The five teams I hate most in the AFC are the Colts, Chargers, Steelers, Jets, and Ravens.
So you can imagine how much I’ve enjoyed these playoffs. First, the Patriots embarrass themselves against the trash-talking Ravens. Then, I was treated to Ravens vs. Colts, Chargers vs. Jets, and Jets vs. Colts. It’s been like watching scrimmages of Yankee teammates vs. other Yankee teammates.
You know it’s bad when the only things you’re rooting for in a game are injuries, a close battle so at least the losing team will feel crushed afterwards, and earthquakes to hit the stadium. Are cracks about earthquakes distasteful? Yes. Are they particularly distasteful at this current moment? Yes. But that’s the mood these playoffs have me in. A distasteful mood. After watching three hours of Rex Ryan’s loathsome jowls battle Peyton Manning’s doofy loser face, being offensive sounds great.
To top that off, I have a cold. And a cough. One of those coughs where if you laugh too hard or take too deep a breath you will fall into a painful coughing fit that accomplishes nothing except upsetting everyone around you. And not dry coughs. Wretched, wet coughs. Sexy, huh?
But this is why having a blog is useful. When you’re feeling great about life, you can write about it. When you’re perplexed, you can write about it. And when you’re feeling pissy and in a mood to criticize a ton of shit—there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here.
So let’s get on with it. 28 things that annoy me:
1) “God bless you!” as a response to sneezing. First of all, if I’m God, the last person I feel like blessing is the gross sneezing guy. Secondly, when I’m sneezing, I’m not in a proud moment. I’m unhappy that I’m in public. And what I definitely don’t want in that moment is human interaction. But that’s what “God bless you” is—it is someone, often a stranger, forcing you to interact with them while you sneeze. It’s a reply to your sneeze, as if a) your sneeze were a question and b) you were directing that question toward that person.
It’s one thing if you sneeze once. Then the inevitable “bless you” happens, and I can throw them a “thank you” and it’s over. But I rarely sneeze just once. I sneeze twice. Or three times. Or five times. So by the fourth sneeze, they’re not just saying “bless you” anymore—they’re saying “bless you.” Maybe even “bless you, are you alright?” So now there I am, about to sneeze for the fifth time, despising myself and despising life, looking filthy and wishing to god that I was not in public—and this person is forcing me to interact with them. I have to throw in “thank you”s between every sneeze, and then when they get to the animated “bless you” stage, I have to get into this little effing song and dance with them and be like, “Yeah, this is nuts, right? I don’t know what came over me haha.” Leave sneezing people alone.
2) That the best they managed to come up with to call a piano player is a “pianist.” I first learned of this word when I was about six and I was like, “Wait, really?” How painless is it for someone to say they’re a guitarist or a violinist or a drummer? But piano players are forced to refer to themselves as pianists for their whole lives. It’s not a cool word. Like, girls like it when guys can play the piano, but does any girl want to say she’s dating a pianist? I sure don’t. Couldn’t we have at least decided to stress the second syllable and make it a pianist? It’s a piano. So why would I be a pianist. I go to great lengths to avoid saying this word. I’ve settled on using the lame-sounding “piano-player” (how much cooler is a drummer than a drum-player?).
3) Wedding gifts. So let me get this straight—the deal is, I’ll buy a plane ticket to the wedding destination, I’ll rent a tux (or get my shitty tux cleaned), I’ll dedicate a weekend of my time, I’ll pay for a hotel and a rental car, all to come celebrate you finding a girl who’s not a d-bag, and in return—I owe you a gift? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I set up a gift registry and send the bride and groom the link? Now for the wedding of a good friend, this feels okay—you’re emotionally onboard and genuinely excited about the marriage (hopefully). So fine, let’s top things off with the high-end kitchen knives. But for weddings I’m already less-than-enthusiastic about attending, the gift seems a bit much.
4) Websites that won’t let you go back to the previous page. You know these? You get to the website, decide to make a u-turn, but when you press back it just refreshes the page and keeps you there. These sites piss me off. What’s their thought process? That I’ll be like, “Well, I guess I have to stay here now and do a bunch of page clicks and buy a bunch of their products and add this page to my favorites and forward it to a bunch of my friends—because they’ve left me with no other option”?
5) When the protruding tissue falls back down into the box and it’s really hard to get it back out and in the process of getting it back out you stretch out the plastic so that now all the tissues are gonna keep falling in. I’ve actually had meltdowns because of this before. Like, I’ll need a tissue fairly urgently, but there's not one sticking out and when I reach in I’ll get so frustrated that I’ll end up just grabbing a stack of like 15 tissues and pulling it out. And then I have to leave the stack sitting on top of the box, which is annoying. I’m also annoyed that I just typed a paragraph on this topic. This topic is not remotely worthy of a paragraph of writing.
