verbminx

So I just got home from a long day out of town, the highlight of which was seeing Amélie!

Drove drove drove. Ran some silly errands (bank, post office, etc) and then realized we were running low on gas. We stopped at a gas station we don't normally use. Today was really cold (for us - around 45 degrees during the day, colder when the sun went down), so there was a lot of steam you wouldn't normally see, and in particular, there were waves of heavy steam rolling off the edges of the roof of the convenience store attached to the gas station. "Um... Mom?" says I, "I think this gas station... is on fire?"

( the deal with the gas station, what I did all day, and a personal review of AMELIE! )

augh! I am so irritated with my bank. I initiated a funds transfer from my Paypal account that was to take 3-4 days, and then mailed a check to my credit card company the next day. But what do you know? The bank paid the check but claimed I had insufficient funds and docked my account $30, which now makes it in the hole. I have cash I can deposit, but it's Xmas money, and that makes me mad... I need to sell more stuff on ebay. But still, this is so annoying... I feel like they didn't register the transfer just so that they could keep an extra $30 of my money. Which is silly and paranoid, but I can't help it.

I had something else to complain about, but I can't remember what, just now.

Due to the influence of Amélie, I have decided to stop cheerfully mocking the French. I just can't think of any justification for it.

Oh! I know what I was going to complain about. Last night I bought this book called The Fabulous Girl's Guide to Decorum, which is basically just an etiquette guide, but very modern and done in the style of Three Black Skirts and so on. However, despite its good intentions, this book irritates me a little, and I can't take it back, because I was feeling sick when I came in from the car last night and I dropped the book on the floor and damaged the front corner.

The reason it irritates me is that I don't think it's very inclusive. It's not geared at WASPs per se (and what am I complaining about? Technically I am a WASP...) -- though I would say it's geared at middle-class childless urbanites, and some of the manners suggested might be different outside of middle-class college-educated white urban north america. The thing that bugged me is that it didn't make multicultural allowances at all, and that its definition of a Fabulous Girl is pretty narrow. For instance, it intimates that disabled people and FGs are two different things, which I found pretty offensive. So I'm kind of bummed that it didn't go quite as far as I would have liked, especially since it's full of advice on general good manners, like how to not be an asshole on the road.