The Fine Art of Being Bitchy

Now I won’t pretend I’m an angel. Y’all know that ain’t true. I’ve said a mean thing or two in my time. I try not to say mean things to a person’s face, unless they are spoiling for a fight, or are 1_Irritated_Mother. For the most part, I prefer to talk smack about a person behind their back. I get my frustration, envy, or rage out and, usually, no one gets hurt. Like when my girlfriend Carol and I were being treated to the extremely snotty attitude of the wife of a celebrity, and as the wife walked away I turned to Carol and said “Well, she’s certainly got one thing going for her that you and I don’t. She’s got cankles.” We both felt better.

It takes years of practice to be properly bitchy. You don’t come to it overnight. It takes years of study to gain a decent vocabulary and fine-tune the ability to put together the right bitchy remark without giving yourself a nosebleed. To pull it off in a face-to-face situation it can take hours of practice to get the right tone of voice or to perfect the subtlest hint of a sneer hidden behind a brilliant and charming smile. If you want to take your anger and frustration out on someone effectively and make them feel small, you need skill. You need to hone your craft.

Lately it seems that every amateur in town thinks they are fit to play in the big leagues; that they can scrapple with the big girls when it comes to being bitchy. I hate to burst their bubbles, but as they say, “Bitches ain’t shit.” These comers seem to think that all it takes is access to the internet and an angry thought. This just isn’t true.

For example, take my friend Alice’s recent scuffle with her fiancé’s ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend went through Alice’s list of Friends on Facebook and sent a crazy gram to every single person on her list. (Word to the wise, check your Facebook privacy settings if you know a whack job who has your scent in their snout.) Now, on the one hand, it was embarrassing enough for Alice to have to apologize to all of her friends and colleagues for their having received the crazy gram; but it was equally humiliating that the tone and content of the crazy gram smacked of a meth habit and an 8th grade education. It would have been an entirely different situation if the writer had bothered to apply the basic rules of grammar, punctuation, spell check, or even picked one language to write in. (This is a point I’d like y’all to note, you can’t flop between text speak, English, and internet slang.) Trust me, it’s less embarrassing to explain to people that you’re being stalked by an intelligent and well spoken sociopath than an illiterate tramp from a trailer park two counties over.

Another case in point is my recent run-in with the fine folks at Scalers Shoes. You may remember that I wrote a review of their product giving my opinion that the product falls somewhere on the useful meter between silly and dangerous. It appears that I upset the staff and/or fans of the product to such a degree that they’ve taken to writing rebuttal posts. Of course, I say “fair play to them.” I had my say, they should have theirs. However, the posts were written in haste, and with an unseasoned attempt at snark. Their tactic was to go on the offensive and start with name calling. It was such a let down for my first virtual blog tussle. As they have obviously never read my writing, little could they anticipate that blog posts dedicated to calling me fat would only serve to crack me up. Know your target people! Make a cursory assessment before you engage them in a battle of words and wits.

If only they knew that I stole their insults and turned them into Facebook status updates:

IAMSURLY seems to be falling into the stereotype of a Mad, Hungry, Fat Woman Shut-in that is trapped in her home and has to live through her computer to get her rocks off.

However, what was truly disappointing about these anti-Surly rants, was that they were chocked full of spelling mistakes, missing punctuation, and full of poorly formed thoughts that were ripped out of the incubator before they had time to fully mature and make a lick of sense. A girl can only dream that when her meagre blog posts spark the villagers to come after her with pitchforks they come prepared with better slurs that “You’re fat!” Clearly, I’ve got my work cut out for me to find some enemies with style.

If you think you’ve got game, bring it. And bring your 12th grade grammar textbook.