6) Jeans with button flies. Jeans with button flies are for d-bags. It’s just another example of people dealing with idiotic inconvenience in the name of fashion. A zipper fly is 100%, objectively, easier and more practical, so it's a fact that people with button fly jeans at some point decided to inconvenience themselves every day so that their fly will be cool. Christ. No one even sees the fly. Unless you’re hooking up with someone. So is that it? Are these dudes like, “I’m gonna go with the button fly, and deal with that every day, but when I’m hooking up with a girl, she’ll appreciate that I have a fashionable fly.” Incidentally, I own several pairs of jeans with button flies. But I’m pretty sure none of them were bought by me—most of my jeans were originally “borrowed” from a friend.
7) People who don’t “reply to all” in emails when they should. This happens all the time. Is this 1997? Have people not grasped that when you email multiple people, you’re doing so because you want them all included in the conversation?
Yes, I’m being really bitchy right now. I realize that.
8) Zombie movies. Like vampire movies, zombie movies should go away forever. Zombies are incredibly uncompelling. And they’re filthy to look at. Look at this photo:
Everything about this photo is unbelievably annoying. And every time I’m sitting in a zombie movie, I’m like, “I haven’t been a nine-year-old boy in a lot of years—why am watching a movie for nine-year-old boys?” A couple years ago, I went to that hideous double-feature Grindhouse and the first two hours was a zombie movie that was the exact kind of movie that d-bags love to love. At the end I told the people I was with that I despised it and they were all mean to me.
9) When you leave a long message for someone and they call you back before listening to the message. My natural urge is to tell them to hang up, listen to the message, and then call me back so I don’t have to repeat it all again. But this rarely goes over well. They’re usually like, “Whatever we’re here now just tell me.” This is only really annoying when I was especially proud of the message I left and thought it was pretty clever, and know that now they’re never gonna listen to it.
10a) When I’m watching TV on an airplane and something interesting or important is happening on the TV and the captain comes on over the loud-speaker and talks for longer than he needs to. First of all, airplane captains have a knack for coming on to say something (which temporarily replaces the TV audio) right at the worst moment. Secondly, they talk incredibly slowly, with these obnoxiously long pauses. Thirdly, sometimes they decide they really like the audio spotlight, and go on and on. Like:
“Good afternoon, this is the captain speaking…...we’re pleased to have you all with us today……..in just a few moments we’ll be reaching cruising altitude of 35,000 feet………………..at that point we’ll be passing over the east part of the country first………..then we’ll be crossing over Kansas……….then we’ll be moving through the center of the country…….at that point we’ll progress over the Rocky Mountains………..and finish up by crossing over the western part of the country……….so please sit back and enjoy the flight…we’re happy to have you with us today…......as we make our way to Los Angeles……………where the weather is………good……….your flight attendants will be passing through the aisles shortly with the food and beverage service……..at that point you’ll be able to select a food and a beverage………….thank you.”
Meanwhile, a brawl broke out in the baseball game, breaking news was announced on CNN about some new political scandal, the narrator on Animal Planet explained how the gopher stores its food during the cold months, four hilarious things happened on Family guy, William Wallace was beheaded, and Rachel Ray explained her secret for keeping the guacamole looking fresh and green for days—and I missed it all.
10b) When the TVs are silenced again toward the end of the flight for six minutes while the flight attendant reads off every connecting flight’s gate. This nightmare should take place under only one circumstance—when there is a power outage in the arrival airport and all the screens which display arrival/departure information are out of service. Why would they ever do this when all of the connecting info is displayed clearly as soon as you exit the aircraft? And of course, they wait until I’m at my most riveted with the TV to launch into this.
11) People who overuse the concept of “gross.” I was with a friend the other day and we stopped by a street stand and I bought a package of Strawberry M&Ms. They were chocolate, but with a strawberry tang to them. My friend decided to tell me that she thought that buying Strawberry M&Ms was “gross.” Really? How about Strawberry M&Ms that had been infested and had maggots living in them? That would constitute gross. Just because it was an unusual purchase and a bit odd perhaps to mix a fruit flavor with chocolate doesn’t warrant the word “gross” entering into the discussion. And yes, this is a sensitive topic because I regularly find myself happily eating things that appall other people.
Other examples of things that might not taste normal or good to someone but that are often (unreasonably) deemed to be “gross” are: ham and pineapple pizza, taco salad, lower-end coffee (like Folgers or something), whole milk, hot pockets, kale, beef jerky, fruit or vanilla-flavored toothpaste, and weird flavored Jelly Belly beans (like buttered popcorn).
12) When my Apple products sulk when I let them run out of batteries. You know I love Apple products deeply and dearly. But even Apple gets on my nerves from time to time. When my laptop or iPhone gets down to 0% battery, it goes black. Fine. Naturally. But then I plug it in, and it should start working again, right? Because I gave it power, right? But no—if I get the plug in at 1% I’m fine, but when either of these devices hits 0%, they punish me by sulking for sometimes as long as 15 minutes before they start working again. They’ll play dead for a probationary period of time to make me think about what I did. And I have to get all effeminate and goofy and weak and make them laugh and then they’re back to normal. Oh wait, that’s with girls. But it’s basically the same thing happening here. It’s weird, too, because this never happened with my other Mac laptops, just this newest version.
