F. P. Dorchak

Speculative Fiction (New Weird) Author

True Blood

Bitchy Resting Face

by

Do you know someone with a bitchy face?

So begins the fake PSA that started out as a joke and gathered more than 2 million hits on the comedy site Funny or Die and YouTube. And there was the True Blood actress Anna Paquin who took some heat from a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where she displayed, what has come to be called “Bitchy Resting Face.” She says, and I love this response: “it’s not my responsibility to be everyone’s sunshine.”

Incidentally, Resting Asshole Face (RAF) is the male equivalent to the female’s Bitchy Resting Face (BRF).

I find this whole phenomenon so funny…but understand it. Not only have I witnessed it frequently throughout my life, and even commented on it to my wife, but my wife had also once told me that when I work out at the gym…I look mean. Like I’m gonna kill someone. So, one day, while working out, I did look at myself in the mirror…and, yeah, I did look like that! How funny, I thought, as I laughed to myself. Okay. Well, thing is—from my point of view—when I’m working out, I get very focused. I don’t spend time talking to people in the gym, I’m there for one reason, and one reason only—to work out. Sure, I smile and say “hello” to people along the way, and do even trade a short (key word: SHORT) conversation or two, if it happens, but I’m there to move weight and exercise, not socialize. But that doesn’t mean someone can’t say “hello” to me, or something.

Well, needles to say, since that little epiphany, I’ve actually made an effort to try to “relax” the “angry gym face” (AGF), I’ll label it. Sure, sometimes it’ll get away from me, but I try to reset it. I’m not an angry person. Not in the least. I’m actually quite the annoyingly happy guy you meet out on the street, always greeting “hellos” and smiling to those I meet. I actually have the opposite of Bitchy Resting Face, called Happy Resting Face (HRF). But when I’m in the gym, I blow through my workouts, taking only seconds of rest between sets, making an Olympic event of it all. But, I seem to do that with everything…writing…walks/hikes. Day job work. I seem to plow through most things I take on, like a frigging bulldozer. It’s just how I am, I suppose. When I’m on top of my game, around the house, doing chores, my wife actually has to set bear-sized leg-hold traps to slow me down. And I usually have to step into two of them to get any results.

So, funny as BRF is, I see it. It exists. Just like RAF. But you know, I still do my best to smile and say “hello” when I can to those BRFs and RAFs out there. Especially at work. And I know I’m probably hated for it, but what the hell, it’s who I am and what I do. I have my own AGF, so I do understand all your plights. Just keep smiling on the inside, and maybe… just maybe…that smile will eventually shine through…one day….

Related articles

Zombies v. The Undead

by

Tales from the Crypt (book)
Tales from the Crypt (book) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Okay, there’s this big craze over zombies (you know they’re big when they’re used in public service announcements and have their own “Zombie 5K“), and while I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing—I personally have nothing against zombies, like I do the overworked, beslutted, and “reimagined” vampire craze—I feel I need to make a differentiation, here, between “zombies” and…the “undead.”

Really, you ask?

Yes. There is a difference. At least to me, and I’m sure some will take opposition to it, but I assure you, I am only sticking to the “facts” as they prove my argument.

Cause, I am a fan of…The Great Undead.

You see, zombies…are alive…but are rendered monster-like through some sort of introduced agent, like a really really bad flu, a government-generated virus, voo doo whoop-de-doo, or cubicle-office work. Of course, many ignore the original zombie, as characterized in, say, the 1932 movie, White Zombie, where there is an Evil VooDoo Master pulling the puppet strings (there are other origins, see this link). I find that link interestingly tagged with “(fictional),” though know of the evils of tetrodotoxin and and The Serpent and the Rainbow discussion of “zombies.” Anyway, today’s versions are independent and hungry. They hunger for flesh, especially the much-prized delicacy of brains.

Zombies can be stopped: a simple penetration of their brains, brings their reign of horror to a quick, ignoble, end.

Now, the “undead,” on the other hand, are supernaturally reawakened corpses that crawl out from their graves and stumble around with no particular need for flesh, brains, or anything else, short of scaring and killing. Real spooky stuff. The undead can’t really be stopped (not in and of themselves, anyway)…unless you terminate whatever it is that reanimated them, or they completed their deed. You may decapitate them, but they just keep on coming. Incinerating them would take them out, I suppose, because of the near-total destruction, but still, I wonder….

And they don’t eat anything.

You see, the dead can’t eat.

Just like real vampires (and I prefer “vampyre” but these are not real vampyres…) have no frigging SEX DRIVE. No EMOTION.

Why?

BECAUSE THEY’RE DEAD.

Yes, dead, people. Did that fact escape everybody but me?

How can dead things have any kind of appetite, and how can they have sex? How can they enter into frigging relationships and pine over humans?!

Oh, “magic,” you say, because, well, how can the dead come back to life, anyway? That’s magic, too!, you cry. It is!

It’s fake magic.

Yesss, there I said it. Fake. Magic. Call me old school on the matter, but the whole “Twilight” thing rolls off my back like blood off an undead duck’s coat. I just can’t get into the displaced Human drives and appetites on the undead and their strikingly good looks. I’m constantly distracted thinking, strike a pose!

Twilight and True Blood “vampires” are just people with fangs.

Where’s the scary in that?

The spooky?

From what I’ve seen, “those kinds” of “vampires (which are undead—did I mention that?) are there to emote, and exhibit graphic violence and sex. Which we get where…?

Anyone?

We get that in any ShowTime or HBO show.

Again (important digressive point, here): today’s vampires are just people with fangs.

Okay, reanimating my thrust, here, so…zombies. While I am a huge Night of the Living Dead fan, I have, however, been more into the rising-from-the-grave-undead-by-supernatural-means more (I’ve always been into the supernatural, not the gore, but the etherial, the elemental, that which comes from beyond)…like Tales From The Crypt creepy, and any mummy movie (a fan of the Karloff versions as well as the Fraser versions). That’s where my favorites, uh, lie (even if “lay” is the proper word, not gonna use it with the undead; I’m not interested in “laying” any undead…).

So, I just wanted to clear this little distinction up. You know, to give the undead their due.

Man, I feel so much better now. Been wanting to do that for years. I can now crawl back into my own grave….

Related articles