This has been bothering me for awhile, but it really started to get on my nerves yesterday, when Patrick and I were listening to the debates on NPR while we drove down to the South Coast Plaza so I could visit the Apple store (mayhem! and - does Apple only hire emo man-boys? Even the girls working there yesterday were man-boys. What does this say about Apple? Or Costa Mesa?) and so he could go to Puzzle Zoo. Oh, and I have never felt so under dressed in a mall in my entire life. In our jeans and sneakers, Patrick and I looked like we should've been pushing mops - everyone else shopping at the South Coast Plaza was dressed to impress, and impress they did. Now I understand how my mother felt when the West Side Pavilion first opened and she refused to take me and my friends there, telling us, "Fox Hills is good enough for you!" (Not a direct quote.)Anyway, so the first person to overuse "dudn't" in place of "doesn't" in my presence was a woman I used to work with named Karen. Karen and I met at the Crown Books in Malibu, when I trained her to be the Second Assistant Manager (I was the First, a fact I never get tired of mentioning). She was a born-again Christian who smoked menthols, sported a female mullet and dressed like Minnie Mouse (yellow polka dot dresses, white high heels, Peter Pan collars... for once I do not exaggerate). She drove a broken down Ford Taurus that was full of literature on abstinence and the wages of sin. She was probably my age now (I was about 22 when we first met). She was a nice lady who prefaced her speeches on why I was going to hell with "It's because I care about you honey," which always seemed to me to be just another example of why most Christians are sick and twisted and not to be trusted. She also hired me away from the piece of crap bookstore I was working in a couple of years later and got me the job at the optometrist's office, so when I say she was nice, I really mean it. She looked after me, and I truly liked her, when she wasn't lecturing me on Jesus. She was also from a well-off family in the Pacific Palisades (estranged, yes, but still, she grew up, compared to my childhood, in the lap of luxury, here in Southern California. If you went by her accent, though, you would've thought she was from the Land of Dixie, and grew up barefoot, wearing overalls, with a brother named "Jem" and a childhood pal named "Dill."
I never figured out why she had adopted that style of speech: twangy, full of folksy colloquialisms, annoying... but I've always thought that she thought it softened her wacked out Christian message of conditional love and "this is why you're going to hell," and made it all a bit more palatable. Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it's like when Dr. Drew, on Love Line, takes a call from a female with a high child-like voice and automatically assumes that the person was abused or has daddy issues. I don't know. I'm definitely not board-certified to make assumptions... but as sweet as she was, she could've been totally off her rocker (the evidence, not submitted here for your perusal out of respect for her right to privacy, supports this supposition). Anyway, I understand that some of the presidential candidates participating in the debates (I'm not sure where Dennis Kucinich is from, but it doesn't matter now, does it) are actually from Southern states, but still. It grates on me worse than an unsolicited treatise on God's plans for homosexuals.
*Obviously I am not the first person to think of this... just one link today (and it's from 2004) because, frankly, I want you to read my blog, not theirs.
And by the way, the Apple store employees were wearing blue t-shirts with little tiny Apples ("open apples," if my memory of Apple iconography is correct) on the sleeves. As devoted as I am to my PC and as silly as I feel the whole "genius bar" thing is (all the people waiting for assistance yesterday seemed to be having iPod problems, which, unless it's totally broken [Patrick said once somebody's way too expensive piece of technology is totally inoperable, you can refer to it as a "brick," which cracked me up], seems like going to the doctor to help you trim your toenails), I would LOVE one of those t-shirts.
My birthday is next month. I'm just sayin'.
Finally... this photo was taken at the Apple store in Santa Monica, which answers the question: it's not just Costa Mesa. Click on today's post's title to read the blog I stole the picture from.
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