On a glorious note, on Wednesday Apple is unveiling its much-anticipated (by nerds, at least) tablet computer. I’m not even sure what a tablet computer is, but I’ll be glued to the keynote as if it’s the moon landing.
13) The disproportionate amount of times black cats cross my path. I’m not superstitious. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find it a little irritating when a black cat crosses my path like a dick. It’s the world’s way of giving you the middle finger. And fine—it happens to everyone. But what really annoys me is the sheer amount that this happens to me. I think it happened four times in the last week. By the fourth time I was openly like, “Oh COME ON,” and people looked at me.
One question—if I run past the cat by cutting in front of him so that I never end up actually crossing over its path, does that take away any bad shit that would have resulted? Oh, and how about if the cat walks in front of where I’m about to walk but then makes a u-turn and walks back? Does he undo the path? These questions are actually really important since this shit happens to me so much.
14) When I’m reminded about frequent flyer miles that I’ve earned and have no idea how to cash. Frequent flyer miles and reward programs are just one of those things that I don’t understand and find incredibly icky. I do my best to pretend that they don’t exist, but then I get these upsetting emails telling me that I have all these miles that are going to expire. Clearly the rational thing to do is figure out how to cash them and get a free flight. Sounds simple. But not for me—I just can’t bring myself to learn how they work. The process of understanding what frequent flyer miles are and how they’re earned and where mine are if I wanted to find them and how I would access them, let alone redeem them for something of value—is so immensely complex and high-level that I prefer to turn my head the other way. I archive the email and quickly forget about it.
But inevitably another one comes. And reminds me about this intangible, esoteric “worth” that is supposedly mine somewhere, and it really upsets me. There are only two times I’ve braved these dark waters—JetBlue’s True Blue rewards program, which itself was deeply icky to me at first but that I eventually learned because JetBlue is actually a well-run company that made it somewhat un-icky, and I figured out how to redeem my “World Points” rewards that I get from using my credit card. I figured this out only once and received cash (1% of what I had spent)—but I don’t really remember how I did it and I might not have the courage to redeem my World Points again in the future.
15) This whole “nom nom nom” thing that is somehow connected to animals or people eating. I don’t get it, but it’s popping up a lot nowadays. I really wish it would go away. It’s not funny and intensely irritating.
16) When I ask the barber not to cut the sides of my head too short because then I'll have a dumb skinny head for the next month and he cuts the sides of my head too short anyway and leaves me with a dumb skinny head for the next month. This isn’t really a minor thing. It’s my head. For the next month. Supercuts used to do this to me constantly, but I didn’t expect it from this barbershop. But indeed, I have had a dumb-looking skinny head for the last two weeks and I’m at least a week away from regaining normal human-head proportions.
17) When Asian delivery restaurants refuse to give me chopsticks because I’m American even though I ask for them. I realize that only d-bag Americans insist on eating Asian food with chopsticks. I’m not defending myself—it’s a huge d-bag move. But whatever—I enjoy using chopsticks and Asian food just tastes worse to me with a fork. In any case, this was never a problem before I came to New York.
18) Arrogant bars. Arrogant bars completely infuriate me. And New York’s got a lot of them. A New York specialty is the bar with no sign or anything on the outside. Nothing is more arrogant than not posting any sign on the wall or door outside of a bar so you have to ask where the place is if you’ve never been there before. The same goes for bars that artificially create a line even though it’s empty inside.
Of course, bouncers are the worst. At least 88% of the times in my life that I’ve desperately wanted to punch someone in the face, it’s been a bouncer that was a huge dick to me or a friend of mine for no good reason. Bouncers are dicks for three reasons: 1) they’re often just dickish people, 2) they’re on a power trip, and 3) they’re not accountable for their actions because a bar’s popularity isn’t tied to its level of customer service (if anything, it’s a reverse correlation). If a restaurant hostess is rude to you, you could make a fuss to the manager and they’d be in some shit. So it doesn’t happen. There’s the natural Capitalist competiveness to keep everyone polite to customers. Not so in a bar—because a bar is all about being “cool” and the coolness is tied completely to its desirability as a hotspot and to the quality of the crowd inside. Once a bar has that going, rudeness just enhances its standing as a place people are dying to get into every night. Just a little taste of what every consumer-business interaction must have been like in Soviet Russia.
(For further tastes of Soviet life, head to the DMV, post office, or traffic court.)
19) When you spend a half hour picking the exact flight you want on Kayak and then click on it and it takes you to Orbitz or Expedia where you see the message, “The flight you requested is no longer available.” This happens a lot, especially with international flights. It’s unbelievably demoralizing. You thought so hard about the exact times of the flight and you found peace with the cost, and then it turns out that Kayak’s database wasn’t updated. When I booked my Brazil flight this happened again and again and I kept clawing for inner peace with each new, increased, ticket price just to get the message again. Further, why are international flights so effing expensive?
