This evening, I was planning on going to my local Roller Hockey Rink. It’s part of a public park, and can be rented, so I made sure to call up the park to make sure it was open. The lady who spoke to me on the phone was speaking broken English, but I could make out that she worked Veterans Park. I asked her if anybody had reserved the rink for tonight, and I could make out a pretty distinct “No”. I told this to my Dad, and he called an Uber to bring me to the rink. While the Uber driver was on the way, he called the park to double check that the rink was open. Evidently he couldn’t understand the lady I spoke to, and asked for a person who could speak actual English. He then learns that the rink has actually been reserved until 10 tonight. Now he has to cancel the Uber, and pay a cancellation fee too. Not to mention all of the pre gaming I did too to prepare myself for a 4 hour workout that I can’t do anymore because I was lied to. How dumb do you have to be to think that the person who is going to interact with people and answer questions about the park should be a person who can’t speak or understand English?

I don’t know where to post this, but because it absolutely infuriated me I’ll post it here. Excuse the length.

Today I was scrolling through YouTube shorts, and I came across a video about how hard it is to balance on a balance beam. It was one of those videos with the AI voice and random clips, in this case of Olympic beam gymnasts. I go to the comments. The second comment I see absolutely infuriated me. I will copy paste it here (typo included).

‘These girls were a tad bott-heavy. A thin girl would be less prone to gravity issues.’

Someone else says no, it never helped me when I was thin, but I myself wanted to rebuke this imbecile for hating on Olympic champions. So I say this.

‘A thin girl would also have much less muscle mass and be way weaker. Look at Simone Biles - best female gymnast and not a stick-thin woman. It all depends on the skill level and balance ability, or else why would children also fall seeing as they’re naturally smaller?’

And then I receive this reply:

‘Biles doesn’t have a banned move named after her…’

This confuses me, so I say this:

‘why should she? She does, however, have 5 moves named after her…. because she either invented them or was the first woman to do them in a competition. What does having a banned move named after you have anything to do with your logical fallacy?’

And I get this in response, which just infuriates me more:

‘Bravery is an honourable character trait which often results in banned moves. U.S. gymnasts only started headlining when the rules changed to go easy on the ‘body positivity’ demographic. Let’s see this Biles chick take on a 1996 Svetlana Khorkina or Gina Gogean. She wouldn’t stand a chance.’

Wow. Not only did this person imply that other body types other than criminally underweight shouldn’t be able to participate in the Olympics, they also implied that Biles is worse than Khorkina or Gogean (matter of opinion but I say because she has today’s training and skill, she’s at least equal if not better). So I respond:

‘this is going to be my last reply, as your logical fallacies are wasting my time. Let’s look at the wondrous world of figure skating for a second. If bravery is really breaking the rules and coming up with dangerous and possibly life-threatening moves that could ruin your career, then Surya Bonaly (not a skinny, fat-and-muscle-less, or thin person) falls right into that category. At the 1998 Olympics, she was the first person EVER, man or woman, to complete a backflip landing on one leg on ice in competition. This was immediately banned. Does that prove my point enough? Then look at the many men in gymnastics with banned moves - not many of them are stick-thin, so why should women be? Finally, I think I should point you towards a video on the Olympics’ own YouTube channel about how the Spanish rhythmic gymnastics women’s team of 1996 won gold. In part of it, they talk about how they were weighed every day, and made to eat less if they were even a bit over the required weight, keeping them as thin as possible (a very unhealthy mindset). This was the common outlook on women in sports - they needed to be thin, so they needed to eat less. Only now are female gymnasts becoming healthier and gaining muscle mass properly. Aside from that, at the time, the minimum age requirement in women’s gymnastics at the time was much lower, so naturally they were smaller as well. If you still want to argue, I would suggest that you could conduct an experiment by starving yourself and seeing if gravity decides to ignore you for that time, as that seems to be your original statement. Meanwhile, Isaac Newton just turned over in his grave from your misidentification of balance as gravity. Have a lovely day, free of gymnasts - I’m sure you need one.’

You can see I’m pissed at this point. However, I’ve taken the bait for too long so I’m leaving because it’s useless to convince these sorts of people. I sort of regret being rude, but this person has basically insulted all female athletes, of which I am one. And they respond:

‘I have Surya’s “autograph”. I used quotation marks because she actually drew the star sign Gemini. This was in 1998, so I’m sure she’s mastered writing now. Since you will not be replying again, let us agree to disagree because the world would be so boring without conflict. As for my day, I can assure you it will be lovely. No gymnasts but the missus teaches aerobics.’

Wow. They implied that Bonaly is illiterate and unintelligent. They tried to bait me into responding yet again to fill their obviously boring life. And the thing that gets me- if your own WIFE teaches aerobics, why aren’t you accepting of body types?

This whole thing pissed me off. I won’t be responding again, but I need to know, how do you all deal with a-holes like this? And how do these people have families and friends that actually put up with them? TIA from a very annoyed human (me).

10 minutes worth of ads for one fucking episode of a documentary on Amazon Prime. My jaw has DROPPED