What is there to say about Gilbert that hasn’t already been said? He’s a jerk. He’s a lowlife. He's a pathetic excuse for, uh, whatever kind of spikey woodland critter he is. I’m pretty sure that you must be a hedgehog because you are adorable, and I have to assume that Gilbert is like idk a ¿porcupine? or something because he is absolutely hideous. And obviously looks aren't everything so it's totally okay that he's not in your league physically. Or at least it would be okay if he was funny or smart or interesting or had any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Unfortunately, as I hope to prove in this letter, that is not the case. I have read about the events that transpired over Valentine's Day in Diane de Groat's classic, Roses Are Pink, Your Feet Really Stink, and I have come to the conclusion that Gilbert cannot be trusted with your heart.
As is customary in Elementary school, your teacher Mrs. Byrd (heh, she’s a bird) assigned all y'all to write out regular (i.e. nice) Valentines for each of your little schoolmates. In what seems to be a pattern of behavior for him, Gilbert put in zero percent effort and wrote a bunch of garbage poems for the other kids in class.
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| Just, not good. |
To be fair, he did work a little harder on his poem for you (which I'm sorry to say was still bad). I'm sure you recall it fondly though because you're always coming up with excuses for him. I understand that impulse and I totally get that sometimes it just feels good to be wanted. I’m telling you though, you really should not be settling for this dude. In fact, you should maybe quit reading this letter altogether and instead read this hilarious GQ piece from 2012 about how women all want to get with nerds (or at least we did at the time) because a large enough cohort of us naturally assume that someone who has been treated poorly in the past would treat us well. However, it actually warned that men who were unpopular in high school are still mad about it and will totally use you to enact their psychosexual revenge fantasies.
Just something you might want to think about.
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I was actually surprised by how much he laid bare his feelings in that poem for you. I feel like admitting that you “like” someone in elementary school is a pretty big deal, right? So at that point, I was kind of thinking that the plot of the book was perhaps going to be about Gilbert’s regret over confessing his undying like for you and that maybe he would spend the holiday trying to steal the valentine back before you had the chance to read it. You know, a caper. Maybe he’d even get a team together, Ocean’s 11 style!
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| I care not for Valentine’s and all its traditions, / What I really need is an expert in munitions. |
No such luck, though.
So, Gilbert finished writing his subpar valentines for everyone in class except his friends Lewis and Margaret, both of whom he felt had slighted him. Lewis apparently tweaked Gilbert's nose once and I guess Margaret made fun of his glasses at some point. And look, I'm not saying it was okay for her to make fun of his glasses, but I do find it understandable. Can’t you just picture them hanging off his (probably sweaty) nose?
I get that Gilbert his supposed to be like seven, but he has distinct shades of moody dudes I went to high school with back in 2005. Specifically the kind who still wore wire-rim glasses after they had stopped being cool but before they had started being cool again. Do you get what I’m saying?
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| Diane de Groat does. Note that this particular picture is taken from the other Gilbert book I own (Jingle Bells, Homework Smells) in which Gilbert blames everyone else for the fact that he didn’t do his homework. It’s also worth nothing that in that book Lewis helped Gilbert complete his homework assignment at the last minute (and we’re about to get to this, but Gilbert apparently chose to repay Lewis by bullying him through poetry a few months later). |
But anyway, Lewis shouldn’t have tweaked his nose and it wasn’t and isn’t cool of Margaret and me to make fun of Gilbert’s glasses. But in my opinion, Gilbert should have taken this up with them at the time. Or, if that didn’t feel like an option, he could have spoken to a trusted adult. Instead, he chose to let his anger fester inside him until he lashed out at his classmates in a way that was not at all proportional.
He ended up writing two mean valentine poems to Lewis and Margaret and then, in a plan almost as evil as it was stupid (and oh was it stupid), he signed Lewis’s card with Margaret’s name and Margaret’s card with Lewis’s. So not only is Gilbert callous and unfeeling, he’s also a moron.
On the 14th, Gilbert received a bunch of nice valentines from everyone because of how that was the assignment. Lewis and Margaret didn’t fall over themselves pretending to be best friends with Gilbert but their cards were both perfectly cordial. It's a great example of what Gilbert could have done (were he not a psychopath)
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| Roses are red, you tweaked my nose, / But hey it’s cool, we can still be bros. |
The nice cards made him feel good about himself and he looked over at Lewis and Margaret who had both received their horrible cards, feeling no remorse. Lewis and Margaret stuck their tongues out at eachother and their newfound fued started to escalate. Margaret pushed Lewis and Lewis called her a “bad name” (so draw your own conclusions about what that was). Mrs. Byrd was appalled to see students fighting on Valentine’s Day of ALL DAYS and assigned everyone to work on workbooks.
The book then goes on to say that “Everyone was mad at Lewis and Margaret. Even Gilbert [emphasis added].” And okay, in this picture Gilbert does look more ashamed than mad, but I'm suddenly a STRICT TEXTUALIST of Gilbert books and the text plainly states that he was mad. (You know, at them. Over what he did.)
Lewis and Margaret took the opportunity to do some detective work because they're SMART, unlike some people. It did not take them long to figure out what happened. Gilbert was rejected by the group at lunch and recess and it was only then that he finally felt sorry for what he had done.
You get why that's a problem, right, Patty? And then you yourself facilitated a hasty reconciliation between Gilbert, Margaret, and Lewis after recess by getting them to apologize to him which I can only assume they did out of fear of reprisal. They decided to make amends because of how it’s often better to just make someone like Gilbert happy than to fight about it. I actually have a long story to tell that’s tangentially related to this, hold on.
