of the person I know and love most in all the world brought me back to myself for a moment, just long enough for me to force out the words “We have to go.”

He turned and asked “What’s wrong?”  And that’s when it hit me.  I understood what had happened, what was happening to me.  Again focusing all the effort within me to form the thoughts to make the words and speak them out loud, I told him “I’ve been drugged.”

And with that I lurched toward the door and out to the street, because I knew I was about to be violently ill.  The Russian lover threw money down on the bar and followed behind, grabbing me and pulling me just far enough away from the al fresco diners before I projectile vomited onto the sidewalk and street.  The spasms of my own heaving nearly knocked me off my feet.

Once there was nothing left inside me, we got in a cab.  As we rode uptown, the Russian lover asked me what happened.  I didn’t have any answers.  As far as I knew up to that point, I’d just had a fun evening with some drinks and dancing.  I hadn’t been offered or taken any drugs, and I am an Olympic drinker; I know my limits with alcohol, and I know exactly how my body feels when I’ve erred and had too much.  This was not me very drunk.  This was me in an altered state, losing control of my body and mind as I drifted toward an inevitable unconsciousness.

By the time we got to the apartment, I was losing the ability to walk.  My legs buckled under me, and the Russian lover half-carried half-pulled me up the stairs.  Twenty or so minutes before I had been dancing and chatting and fully lucid, if somewhat inebriated; now I was almost fully incapacitated.  Halfway up, I collapsed to me knees and cried “I’m so…m–. Mm- -.” My lips wouldn’t move the way I wanted them to; I couldn’t push the sounds off of my tongue. “Mad!” I finally forced out.  I started to sob.  The Russian lover kept me going, kept me moving, spoke encouraging words I can’t remember but I do remember the anger in his voice that he couldn’t conceal – anger that this had happened to me right under his nose, anger that this had happened to me at all, anger that this is something that happens to women ever, anywhere.

I managed to make it to the bed, where I vomited one last time into a trash bin.  Then I lay down, and I couldn’t move again.   The Russian lover and my friend worried about me in hushed tones, wondering what they should do.  I couldn’t tell them anything; the part of me that wills my body into motion was completely disassociated and my paralysis felt total.  I just wanted to sleep.

I awoke 7 hours later beside the Russian lover.  I could move again, and I marveled out how light my body felt and how easy it was to speak. “I’m OK,” I assured him as he wrapped his arms tight around me. “I’m OK.”

And I am.  I’m tired, but I’m OK.  I won’t allow myself to spend much time contemplating the alternative.  What if the Russian lover hadn’t been there?  What if the drug had taken effect sooner while he was distracted and someone led me away?  When the full force of the drug overtook me, I was a mere puppet.  A voiceless puppet without any will or strength.  Anyone could have done anything they wanted with me; I was lost in a helpless void and approaching total blackness.  I have never experienced a terror like that before.

When I went to tell a friend today, I started by saying that I “got roofied.”  I’ve used the term before, in jest.  It’s a great word to joke around with–it rhymes with goofy, and doofy.  But today the word felt wrong, like a balloon where a shroud should be.  I was violated as a person, and the word I use to describe that experience shouldn’t ring trivial.  We’ve made drugging women into something of a punchline –I am guilty of it too – and then we are shocked when men seemingly have no compunction about drugging women.

What kind of smiling, jovial monsters are these men lurking in bars that are capable of treating another person, but especially a woman, with that kind of callous disregard?  How can a woman feel safe anywhere knowing the possibility of being drugged is looming with every sip she takes in the company of others?  And how have we allowed for this culture of devious cowardice to emerge?

I’ve told this story because I wanted to get it out and move on.  My usual caution in bars will be upgraded to full-scale paranoia for a while (“hey lady, why are you here drinking beer out of a baby bottle?”) but I don’t intend to dwell on this incident or allow it to shut me down socially.  Awful, terrible people exist.  But so do wonderful ones.  And if I shrink away to escape the former, I’m going to miss out on the latter.  All I can do is be careful, be smart, and be grateful that the only lingering consequence of this experience is the humiliation of throwing up all over the sidewalk right in front of the see-and-be-seen scene of Soho.

Posted in Dating, Sex
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