A couple of years ago, I was walking through the parking lot at work with my co-worker Rob when I stopped and pointed at a car. “I hate that,” I said. “What?” he asked. I read the offending license plate frame aloud: ” “There’s a difference between cutsie and artistic.” I read it as it looked to me, pronouncing the word as “cut see” instead of what I assumed meant to be “cutesy.” What bothered me the most about it was attitude I heard behind those words. Essentially, I read it as, “You might think you’re being artistic, but I’m a true artist and I know that your stuff is a big step down from what I consider art. And go fuck yourself.” The fact that there was a typo in it frustrated me to no end. “If you’re going to be an asshole and put people down, at least spell all seven words correctly,” I told Rob.
A month or so ago, we interviewed someone for a position in our office. When she left, I said that it was nice to meet her (which I meant). Once the door closed, Rob told me that I actually knew of her before that interview. She used to work at a different office in our same lot, he said, and she had a license plate frame that bothered me. “Not the cutsie one!” “Yep,” he said. “Well shit…I kinda liked her,” I replied.
Fast forward a little more, and she’s now hired and a part of our team. Four of us were walking to pick up some food, and I remembered about her and her car. I couldn’t hold it in (or to cite myself, I “spit my tongue“) and told her out of the blue, “I have a problem with your license plate frame.” “Oh yeah? Why’s that?” she asked. She had a weird tone to her question that made it sound like she’d heard that several times before. “Well, I believe there’s a typo on it,” I said. “I agree,” she said. “Huh?” Then she told me her story. Apparently, she took a photography class in college, and the final project was to have a picture that signified a song. She chose “People Are Strange” by The Doors, and had cut-out faces in and around a picture of raindrops. Some faces were partially obscured, and others were not, and it sounded to me like it really embodied the “faces come out of the rain” line. Her professor disagreed. When she got the project back, it was marked with a C and adorned with a note that said, “There’s a difference between cutsie and artistic.” She and her friends thought it was hilarious that the professor had misspelled a word in her condescending note, so she immortalized it by getting it as a license plate frame.
“Well now I like it a whole bunch more,” I told her. “All this time I thought you were the bitchy one with poor spelling.” She laughed and said that she has to explain it to a lot of people. At least I’m not the only one who’s been fulish.