Yes, yes, sarcasm is inherent in any good eye-roll, however, the sarcasmo-death-rays I'm shooting must be especially hurtful. I mean, I almost made a lady cry in the Co-op the other day.
Oh, but wait! Before you light fire to that effigy of me you've surely constructed, let me just whine: "I didn't meeeean to!" Really.
I was clearly heading for that register. I was totally going for it at a normal pace and this woman with her arms full of some kind of canned cat food, saw me and gave me the evil eye and did this crazy, quick shuffle step to beat me there!
I was willing to forgive her for that. It was that she was taking forever to arrange her groceries on the little conveyer belt. No, I did not have any place in particular that I needed to be, I was just miffed that she seemed to be insisting on organizing her bazillion tiny tins of cat food in alphabetical order with almost obsessive compulsion. You could practically see her thinking "Delices du mer, dinde et poule, pat� au crevettes. Yum. My fave!"
Meanwhile, I had a package of tofu and a copy of Rolling Stone (what a shitty magazine). So I rolled my eyes. I didn't do the huff of indignation that usually accompanies the eye-roll though. That's gotta count for something, right?
Apparently not. She saw me and supplied her own huff of indignation. Like, how dare you be annoyed by my slow ass? Fucking hell, woman! You're over the nine item limit by at least ten items! I know it, you know it, the cashier knows it, hell, the glue-sniffing box boys know it! So I rolled my eyes back and threw in a snort of derision, while flipping through my magazine because I'm totally hip and she's not. And she was all *Sniffle* and failing to look at me or the cashier while she quietly paid and gathered up her purchases and went home to her cats.
Oh, please! Stop looking at me like that! I know I'm going to hell!
It's not like it was just me, either! No! I shared an eye-roll with the exasperated cashier! We exchanged the eye-roll of "Yeah. I been there, sister." See, I too was a cashier. In fact, I learned my many eye-rolling skills in that position. That's what you do to deal with the crudest, ugliest, smelliest forms of humanity who come into the store and breath on you and touch you and finger the merchandise and count out their entire purchase in pennies and let their brat-ass kids run wild and break shit and get their snot all over everything. If you don't roll your eyes, you'll go crazy!
But now, I mostly limit my eye-rolling to when I have to stand in line for inordinate amounts of time. Like when I'm trying to get twenty bucks from the cash machine and there's a guy in front of me apparently paying his damn mortgage! Like, it's not illegal to go to an actual teller, bub!
But this is turning into a rationalization of my eye-rolling instead of an admission of guilt. Let me try to start over...
My name is Tanis and I'm an eye-roller.
*Hi Tanis!*
I guess it all started when I was a sullen teenager and my prime method of communicating my disgust with my father and his idiot ways, was to lower my head and roll my eyes. And without fail, he would say "Don't give me that look!" How did he know? I never meant to do it. It just got to be a habit.
*Testify!*
It just sort of slips out somehow.
*Preach it, sister!*
And I guess I need help.
*You know, the first step is admitting it.*
Oh. Hold on. I'm having an internal debate. (No, Tanis! Don't do it! Hold it back!/Oh, but they're asking for it!/But you don't want to do it!/But I really, really do!/No! Don't do it! Don't-)
*Just let it out. We're here for you*
Oh my God!
*EYE-ROLL!*
Oh man! Oh, that felt so good! Oh yeah! I like rolling my eyes! I like it, and I do it all the time, baby! Hoooooo.....
I feel better now.
####
Geek Link of the Week: Whale Net Whales are cool.
Tunes: The New Pornographers, "All for Swinging You Around." A download. People, on the strength of this one song, I'm going to get this CD. Don't tell me that the Internet is hurting the music industry. That's what they want you to believe, man!
Tube: The season final� of Alias was just...wow. I believe my cerebellum fused. In a good way. Of course, with my track record with other shows, I should just stop watching now. Because they start sucking after the second season. Without fail. Witness Buffy. And the X-Files.
Pages: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. A book I read once a year.