20) Professional athlete interviews.
You know, we’re just focusing on the game at hand and everyone’s trying to do their piece. I give the coaches all the credit in the world for keeping us so prepared every week. We’re just trying to go out there and give it everything we have, and just take it one game at a time.
Could anything possibly be more boring than interviews with pro athletes? Their publicists have terrified all of them into saying nothing of any substance whatsoever in any interview. I can’t sit through them anymore. I’d love to give all of them the Liar, Liar disease:
You know, I was completely terrified of choking since I’ve been a head case on and off over the years. But I’m really relieved right now that I came through. The team lost, but I’m in a great mood because I didn’t choke this time. The thing that’s on my mind most is what my agent said about finishing the year with a sub-4.00 ERA. He said if I can do that he thinks he can get me $40 million over five years as a free agent this offseason. $40 million! Think how hedonistic I can be with that much money! And hopefully I can get signed by the Braves or Angels or someone. Anything to get me the hell out of Minnesota. I have a ton of disdain for these fans and the chicks are way hotter in other cities.
21) When people ask me what kind of music I like. This is as silly a question as, “What kind of movies do you like?” or “What kind of food do you like?” Sure, there are favorite bands, but who likes just one or two genres? I can come up with an answer to the question if I need to—but the truth is that my 30 favorite things to listen to probably fall into 10 different genres. Likewise, I’m sure you could answer the movie or food questions, but they would be annoying questions, right? I don’t see the music question as any more reasonable a thing to ask.
22) When women wear deep red lipstick.
Who decided this was attractive? It’s not attractive at all. She looks like the joker. You know what it is? It’s icky. The only people who should wear deep red lipstick are mean, icky, elderly substitute teachers.
Now, I’ll admit that I may be partially swayed by the fact that Mrs. Fox, the meanest, ickiest, elderliest substitute teacher ever from my elementary school years wore deep red lipstick. Mrs. Fox may have bordered on abusive. It’s unclear.
23) Gustavo.
24) Felipe.
25) When people call espresso “expresso.”
26) When people hate famous people only because they hate their fan bases. Dave Matthews is a classic example. Dave Matthews music is pretty fantastic, right? I haven’t heard much since the first few big albums, but that stuff was pretty great, right? Like, if you were at a small music venue, and this unknown band got up there and played Ants Marching, Jimi Thing, Crush, The Best of What’s Around, etc., wouldn’t you be pretty blown away?
And yet, so many people hate the Dave Matthews Band. Why? Because they hate the fans and the incredibly annoying culture surrounding the band. But can’t we separate that annoyance from the music itself? Phish is like this too. Annoying culture—excellent music. This extends to other areas too. Like sports. When Cal Ripkin started being talked about like he was Martin Luther King after his streak and when he got selected for the All-Star game when he was batting .220 towards the end of his career, a lot of people started to hate him. But that was misplaced hatred—it was all the annoying commentators and fans that were to be hated. All Cal Ripkin did was have a ridiculously impressive streak and a great career. What did he do wrong?
27) When I tag a photo of myself and one other person in Facebook and the other person untags him or herself. Hurtful.
28) When I go to great lengths to see Avatar not only in 3D, but in the 3D IMAX theater, despite how hard it was to get tickets, and the “IMAX” isn’t a rad dome screen but rather just a normal screen that’s a little curved. This annoyed me, but mainly it was an excuse to express my opinions on the movie.
I thought it was very, very good. Look—I have seen so many terrible movies in this genre (Transformers II was a horrific life experience, for example), and Avatar really succeeded. Was the plot super original? Definitely not. In fact, it was one of the most predictable plots I can remember. Ten minutes in I could have basically laid out the whole thing just as it happened. But it didn’t need an original plot—it was a classic plot (basically Pocahontas), but with the rad spin of being in the future on a different planet, and the depiction of the planet and life there was simply genius. Both in its concepts and in the spectacular visual presentation. I was just sitting there in the theater loving it. Not bored at all—which says a lot given my thoughts on the plot’s predictability.
When I first saw the previews I had a bit of an uncanny valley repulsion to the appearance of the characters—but this was gone once I saw the actual movie.
Then there’s the whole fact that it was blatant propaganda. This didn’t bother me for one reason only—if there’s any liberal propaganda that doesn’t annoy me, it’s anti-imperialism propaganda. There aren’t two sides to the imperialism story—imperialism in the brutal genocidal fashion in which it is traditionally carried out, is pure evil. So Hitler mass-murdered to exterminate a race and imperialists mass-murdered for economic and political gain-- are they that much better?
Some critics saw the movie as anti-American or anti-Iraq War—but I really saw the major message as anti-imperialism, which applies to many countries at many points in history.
Not a masterpiece, and it of course had its irritating moments, but for a mega-budget January blockbuster, it was a homerun.
