remember, a hard hat and a hi-vis vest, and a friend with their own hard hat, hi-vis vest and a clipboard, and you can get away with all sorts of things
just remember that if anyone asks, act irritated that you were called in on your day off because the guy who was supposed to do it fell sick, then catch yourself and say “anyway, no time to chat, i got a quota to meet” before grumbling about how you should have listened to your mother.
That bar is to prevent unhoused people from sleeping there, for anyone who doesn’t understand why we’re removing it
rb and put in the tags which song reminds you of your childhood
So.
Making fun of people for comments that seem smart-ass-y is. Not good.
Because either you’re making fun of an autistic person or someone else who doesn’t pick up well on jokes or you’re making fun of someone for an attitude that is frankly best ignored.
So the other night my mom was upstairs on a zoom call with The Council of Retired White Moms (her book club) , my dad was downstairs working out, and my brother and I were cleaning up the kitchen, which obviously requires a soundtrack.
Now, you know how sometimes you’re like “alexa, play [a song]” and she’s like “playing [a totally different song] on TST’s spotify”? or maybe she just decides to play literally nothing instead? My workaround has always been to select the Echo as thr output device in the spotify app. It works like 80% of the time.
As such, when Alexa couldn’t manage to play my great kitchen cleaning jam on the night at issue, I opened spotify, selected the kitchen echo, and pressed play. When the Echo didn’t respond, I just assumed it was just the usual spotify/alexa bullshit… until the screaming began.
This next part is important: there are 32 devices on our network and nobody but me ever names them. So when I’m selecting a device to play spotify on, I have to pick the right speaker out from a long list of random alphanumeric gibberish. I usually guess right, but I do occasionally fuck it up. Accordingly, it came to pass that I had not told Spotify to play my music on the kitchen echo; I had actually selected the iHome in my mom’s office.
Mom originally bought the iHome to play NPR loud enough that she could hear it from any room in the house. It’s not a smart speaker, though, and mom (like the majority of boomers) prefers to use voice commands. Once she got her own Echo, she just basically forgot about the iHome. More importantly, she forgot how to use it, and then, it seems, forgot that it was a speaker system at all – a few weeks prior to the events of this story, I was trying to troubleshoot her computer and had a private and very sensible chuckle to myself when she incidentally referred to it as “that digital clock.”
For the past few years it’s just been lurking silently on her desk next to her laptop.
Waiting.
As a result, when the iHome unexpectedly lurched back to life at its customary maximum volume, neither my mother nor the 25+ other Women of a Certain Age in her book club had any idea of:
a) where the music was coming from, or
b) how to stop it
I had started up the stairs in response to the screaming, but I paused (out of mom’s line of sight) when I realized what was happening.
“STOP IT!” My mom was out of her chair and screaming. “WHAT IS THAT!? NO! ALEXA, STOP IT! ALEXA! STOP PLAYING!”
A greek chorus of distraught book club attendees was echoing her sentiments over the laptop speakers, the monitor displaying the horrified face of each speaker in incredibly rapid succession.
“ALEXA!” My mom shouted at the mesh router point, “MAKE IT STOP! NO! NO! NO!”
(“Did you mean ‘set a timer?’” the Echo in her bedroom asked politely.)
The song, naturally, did not stop, and mom did not think to mute her laptop or pull the power cord from the iHome. Instead, she whirled around several times held her arms out in a sort of T-pose, as if she could physically stop the book club attendees from hearing the song I’d picked out.
I will say this for the iHome – sure, it’s old tech, but even at max volume, the lyrics could be understood with perfect clarity.
Now, this would have probably been funny regardless of the song I had chosen as my kitchen clean-up jam. I know that. But the actual song that my mom’s book club encountered that night is what raises the whole thing from “amusing anecdote” to “genuinely incredible.”
If you have been following me for a while, you’ll know that I tend to think of myself as a real prankster. A rascal, a scamp, a jester of a woman. I have engineered a few comedic misadventures in my day. But I have to be humble here… what I unintentionally accomplished that night was so much funnier than anything I have ever done on purpose. It was the absolute apex of comedy.
The song I had chosen, dear readers, was WAP.
great story but can we talk about the fact your mom listens to npr? i may be incorrect because this radio does not play in my country afaik, but is that not the exceedingly rightwing vitriol radio?
oh god no, while I have plenty of issues with the amount of NPR in my house, none of it relates to content. It’s publically funded radion; news, world and classical music, short fiction, This American Life etc. Politically, I’d say it’s centrist to center left. Not exactly Viva La Revolution stuff, but certainly not Q Anon bullshit.
The right, naturally, HATES IT. It’s slightly higher up on their shit list than like Sesame Street.
No, no, you have no idea. It actually IS the beginning of the whole so-called “kawaii culture”. And it started because girls started using mechanical pencils, which provided fine handwriting. After being banished (more precisely, during the 80s), this kind of writing started being used in products like magazines and make-up. And, during this time, icons we usually associate with the whole kawaii industry (like the characters from Sanrio) came to life too.
And what many people don’t realize is that this subculture was born as a way for young girls to express themselves in their own way. And it was also used as something against the adult life and the traditional culture, often seen as dull and boring and oppressive. By embracing cuteness, these young girls (and adult women, after a while) were showing non-conformation with the current standards.
So yep. Kawaii is important, and it all started with cute, simple handwritting a few hearts and cat faces in some girls’ school notebooks ❤
!!!!!
NO OK THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!
This is also how the kawaii fashions started! Girls began dressing in cute and off beat styles for themsleves, they were criticized by adult figures telling them “you’ll never find a husband if you dress that way!” to which they began to reply “Good!”
All the Japanese subcultures and fashions that evolved out of this became a rebellion to tradition and the starch gender roles and expectations the adults were forcing on the younger generations. As early as the 70s and still to this day you’ll see an emphasis on child-like fashion and themes in more kawaii styles and the dismissal of the male gaze with styles like lolita (a lot of western people assume lolita is somehow sexual due to the name of the fashion, but ask any Japanese lolita and they will tell you that men hate the style and find it unattractive which is sometimes a large reason they gravitate towards the style – they can express their femininity and individuality while remaining independent and without the pressure to appeal to men)
Its so so so important to understand the hyper cute and ‘odd’ fashions of Japanese girls carry such a huge message of feminism and reclaiming of their own lives.
so are you telling me that Japan’s punk phase was really the kawaii phase
Kawaii is so goth
Metal heads Stan for our sisters in lace
I did not know this but I love this form of feminism!
-FemaleWarrior, She/They
Which is why you get bands like BABYMETAL, which toured with Judas Priest for a while, looking like this:
ifesbob 