What Grinds My Gears 1

The difference between a blog and a journal is that blogs typically have a purpose. If this were a journal, I'd tell you about my day, how class went, what I'm up to this evening and the weekend, etc. And there will be posts like that.

This is a section I'm gonna call "What Grinds My Gears", shamelessly ripped off of a Family Guy episode where Peter gets a segment on the local news called "What Grinds My Gears", where he tells people in the 1890s to get with the times, etc. etc. But I'm gonna rant about things that bother me. Some of them are critical, and some so trivial you can't really be bothered by them except to fill your blog, and some will be downright humorous. Feel free to comment and share your own.

So here are a few things that irk me, in no particular order:

• When you're done peeing and you zip up your fly, only to have your boxers catch in the zipper. My work pants catch my boxers every time. Bothers the hell out of me.
  
• When people in the library talk on their cell phones.
• When you're in class and somebody's cell phone rings. (I was guilty today of forgetting to put 'er on silent. It bothers me even more when I do it.)
  
• There's this mentally challenged guy in church whose watch goes off at 11:45 EVERY WEEK, and he either doesn't want to acknowledge that it's him or he's completely oblivious to the fact. Either way, it goes "meep meep, meep meep, meep meep" ad infinitum for the full 60 seconds, annoying everyone around him. What's worse is that he's "special", so no one feels they can inform him of the disruption.
• When someone you're stuck next to for a good long while expresses zero interest in conversing with you despite several attempts to break the ice and befriend them. Swear to god, I tried for a good half hour to find some sort of common ground with this one particular person, and they deadpanned every answer.
  
  Moi: "So, what kind of music are you into?"
  Elle: "Oh, everything."
  Moi: "Like what?"
  Elle: "I dunno."
  Moi: "Who's your favorite band?"
  Elle: "Don't have one."
  .........*awkward silence*
  
  That bothers me. I know I can be a bit overbearing and annoying at times, but if we're stuck together for two hours (you know, like on a greyhound bus or a chem lab or the same machine at the plant or a Dan Fogelberg concert or something boring like that) then damnit, treat me like a human being. I have the same social context you do at the moment, and the least we can do is be amiable instead of stonewalling every attempt I make to converse with you.
  
• When your coffee hits that critical point where it's no longer warm and just tastes like bleeeeech and you still have half of it left and you don't want it to go to waste because it cost you a dollar to fill it up.
• When religious radio stations (namely 95.7 WHWL) broadcast programs that preach politics, and try to politically assassinate Barack Obama with rhetoric so incredibly biased that a mole could see it. No wonder the Religious Right is so blindly against anything remotely unRepublican (note: not Democratic, but unRepublican).

Oh, how I long for a truly conservative political party to emerge. (That's a whole 'nother blog though.)