Two other times I was in a pissy mood:
33 things that annoy me
69 things that annoy me
So you can imagine how much I’ve enjoyed these playoffs. First, the Patriots embarrass themselves against the trash-talking Ravens. Then, I was treated to Ravens vs. Colts, Chargers vs. Jets, and Jets vs. Colts. It’s been like watching scrimmages of Yankee teammates vs. other Yankee teammates.
You know it’s bad when the only things you’re rooting for in a game are injuries, a close battle so at least the losing team will feel crushed afterwards, and earthquakes to hit the stadium. Are cracks about earthquakes distasteful? Yes. Are they particularly distasteful at this current moment? Yes. But that’s the mood these playoffs have me in. A distasteful mood. After watching three hours of Rex Ryan’s loathsome jowls battle Peyton Manning’s doofy loser face, being offensive sounds great.
To top that off, I have a cold. And a cough. One of those coughs where if you laugh too hard or take too deep a breath you will fall into a painful coughing fit that accomplishes nothing except upsetting everyone around you. And not dry coughs. Wretched, wet coughs. Sexy, huh?
But this is why having a blog is useful. When you’re feeling great about life, you can write about it. When you’re perplexed, you can write about it. And when you’re feeling pissy and in a mood to criticize a ton of shit—there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here.
So let’s get on with it. 28 things that annoy me:
1) “God bless you!” as a response to sneezing. First of all, if I’m God, the last person I feel like blessing is the gross sneezing guy. Secondly, when I’m sneezing, I’m not in a proud moment. I’m unhappy that I’m in public. And what I definitely don’t want in that moment is human interaction. But that’s what “God bless you” is—it is someone, often a stranger, forcing you to interact with them while you sneeze. It’s a reply to your sneeze, as if a) your sneeze were a question and b) you were directing that question toward that person.
It’s one thing if you sneeze once. Then the inevitable “bless you” happens, and I can throw them a “thank you” and it’s over. But I rarely sneeze just once. I sneeze twice. Or three times. Or five times. So by the fourth sneeze, they’re not just saying “bless you” anymore—they’re saying “bless you.” Maybe even “bless you, are you alright?” So now there I am, about to sneeze for the fifth time, despising myself and despising life, looking filthy and wishing to god that I was not in public—and this person is forcing me to interact with them. I have to throw in “thank you”s between every sneeze, and then when they get to the animated “bless you” stage, I have to get into this little effing song and dance with them and be like, “Yeah, this is nuts, right? I don’t know what came over me haha.” Leave sneezing people alone.
2) That the best they managed to come up with to call a piano player is a “pianist.” I first learned of this word when I was about six and I was like, “Wait, really?” How painless is it for someone to say they’re a guitarist or a violinist or a drummer? But piano players are forced to refer to themselves as pianists for their whole lives. It’s not a cool word. Like, girls like it when guys can play the piano, but does any girl want to say she’s dating a pianist? I sure don’t. Couldn’t we have at least decided to stress the second syllable and make it a pianist? It’s a piano. So why would I be a pianist. I go to great lengths to avoid saying this word. I’ve settled on using the lame-sounding “piano-player” (how much cooler is a drummer than a drum-player?).
3) Wedding gifts. So let me get this straight—the deal is, I’ll buy a plane ticket to the wedding destination, I’ll rent a tux (or get my shitty tux cleaned), I’ll dedicate a weekend of my time, I’ll pay for a hotel and a rental car, all to come celebrate you finding a girl who’s not a d-bag, and in return—I owe you a gift? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I set up a gift registry and send the bride and groom the link? Now for the wedding of a good friend, this feels okay—you’re emotionally onboard and genuinely excited about the marriage (hopefully). So fine, let’s top things off with the high-end kitchen knives. But for weddings I’m already less-than-enthusiastic about attending, the gift seems a bit much.
4) Websites that won’t let you go back to the previous page. You know these? You get to the website, decide to make a u-turn, but when you press back it just refreshes the page and keeps you there. These sites piss me off. What’s their thought process? That I’ll be like, “Well, I guess I have to stay here now and do a bunch of page clicks and buy a bunch of their products and add this page to my favorites and forward it to a bunch of my friends—because they’ve left me with no other option”?
5) When the protruding tissue falls back down into the box and it’s really hard to get it back out and in the process of getting it back out you stretch out the plastic so that now all the tissues are gonna keep falling in. I’ve actually had meltdowns because of this before. Like, I’ll need a tissue fairly urgently, but there's not one sticking out and when I reach in I’ll get so frustrated that I’ll end up just grabbing a stack of like 15 tissues and pulling it out. And then I have to leave the stack sitting on top of the box, which is annoying. I’m also annoyed that I just typed a paragraph on this topic. This topic is not remotely worthy of a paragraph of writing.
