2000-10-24 - 10:28am

On the internal soundtrack: The Smiths, "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want".

I decided I'm tired of referring to people in a vague manner or by their initials, so I have to make up nicknames for everyone. This entry will serve as my "cheat sheet" (and will periodically be updated as new people are added) so I can look up the names. Here we go:

Poindexter: Duh. My husband.

Lynn, JR, Kelly, and Christie: Poindexter's sister and her family.

Stacey, Brent and Kelsey: Formerly S and B, and S's daughter K. My only girl cousin and her brand-new husband. They'll be adding a new one in June sometime.

Billy: My cousin (Stacey's brother). I don't get to see him very often.

Kay, Cassie, and Marianne: My mom's three sisters, in birth order after her.

Stefan and Benedict: My two youngest cousins.

George and Jay: President and the VP of my company that I work most closely with.

Megan, Renee, and Sherry: The three girls in my office who are younger than me. Sherry is the Wonder Bread girl, Megan and Renee (along with me) are the crunchy granola girls. Bread-wise, anyway. Megan is married to Pierre and Renee is married to Alan.

Isabelle: My cousin's ex-wife who lives in Philly. Has a daughter, to be named later when I meet her.

Rob and Rianna: Our next-door neighbors from our previous (rented) house.

Will: Formerly "Big Devil". My best friend from college, currently living in Japan.

Alicia and Mike -- formerly A and M, parents of twins Susannah and Brennan.

Justin, Jo, and Sophia -- Poindexter's best friend, his wife, and their daughter.

I was going to have a nice what-I-did-this-weekend entry today, but my day was completely ruined by an unavoidable trip to hell on earth.

That is, Tyson's Corner. Good GOD, I hate that place.

Poindexter has been looking for a particular type of dirt bike for quite some time now, and one finally turned up in Hagerstown. A quick decision was made to go tonight, so I went to the bank a mile from my office to get some cash.

Alas, the drive-thru window had a ridiculously low minimum on cash, so I had to go to another branch.

The nearest open branch? Tyson's.

So I go, and go and go, outside the Beltway. I almost never go outside the Beltway. I don't like it out there, at least not until I'm well outside Fairfax County.

I get there, and it's CLOSED.

Happily, a banker chick was there and directed me to another branch that she PROMISED was open. It was, but it meant another 10 minutes wandering through the maze that is Tyson's.

FINALLY, I got my money. God damn. Freakin' Tyson's.

The teller there kept STARING at me.

I have noticed, in the past, that many (not all!) men from some (not all!) Latin American countries (and probably Mediterranean ones, too, but I don't run into as many of those) have a practice of staring very hard at women. There is none of the quick look-away-before-she-catches-me-looking-at-her that is more common. They just keep looking. They don't even bother to smile or chat or anything, just look. It's pretty interesting.

I can only presume this is culturally acceptable in their native country, because so many (but not all!) of them do it, but I don't have this problem with native-born Americans, aside from the occasional oddball, which is to be expected. (And by native-born Americans, I mean anyone born and raised in this country, not "white folks".)

Anyway, the staring. It is quite blatant, and used to make me very uncomfortable being stared at so intensely, but I finally just decided that perhaps I should take it as a compliment of sorts. Can't do much else about it.

Speaking of staring and making women uncomfortable. I don't think most men realize how much they can scare a woman by doing that. Or how scary it is for women to be spoken to in a parking lot or on the street when no one else is around, or when a guy is a leeetle too persistent in asking for a date. Lots of us have been indoctrinated to think that every guy out there is a potential rapist, but men just don't think that way.

God, I'm on a protracted ramble here. Ok, so have you ever noticed that it is awfully easy to pick out immigrants vs. native-born Americans? They don't even have to speak, they just LOOK different. You'd never mistake (or if you would, pay more attention for godsakes) a Nigerian here on a green card with a person born and raised here whose parents were Nigerian. Or from any other country at all. There's an American "look" and it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or anything else. I wish I could put my finger on what it is.

It's kind of like that gay "look", I guess. Difficult to define but something quite distinctive. It amuses me to no end that my mother can't see it. She has no gaydar at all. She could go to Dupont Circle and never realize that every other man there is gay, even the ones who aren't holding hands.

Speaking of gay, and I can't remember what I saw that made me think this, but did it ever cross your mind that Al Gore might be gay, but he's repressed it? Deeply, deeply repressed? There's something about him. Maybe the reason he's holding himself so stiff is so his inner queen can't get out.

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