I try to be nice but sometimes I'm not. Last night I went to a concert with a friend from work. The "band" is called Die Antwoord and they're a South African hip-hop duo but it's really more about performance art. The members are "Ninja" and Yo-landi Visser, pictured below.
Their schtick is that they act super tough and gangster but then say and do highly un-gangster, un-tough things. The hip hop is mediocre but the overall persona is pretty fun. Anyways, it was an interesting crowd and although we weren't the oldest people there, we were in the upper percentiles. I was packed in behind a tall, thin, person with about a two-inch-long afro. This person was jumping around with abandon, and in order to prevent him from spilling my beer, I was holding out a hand or elbow to absorb the shock when he jumped into me. After a few minutes of this, he turned around, revealing himself to be a girl, and said "If you put your hand on me again I'm going to punch you in the face." I just laughed. A few minutes later she started jumping into my friend Mark, and yelled at him when he started jumping right along with her. I then said to her "If it makes you feel any better ma'am, I thought you were a dude." She said, "Oh, nice, nice" and walked away. I felt proud of myself.
I also try to not use ethnic stereotypes for comedic value but sometimes I do. Today we went to Costco. We have this running joke about Costco and it revolves around the fact that usually about half the people in Costco at any given time are Asian. "You know who loves Costco?" I'll say. "Who loves Costco?" Liz will say, making no attempt to hide the fact that she's humoring me. "Asians love Costco," I'll say. Costco can be a pretty big cluster on the weekends, but it was snowing a bit earlier today and I was wondering how that would affect the crowd levels. I wondered out loud whether the weather might have the Asians hiding out in their ramen bunkers. Liz called me a racist. When I saw the parking lot full of Toyotas I knew I was out of luck. For the record, I love Asians. Best behaved kids in all of Costco. Now the Greek guy that smashed Liz's pregnant belly between his cart and ours, that guy sucks. Later, in what can only be described as a Valentine's Day miracle, went to go buy our annual Valentine's Day steaks and found two big juicy prime porterhouses erroneously labeled and priced as choice flank steak. I probably should have notified someone in the meat department about their error, but as I said, I'm a bad, bad man.