6) Jeans with button flies. Jeans with button flies are for d-bags. It’s just another example of people dealing with idiotic inconvenience in the name of fashion. A zipper fly is 100%, objectively, easier and more practical, so it's a fact that people with button fly jeans at some point decided to inconvenience themselves every day so that their fly will be cool. Christ. No one even sees the fly. Unless you’re hooking up with someone. So is that it? Are these dudes like, “I’m gonna go with the button fly, and deal with that every day, but when I’m hooking up with a girl, she’ll appreciate that I have a fashionable fly.” Incidentally, I own several pairs of jeans with button flies. But I’m pretty sure none of them were bought by me—most of my jeans were originally “borrowed” from a friend.
7) People who don’t “reply to all” in emails when they should. This happens all the time. Is this 1997? Have people not grasped that when you email multiple people, you’re doing so because you want them all included in the conversation?
Yes, I’m being really bitchy right now. I realize that.
8) Zombie movies. Like vampire movies, zombie movies should go away forever. Zombies are incredibly uncompelling. And they’re filthy to look at. Look at this photo:
Everything about this photo is unbelievably annoying. And every time I’m sitting in a zombie movie, I’m like, “I haven’t been a nine-year-old boy in a lot of years—why am watching a movie for nine-year-old boys?” A couple years ago, I went to that hideous double-feature Grindhouse and the first two hours was a zombie movie that was the exact kind of movie that d-bags love to love. At the end I told the people I was with that I despised it and they were all mean to me.
9) When you leave a long message for someone and they call you back before listening to the message. My natural urge is to tell them to hang up, listen to the message, and then call me back so I don’t have to repeat it all again. But this rarely goes over well. They’re usually like, “Whatever we’re here now just tell me.” This is only really annoying when I was especially proud of the message I left and thought it was pretty clever, and know that now they’re never gonna listen to it.
10a) When I’m watching TV on an airplane and something interesting or important is happening on the TV and the captain comes on over the loud-speaker and talks for longer than he needs to. First of all, airplane captains have a knack for coming on to say something (which temporarily replaces the TV audio) right at the worst moment. Secondly, they talk incredibly slowly, with these obnoxiously long pauses. Thirdly, sometimes they decide they really like the audio spotlight, and go on and on. Like:
“Good afternoon, this is the captain speaking…...we’re pleased to have you all with us today……..in just a few moments we’ll be reaching cruising altitude of 35,000 feet………………..at that point we’ll be passing over the east part of the country first………..then we’ll be crossing over Kansas……….then we’ll be moving through the center of the country…….at that point we’ll progress over the Rocky Mountains………..and finish up by crossing over the western part of the country……….so please sit back and enjoy the flight…we’re happy to have you with us today…......as we make our way to Los Angeles……………where the weather is………good……….your flight attendants will be passing through the aisles shortly with the food and beverage service……..at that point you’ll be able to select a food and a beverage………….thank you.”
Meanwhile, a brawl broke out in the baseball game, breaking news was announced on CNN about some new political scandal, the narrator on Animal Planet explained how the gopher stores its food during the cold months, four hilarious things happened on Family guy, William Wallace was beheaded, and Rachel Ray explained her secret for keeping the guacamole looking fresh and green for days—and I missed it all.
10b) When the TVs are silenced again toward the end of the flight for six minutes while the flight attendant reads off every connecting flight’s gate. This nightmare should take place under only one circumstance—when there is a power outage in the arrival airport and all the screens which display arrival/departure information are out of service. Why would they ever do this when all of the connecting info is displayed clearly as soon as you exit the aircraft? And of course, they wait until I’m at my most riveted with the TV to launch into this.
11) People who overuse the concept of “gross.” I was with a friend the other day and we stopped by a street stand and I bought a package of Strawberry M&Ms. They were chocolate, but with a strawberry tang to them. My friend decided to tell me that she thought that buying Strawberry M&Ms was “gross.” Really? How about Strawberry M&Ms that had been infested and had maggots living in them? That would constitute gross. Just because it was an unusual purchase and a bit odd perhaps to mix a fruit flavor with chocolate doesn’t warrant the word “gross” entering into the discussion. And yes, this is a sensitive topic because I regularly find myself happily eating things that appall other people.
Other examples of things that might not taste normal or good to someone but that are often (unreasonably) deemed to be “gross” are: ham and pineapple pizza, taco salad, lower-end coffee (like Folgers or something), whole milk, hot pockets, kale, beef jerky, fruit or vanilla-flavored toothpaste, and weird flavored Jelly Belly beans (like buttered popcorn).
12) When my Apple products sulk when I let them run out of batteries. You know I love Apple products deeply and dearly. But even Apple gets on my nerves from time to time. When my laptop or iPhone gets down to 0% battery, it goes black. Fine. Naturally. But then I plug it in, and it should start working again, right? Because I gave it power, right? But no—if I get the plug in at 1% I’m fine, but when either of these devices hits 0%, they punish me by sulking for sometimes as long as 15 minutes before they start working again. They’ll play dead for a probationary period of time to make me think about what I did. And I have to get all effeminate and goofy and weak and make them laugh and then they’re back to normal. Oh wait, that’s with girls. But it’s basically the same thing happening here. It’s weird, too, because this never happened with my other Mac laptops, just this newest version.
