Taco Bell, Ayn Rand, and the History Channel.

Nothing good happens after midnight, and this includes my mood. So, I guess I'm just going to write it out.

Sometimes I think I might be a negative, or pessimistic person, and the worst kind too! The kind that thinks they have every right to be negative. Still, sometimes it can't be helped. For example...

I went to patronize my friendly neighborhood Taco Bell today, fully intent on buying myself a chicken quesadilla. I walked to the front counter and no one was there. Normally, I'd get really pissed off and glare at anyone doing anything other than asking for my order, a trait I picked up from my mother. But I was in an exceptionally good mood, so I decided to give them the benefit of a doubt. I myself have worked in the food business, and I knew there was a multitude of things they could be doing. Maybe there was a small grease fire in the back, and a lone worker was trying to extinguish it. Thinking of this scenario suddenly made me feel guilty.

Finally, a woman came to the counter. She laid her hands on top of the cash register and gave me a look that said, "What?" An aggravated what, the what a mother gives her child while she's on the phone but the child won't stop interrupting her conversation to beg for food before he or she starves to death.

"Ummm I'll have a chicken quesadilla and a medium sweet tea and that's all." I packed a lot of my feelings into that ummm, I can only hope she spent a few minutes analyzing it in her head until she finally arrived at the conclusion that I was pissed.

She took a cup and slapped it on the counter, giving me another look. Except this one said, "take it, bitch."

It's my pet peeve, anyone will tell you, when I see service people giving you an attitude. My friend once almost had to witness me attacking a Subway sandwich artist because she wouldn't stop throwing metal cookie sheets around and sounding whiney to the customers. I just hate it. It might be because I hated working at Rosa's but I still kept a good attitude, at least to peoples' faces. It might be because I feel that if someone is paying you to do something then why aren't you doing it right? It might just be because, again, I am inherently negative person. Who knows? I just know that I get extremely annoyed by it.

In addition, I think Ayn Rand has hijacked my sanity. I'm reading Atlas Shrugged in order to enter a scholarhip about the book. I made it past the first chapter. Okay that was a lie, I read the bulk and got the gist of chapter one. Some parts were just begging me to skip them. Like when what's-his-face wouldn't stop whining about how his oak tree got struck by lightening. SUCK IT UP!

I know a lot of people support her philosophies, and that's fine with me, I just feel that the book is an enormous bitch-slap because it assumes you can make it past chapter 4 without getting sick of the adjective "mockingly" and names like Dingy Taggert. Or Dagny Tiggert. Dandy Tavern? Whatever, her female characters are hoes anyway. In addition, she expects you to read every word of her 1,008 page book which is really just her manifestos as shouted via radio by John Galt. In short: Atlas shrugged, and I shrug with him. You can't fully trust a book written by an author who can't even spell Anne.

Aside from exercise and my light summer reading, I've been watching a ton of the History Channel and have come to the conclusion that it hates people, and even more than I do!

It shows stuff like Life After People, where it goes through crazy scenarios in which our empty homes are consumed by termites, bears lord over the roads, and of course, a multitude of monuments fall to the ground in a pile of rubble. It's the staple of a genre nowadays, you can't make a movie without tipping the Eiffel Tower or biting off the Statue of Liberty's head. A movie just isn't a movie anymore until a huge preying mantis is clawing away at the White House while battling a killer moth who, coincidentally, uses Big Ben as a nest.

If it's not discussing scenarios about life after you're all dead, it's talking about ways to get rid of you in the first place. The Bible is a great place to start for the History Channel, for it's full of armageddon. There's fire and earthquakes and tribulation all over the place. Not a Christian? Don't worry, the History Channel has other options. A tsunami perhaps, and if you're not a coast-dweller, then an earthquake will finish you off. If none of the above works, there's still the chance that at any given moment a comet will strike and end us all.

The History Channel concedes that none of the above may happen, and in fact, you may live to see another day. So then they want to make sure that you're as paranoid as possible while still alive. I can see the History Channel, angry that not so much as a moon rock has fallen from the sky and no visible signs of bears roaming the highway, saying something like...
"oh, yeah maybe the comet thing didn't happen... looks like we get to live after all! I just wish we didn't have to deal with the aliens... sigh... what's that? You haven't heard of the pending alien invasion? Watch The UFO Files, that will surely convince you. You know, sometimes I wish we were all wiped out at once due to a massive solar flare... then we wouldn't have to deal with the ghost hauntings... WHAT?! Never heard of the ghost hauntings?! Watch This Haunted House, that will teach you a thing or two."

In short, the History Channel's main message is that you may not be dead yet, but you soon will be, and then nature can slowly take over your home. While waiting for the inevitable apocalypse at the hands of God or natural disasters, enjoy being visited by UFOs and ghosts.

I think I've written too much, but that's just all that's on my mind right now.