One time, back in my mall days, this weirdo dude got his beard colored and trimmed at my salon. He said a bunch of uncomfortable things to the stylist during his appointment about how she had babies in heaven waiting for her to be their mother, aaaand also he spent a full 40 minutes in the bathroom. He was big guy. Tall, and round in every dimension. He was also wearing a bright yellow shirt so there were some real pac-man vibes.
As far as I know, he liked his beard fine when he left. He returned a week later to complain about the way it was trimmed. And by “complain” I mean scream. As in, he walked into the salon and immediately started screaming at us. We tried to figure out what the problem was and he yell-informed us that usually when people trim his beard they trim it in a certain special way that totally hides his double chin.
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| That’s a real thing but it was, shall we say, not in the cards for this particular client. |
We're totally happy to do our best to fix things when someone doesn’t like their hair. My coworkers were trying to figure out what he wanted us to do but he just kept shouting. Like, arms flailing, panting, the whole thing. Our boss was at lunch so someone called her and asked if she could come deal with an angry client. As soon as she came back he was perfectly reasonable and she trimmed his beard to "hide" his double chin and he was out the door.
A week later he came back AGAIN, this time screaming about how the color in his beard was shoddy because you could see grey. At the roots.
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| AHHHHH! |
I looked around and realized that I would have to be the one to deal with it since I was the most senior employee there at the time, much like how I sometimes still look around for Iggy's mother. He was yelling about his roots but also about how he'd wasted so much money taking the bus to come back all the time to complain at us. I did my best to calmly explain that hair would generally grow about a quarter inch in a two week period so it would make sense to start to see a little grey at the roots.
It was at that point that he screamed louder than I had heretofore heard him scream (and into my face), "MY HAIR DOESN'T GROW (panting) THAT (panting) FAAAST!"
It was like that part in Shrek when he roars at the angry mob and they get covered in spit and food particles. Even though I have already inserted several lame and out-of-date gifs I will not be inserting one of that particular moment here because of how it was absolutely disgusting and I always closed my eyes during that part.
So I was standing here with this panting/worked-up/angry dude and the first thing I thought to myself was, Does he have a gun? Obviously. But the second thing I thought to myself was something to the effect of, I, Kitty Kane, am obviously not doing his hair. I also cannot in good conscience ask anyone else here to do his hair. And clearly he's just going to keep coming back every week to yell about this. Soooo yeeeah, I’m just gonna give him a refund and tell him he can’t come back.
Now, Regis had a whole refund policy and corporate hoops to jump through before I could do that since they didn’t want people handing out refunds willy-nilly to every scammy person at the mall. I decided it was worth it to just pay him with my own money. A bribe, essentially.
"Okay, I don't think we're going to be able to make you happy. How's about we just give you a refund for the service and you can go get it done somewhere else?"
He calmed down and agreed. As I was handing him the bribe I notified him that we would not be doing his hair ever again. He snorted and agreed to that too because of how we were idiots who didn't know how to hide a double chin slash stop his hair from growing.
This story actually isn't over yet. He came back to the salon one more time (six months later). I immediately rushed to the front when I saw him before anyone who didn't know better accidentally started doing his hair. I figured it would be best for him to interact with me since I was the one who had originally told him to GTFO.
I was like, “Uhhh how can I help you?”
And he was like, “Can I get a haircut?"
(Normal so far)
And then my voice got higher than it ever had in my life and I said, “Um, I don’t know if you recall, but we had some issues last time you were here. So, I don’t think we'll be able to make you happy."
Then he was like, “You can try,"
“Uh okay well, no one here is willing do your hair."
He left and seemed fine about it but then an hour later he stood in front of the salon and screamed, “You won't even try, LOSERS!"
Which is a pretty good point. You are only a loser if you never try.
Also another coworker of mine once saw that guy at the food court with like a mountain of Chinese food piled on his tray. We’re talking like 10x the customary amount, which tells me he just kept yelling at the people at the Chinese food place to keep giving him more food until they decided it wasn’t worth it to fight him on it. Give him all the Chinese food. Refund his purchase. Do whatever it takes to get him to go away. Anyway, THAT'S why Lewis and Margaret apologized first even though attempting to frame the two of them in an effort to get them to beat each other up was like way worse than anything they had done.
Gilbert made some apology cards and they all went back to being friends. So, what have we learned from this, Patty? I for one learned that Gilbert fixates on minuscule slights and instead of communicating his frustrations just lets things fester until he can seek his horrible revenge. Also it seems like he felt zero remorse for his actions (until it effected him). Oh and he’s not exactly the sharpest porcupine in the forest. That is, if he’s a porcupine, which I’m starting to doubt actually.
Once again (and I really cannot stress this enough), stay away. Cut him off. Do not allow your life to get any more tangled up with his. He will enact his psychosexual revenge fantasies on you for sure. I really think he might be dangerous. Like, his classmates might want to double check that Gilbert’s dad keeps his guns in a safe. I could also totally see him going full serial killer and spending the next twenty years periodically murdering women who happen to look like you. And okay he is like eight so while I may not have smoking gun serial killer evidence yet, it is MORE than apparent that he is not boyfriend material.
In conclusion, Gilbert is just the worst and this Valentine’s Day debacle proves it. Maybe I’ll check out more of these books from the library to pad my case though.
Yours truly,
Kitty
P.S. I just googled it and apparently Gilbert is an opossum. I, uh, don’t know animals.