On a glorious note, on Wednesday Apple is unveiling its much-anticipated (by nerds, at least) tablet computer. I’m not even sure what a tablet computer is, but I’ll be glued to the keynote as if it’s the moon landing.
13) The disproportionate amount of times black cats cross my path. I’m not superstitious. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find it a little irritating when a black cat crosses my path like a dick. It’s the world’s way of giving you the middle finger. And fine—it happens to everyone. But what really annoys me is the sheer amount that this happens to me. I think it happened four times in the last week. By the fourth time I was openly like, “Oh COME ON,” and people looked at me.
One question—if I run past the cat by cutting in front of him so that I never end up actually crossing over its path, does that take away any bad shit that would have resulted? Oh, and how about if the cat walks in front of where I’m about to walk but then makes a u-turn and walks back? Does he undo the path? These questions are actually really important since this shit happens to me so much.
14) When I’m reminded about frequent flyer miles that I’ve earned and have no idea how to cash. Frequent flyer miles and reward programs are just one of those things that I don’t understand and find incredibly icky. I do my best to pretend that they don’t exist, but then I get these upsetting emails telling me that I have all these miles that are going to expire. Clearly the rational thing to do is figure out how to cash them and get a free flight. Sounds simple. But not for me—I just can’t bring myself to learn how they work. The process of understanding what frequent flyer miles are and how they’re earned and where mine are if I wanted to find them and how I would access them, let alone redeem them for something of value—is so immensely complex and high-level that I prefer to turn my head the other way. I archive the email and quickly forget about it.
But inevitably another one comes. And reminds me about this intangible, esoteric “worth” that is supposedly mine somewhere, and it really upsets me. There are only two times I’ve braved these dark waters—JetBlue’s True Blue rewards program, which itself was deeply icky to me at first but that I eventually learned because JetBlue is actually a well-run company that made it somewhat un-icky, and I figured out how to redeem my “World Points” rewards that I get from using my credit card. I figured this out only once and received cash (1% of what I had spent)—but I don’t really remember how I did it and I might not have the courage to redeem my World Points again in the future.
15) This whole “nom nom nom” thing that is somehow connected to animals or people eating. I don’t get it, but it’s popping up a lot nowadays. I really wish it would go away. It’s not funny and intensely irritating.
16) When I ask the barber not to cut the sides of my head too short because then I'll have a dumb skinny head for the next month and he cuts the sides of my head too short anyway and leaves me with a dumb skinny head for the next month. This isn’t really a minor thing. It’s my head. For the next month. Supercuts used to do this to me constantly, but I didn’t expect it from this barbershop. But indeed, I have had a dumb-looking skinny head for the last two weeks and I’m at least a week away from regaining normal human-head proportions.
17) When Asian delivery restaurants refuse to give me chopsticks because I’m American even though I ask for them. I realize that only d-bag Americans insist on eating Asian food with chopsticks. I’m not defending myself—it’s a huge d-bag move. But whatever—I enjoy using chopsticks and Asian food just tastes worse to me with a fork. In any case, this was never a problem before I came to New York.
18) Arrogant bars. Arrogant bars completely infuriate me. And New York’s got a lot of them. A New York specialty is the bar with no sign or anything on the outside. Nothing is more arrogant than not posting any sign on the wall or door outside of a bar so you have to ask where the place is if you’ve never been there before. The same goes for bars that artificially create a line even though it’s empty inside.
Of course, bouncers are the worst. At least 88% of the times in my life that I’ve desperately wanted to punch someone in the face, it’s been a bouncer that was a huge dick to me or a friend of mine for no good reason. Bouncers are dicks for three reasons: 1) they’re often just dickish people, 2) they’re on a power trip, and 3) they’re not accountable for their actions because a bar’s popularity isn’t tied to its level of customer service (if anything, it’s a reverse correlation). If a restaurant hostess is rude to you, you could make a fuss to the manager and they’d be in some shit. So it doesn’t happen. There’s the natural Capitalist competiveness to keep everyone polite to customers. Not so in a bar—because a bar is all about being “cool” and the coolness is tied completely to its desirability as a hotspot and to the quality of the crowd inside. Once a bar has that going, rudeness just enhances its standing as a place people are dying to get into every night. Just a little taste of what every consumer-business interaction must have been like in Soviet Russia.
(For further tastes of Soviet life, head to the DMV, post office, or traffic court.)
19) When you spend a half hour picking the exact flight you want on Kayak and then click on it and it takes you to Orbitz or Expedia where you see the message, “The flight you requested is no longer available.” This happens a lot, especially with international flights. It’s unbelievably demoralizing. You thought so hard about the exact times of the flight and you found peace with the cost, and then it turns out that Kayak’s database wasn’t updated. When I booked my Brazil flight this happened again and again and I kept clawing for inner peace with each new, increased, ticket price just to get the message again. Further, why are international flights so effing expensive?
