Hi all. Expect a new Scary-Crayon piece up tomorrow (Tuesday) -- I'd hoped to have it up today, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I think it'll be worth the wait, though. Spectare reviews are always fun, and especially so when they involve our five half-shelled heroes... waitaminute, five?!? That's the only hint you're getting.

In other news, I finished a new (really) short story! 890 words. I'm going to sit on it for a few days, maybe let some folks read it and offer suggestions, then throw it at a market and see if it sticks. FYI, Word's Readability Statistics rate it at 57.5 for Flesch Reading Ease and 12.0 for Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. I dunno exactly what those stats mean, but they sure make my writing sound complicated. 😛

Notes from the bookstore:

Sometimes I really wish I could hit on the customers. ("Hit on" as in "flirt with". I always wish I could punch them.) Well, I don't recall an explicit rule to that effect, but I'm sure it would be frowned upon. Unless it went well, in which case I guess it wouldn't matter at all. At any rate, I can't hit on the customers, but sometimes I wish I could. It's probably just as well that I can't, though. I'm terribly awkward and would probably end up getting fired/arrested for sexual harassment and/or just being inordinately creepy. Owell.

Customers I hate: Ones who come to the register with a number of books and, after setting them down on the counter, announce that they don't want some of them. Now I could understand if they were in a hurry, but arguably if they were in that much of a hurry they would've left the books they didn't want elsewhere in the store, grabbed what they wanted, and rushed to the counter post-haste. But they never seem like they're in a hurry. One guy came up to the counter with a few GED prep books -- and he came straight from the GED section; we can see it from the front -- and noted that he didn't want one of them. Why the hell couldn't he put it back, then, or at least leave it in the section? It's baffling. And irritating.

And then you have the customers who get pissed at you because things are "too expensive". Now I can understand being upset about the prices -- we do have some pricey items -- but the cashier is NOT the person with whom you should be angry. And if it pisses you off that much, don't buy the fucking book! But there are some customers who don't look at the prices on the books -- hey, why not? with extremely few exceptions, the prices are on the books themselves, not to mention that we usually have an additional price sticker on them -- so it's a shock to them when they see the price of the book as I ring it up. And then they get all pissy and say that they don't want the book, which kinda ties in with the above. Admittedly, I've probably had it happen to me a few times that I didn't want a product because it rang up too high (though I don't think this would happen often, since I generally ask for price checks when I don't know how much an item costs), but I've never gotten angry about it and have always offered to replace the products on the shelf. Occasionally I get customers like that, which is great, but more often than not they get upset and take it out on me. I had one Saturday night whose discount card had expired -- the card was over two years old, no less, and they're only good for a year; even the card's design was outdated -- and got really angry with me when I told her she couldn't use it and asked if she'd like to renew it. I'd like to know where the hell she's been for the past year such that she didn't know the card had expired. Maybe she was in a coma from the last time she got really nasty with a cashier. I don't know.

And I fucking hate the racist customers. I kind of hate the book businesses, too, for condoning and consequently encouraging them in these attitudes as well. It's true that if more bookstores flat out refused to set up an "African-American authors" section, for example (we don't exactly have one, as I've mentioned before, but even our nonfiction grouping is problematic), these people would just go to other stores to get what they want, but if I were in charge I'd rather lose their business than give the nod to racism by telling them that it's okay to choose their reading material based on the skin color of the author. If that were how people chose their friends, their employees, etc., you'd call them racist (or at least I hope you would, and rightfully so), but using skin color as a guide is perfectly acceptable when it comes to the authors they read and the television programs they watch? Get the fuck out of here.

You know, I'd love to get some funding to do a documentary on the subject -- I can already see sending someone into one of the Karibu bookstores to ask for the "Caucasian authors" section and following it up with a handful of questions in the Socratic method. Among other things, like analysis of certain television shows and films and whatnot (White Chicks, anyone?). Or at least make some kind of movie/program exposing the double-standard and ugliness and hypocrisy of this crap. Ugh.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say about this topic in the future. Ja for now.