Tracy Moore, Were You Raised by Jackals?

Dear Nashville Scene,

Yes, it does hurt my feelings a little bit when you make fun of bloggers.  I’ll admit, my experience with alt.weeklies has been limited to the Reader and the Village Voice, so I was kind of under the impression that free weeklies were a cool, off-beat stick-it-to-the-man, truth-telling alternative to whatever corporate nonsense was going on in town, especially at the local daily paper.

And I kind of do want to be a cool, off-beat, stick-it-to-the-man, truth-telling alternative to whatever and so I do want you to like me.  It’s true.

But god damn, today you have a blog post about sticking it to a chick who works at McDonalds!

Have you never, ever heard “Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable?”  Just how “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” do you think it is to make it your mission to make a chick who works at McDonalds miserable?  Let me reiterate, SHE WORKS AT MCDONALDS.  What the fuck is wrong with you?

Do you have any idea how much it sucks to work at fast food?  How hard it is and thankless and how little the pay usually is?  And do you have any idea how unlike your dreams your life has had to go for you to be a grown-ass person who works at McDonalds?

And yet, you not only called her manager; you called corporate, too?

What the fuck is wrong with you? 

Seriously.

Are you so unaware of how good you have it, to have a job most folks would kill to have at a paper that gets read by everyone, and how shitty her life must be?  And yet, you’re going to pile it on her?

Are you evil?

Is that it?

What’s next?  Are you going to go into the NICU and laugh at how ugly the babies with the wires and tubes coming out of them are?

Shame on you.

Christ, I’d rather you go back to making fun of bloggers.

Aunt B.

Time Out

Okay, folks, we have to take a timeout here for a minute so that I can say how much I love you guys.  And I’m not even drunk.  I really do love you.

Where else on the internet can you go and find folks who are smart and funny and make you mad and make you think and make you laugh?

Okay, yeah, a bunch of other places, but I like this one a hell of a lot.

I feel really grateful to have you all stopping by.

Okay, I’m done being mushy.  We can now return to our regular discussions.

Love,

b. 

Cats Are Stupid

The first most important thing to realize when you own a cat is that there is no one in the whole world who gives a shit about your cat except you. If you can accept this, you’ll make everyone around you much happier.

That being said, we own two cats, who behave in ways completely indecipherable to me.

The tiny cat, for instance, lives on my bed. Occasionally she makes her way over to the window, but, if the whole world were my bed and the window, she would live happily, pulling out her butt hair in the winter, growing it back in the summer. Who knows why, but there you go.

But both she and the orange cat will sleep facing the wall or, in the orange cat’s case right now, the back of the couch.

We have a large dog whose favorite game is “Pounce on the Cats.” Wouldn’t it make more sense to sleep like some Mafia don–in a corner, with your back to the wall, so you can see who’s gunning for you?

Also, why is it that the cats regularly only make half-assed attempts to jump up onto the table to get their food? And then why do they stare at me like I’m the problem?

Science, I know I belittled your commitment to your stupid just-so stories about evolutionary psychology just the other day, and so maybe you’re a little put out with me and not open to suggestions, but really, where is the research into what cats are thinking?

That’s important, clearly, because that affects me.