20) Professional athlete interviews.
You know, we’re just focusing on the game at hand and everyone’s trying to do their piece. I give the coaches all the credit in the world for keeping us so prepared every week. We’re just trying to go out there and give it everything we have, and just take it one game at a time.
Could anything possibly be more boring than interviews with pro athletes? Their publicists have terrified all of them into saying nothing of any substance whatsoever in any interview. I can’t sit through them anymore. I’d love to give all of them the Liar, Liar disease:
You know, I was completely terrified of choking since I’ve been a head case on and off over the years. But I’m really relieved right now that I came through. The team lost, but I’m in a great mood because I didn’t choke this time. The thing that’s on my mind most is what my agent said about finishing the year with a sub-4.00 ERA. He said if I can do that he thinks he can get me $40 million over five years as a free agent this offseason. $40 million! Think how hedonistic I can be with that much money! And hopefully I can get signed by the Braves or Angels or someone. Anything to get me the hell out of Minnesota. I have a ton of disdain for these fans and the chicks are way hotter in other cities.
21) When people ask me what kind of music I like. This is as silly a question as, “What kind of movies do you like?” or “What kind of food do you like?” Sure, there are favorite bands, but who likes just one or two genres? I can come up with an answer to the question if I need to—but the truth is that my 30 favorite things to listen to probably fall into 10 different genres. Likewise, I’m sure you could answer the movie or food questions, but they would be annoying questions, right? I don’t see the music question as any more reasonable a thing to ask.
22) When women wear deep red lipstick.
Who decided this was attractive? It’s not attractive at all. She looks like the joker. You know what it is? It’s icky. The only people who should wear deep red lipstick are mean, icky, elderly substitute teachers.
Now, I’ll admit that I may be partially swayed by the fact that Mrs. Fox, the meanest, ickiest, elderliest substitute teacher ever from my elementary school years wore deep red lipstick. Mrs. Fox may have bordered on abusive. It’s unclear.
23) Gustavo.
24) Felipe.
25) When people call espresso “expresso.”
26) When people hate famous people only because they hate their fan bases. Dave Matthews is a classic example. Dave Matthews music is pretty fantastic, right? I haven’t heard much since the first few big albums, but that stuff was pretty great, right? Like, if you were at a small music venue, and this unknown band got up there and played Ants Marching, Jimi Thing, Crush, The Best of What’s Around, etc., wouldn’t you be pretty blown away?
And yet, so many people hate the Dave Matthews Band. Why? Because they hate the fans and the incredibly annoying culture surrounding the band. But can’t we separate that annoyance from the music itself? Phish is like this too. Annoying culture—excellent music. This extends to other areas too. Like sports. When Cal Ripkin started being talked about like he was Martin Luther King after his streak and when he got selected for the All-Star game when he was batting .220 towards the end of his career, a lot of people started to hate him. But that was misplaced hatred—it was all the annoying commentators and fans that were to be hated. All Cal Ripkin did was have a ridiculously impressive streak and a great career. What did he do wrong?
27) When I tag a photo of myself and one other person in Facebook and the other person untags him or herself. Hurtful.
28) When I go to great lengths to see Avatar not only in 3D, but in the 3D IMAX theater, despite how hard it was to get tickets, and the “IMAX” isn’t a rad dome screen but rather just a normal screen that’s a little curved. This annoyed me, but mainly it was an excuse to express my opinions on the movie.
I thought it was very, very good. Look—I have seen so many terrible movies in this genre (Transformers II was a horrific life experience, for example), and Avatar really succeeded. Was the plot super original? Definitely not. In fact, it was one of the most predictable plots I can remember. Ten minutes in I could have basically laid out the whole thing just as it happened. But it didn’t need an original plot—it was a classic plot (basically Pocahontas), but with the rad spin of being in the future on a different planet, and the depiction of the planet and life there was simply genius. Both in its concepts and in the spectacular visual presentation. I was just sitting there in the theater loving it. Not bored at all—which says a lot given my thoughts on the plot’s predictability.
When I first saw the previews I had a bit of an uncanny valley repulsion to the appearance of the characters—but this was gone once I saw the actual movie.
Then there’s the whole fact that it was blatant propaganda. This didn’t bother me for one reason only—if there’s any liberal propaganda that doesn’t annoy me, it’s anti-imperialism propaganda. There aren’t two sides to the imperialism story—imperialism in the brutal genocidal fashion in which it is traditionally carried out, is pure evil. So Hitler mass-murdered to exterminate a race and imperialists mass-murdered for economic and political gain-- are they that much better?
Some critics saw the movie as anti-American or anti-Iraq War—but I really saw the major message as anti-imperialism, which applies to many countries at many points in history.
Not a masterpiece, and it of course had its irritating moments, but for a mega-budget January blockbuster, it was a homerun.
Two other times I was in a pissy mood:
33 things that annoy me
69 things that annoy me
