Wednesday, August 18, 2010

hate week: the telling off stories

in celebration of hate week, here is an email correspondence about the virtues of going ape shit. this particular conversation is about a person and situation that must remain mysterious. but the themes are universal.

tell us your telling off stories!

Megan:  i really want someone to tell him off. kathy, have you told anyone off before?  sarah, have you? i have told garrison off at the top of my lungs several thousand times. tell me telling-off stories. i just told gato off for prowling around in my garden and trying to eat my pepper plants which bugs are already eating.

Sarah: Bugs are eating my pepper plants, too.  But I am going to have soooo much zuchinni. The most major telling-off I've ever done was with one of my partners at Brainstorm.  We were full-on yelling at each other, and he kept getting closer and closer to me, and when it was all over, my calves were killing me because I was standing on my tippy-tippy toes so I could be on eye-level with him.  I think I need to re-access my anger.  This is the moral. Tell him off!  Tell him off! Also, all of my gmail ads are about nightgowns, now.  Are yours?

Megan: There are ads for nightgowns? I never want you to go off on me. You'd grow taller and taller with anger like the Incredible Hulk except you wouldn't get more muscle-y. You might not even need to talk: you could just grow and stare through me with that serial-killer face and I would shrink into the carpet like in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Kathy, if you go off on him I want you to wear a wire. I need to hear it live.

Kathryn: i feel like i did tell him off but i did it in a really calm, gentle voice. so maybe that is not a real telling off. i think the last person i told off was vinnie, and it was when he worked at betuitive, and it was for something like turning the air conditioner off when i wanted it on. i read that self-control is exhaustible. they did a study where they let one group of people eat as many cookies as they wanted and they made the other group eat vegetables while looking at the cookies. they could see the cookies but they weren't allowed to eat them. the vegetable group could do nothing else for the rest of their day because they had exhausted all their energy not eating the cookies. i think i exhaust all my energy being nice, and that if i didn't use my energy on that, i could use it all on not eating cookies. or writing poems. this could be the next diet craze. the fly into a rage diet. "scream at people all day, and watch the pounds melt away!" remember the incan child sacrifice diet? the tag line was "no meat, no maize."

Sarah: I love your diet crazes, Kathy.  I'm going to fly into a rage on the next person who walks into my office and then skip lunch.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

the hilarious thing about this conversation is that my pepper plants are healthy and my zucchini plants shriveled into nothingness. zero zucchinis.

Kathryn said...

poor zucchinis. they do seem like a delicate vegetable.

Megan said...

we're funny. this is funny.