Most of my favorite shows are fictional stories like Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones, but I also enjoy a variety of different things, and one show I love is Penn and Teller’s Bullshit. I don’t agree with 100% of the things that they’ve said on the show, but I do agree with quite a lot of it, and I admire the way that they’re willing to talk about the unpopular opinions when they truly believe in that opinion.
I can sing at least one song, without forgetting any words, to every Disney Princess movie except Brave and Frozen, and only because I haven’t watched those particular ones enough to have the songs memorized. I regularly sing said songs at the top of my lungs when I know no one can hear me.
Moths and similar winged bugs freak me the hell out. I don’t mind them as long as they’re nowhere near me, but if they come close enough to touch me I lose my bloody mind.
When I was a little kid I had a Cricket talking doll that I loved to death. My mom’s coworker and friend used to call me on the phone and talk to me in Cricket’s voice and for years I really believed that it was the real Cricket who was talking to me.
I play a bit of guitar (although not that often anymore) but I am straight up phobia-level terrified of tuning the instrument. When I was young and taking lessons, my teacher had a string snap while he was retuning his guitar – a little surprising, but nothing too terrible there. Then a couple of years later I snapped a string because I hadn’t realized that particular string had somehow been wound up an octave too high. Again, it surprised me but was nothing too horrifying. But then I saw a horror movie in which a character broke a string on another instrument (I think it was a piano, but I can’t quite remember), and the string struck the character in the eye. A great deal of blood ensued. Ever since watching that scene, I can’t help but imagine myself getting hit in the eye by a flying broken string every time I have to tune my guitar. The only way I can get myself through it is to make sure the guitar strings are pointed as far away from my face as possible through the entire ordeal, and to wear a pair of safety glasses. I look like a total lunatic, but it’s the only way it’s going to happen.
I have a major pet peeve…about actual pets. I’ve always loved cats, but I have two and it absolutely enrages me how they run after me and wind around my legs and stand in the way of my feet as I walk whenever I get anywhere within ten feet of their food bowls. I might have just filled the bowls literally five minutes previous, but if I walk too close they’re on top of me again, tripping me while I try to carry laundry down the stairs or pawing at my feet when I turn toward the bathroom instead. And it makes me genuinely MAD. Maybe it’s a bit of an anger management thing, I dunno. All I know is that it makes me want to punt them down the stairs. 😛
I have a thing about certain scents. Some are reasonable, like the smell of sugar cookies, and some are weird, like the smell of Play Doh, and some send me straight into a nostalgia spiral back into my childhood. To this day certain smells immediately make me think about playing certain old video games or scribbling out stories in a notebook in the back of my mom’s car.
I am not, nor will I ever be, the kind of person who worries a ton about cleaning, but I absolutely wig out when I step on stuff (little crumbs or what-have-you) with bare feet. My entire house is hardwood and laminate flooring, so I wear socks 90% of the time to avoid stepping on little bits of things that didn’t get vacuumed up.
As a writer, I cringe when reading something that is poorly written, but – counter-intuitively – I have thoroughly enjoyed some books that were horribly written but had a fun plot.
For the first 27 years of my life I swore you would never get me on a plane because I figured I’d either have a panic attack from the height, or get violently ill because I occasionally have motion sickness. When I finally got on a plane for the first time in order to go away for work, I experienced either. My ears popped pretty bad during the first flight, but that was it. Color me surprised.
Once, at a wedding when I was about twelve years old, there was a big platter of nanaimo bars on the buffet table, and no one was really eating them. By the time the reception was over I had eaten a good dozen of those squares. And they weren’t small either.
When I’m working out West I tend to eat better because all the food is provided for me and it’s pretty easy to just grab some salad fixins and a chicken breast. But once a week or so I skip supper all together, buy a huge bag of chips and some cream soda from the convenience store, and spend the night gorging and watching shows on my tablet.
I get a strange enjoyment out of writing these “random things” posts because they force me to really think about myself and pick out the information that I didn’t even realize I was keeping to myself. 😀
Like anyone, I have a mental list of things that annoy the hell out of me. You might call them pet peeves. Everyone has them. Yours may be completely different than mine, or some may be similar. Pet peeves don’t really have much to do with any logical sense; they’re just things that bug us personally, sometimes for no good reason.
And then there are the big peeves. A lot of people would probably not admit to having any of these, but it’s my personal belief that everyone does. These are pet peeves on an enormous scale. These are the things that, even though they mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, just make you mad. I mean, seriously filled with unbridled rage. You know you’re overreacting, but you can’t help it. When these things occur, you have to grit your teeth and count to ten while you breathe to keep yourself from punching a hole through the wall. Other people think there’s something wrong with you for getting so worked up about something so meaningless, but you can’t help the way your heart starts to hammer and your eye starts to twitch. These are the things that make you wonder if you need anger management courses.
“No, I’m not angry with you. Whatever would make you think that I was angry with you?”
– A “pet” peeve in the literal sense, I can’t stand it when my cats wind around my feet and beg for food when there is still food in their bowls. I’m to understand that this is a common feline predicament…they just can’t seem to be able to stand the fact that a tiny section of the bottom of their bowl is showing. But knowing that other cats are the same way does not help. This phenomenom enrages me. Every time my cats follow me around, begging for food, mewing and whining and trying their damnedest to trip me, and I subsequently see that 80% of the bowl is still full, I want to kick the cats as hard as I can. I don’t, of course, because I’m not a lunatic, but that’s how this kitty attitude toward partly-empty bowls makes me feel. On several occasions I’ve flat-out refused to give them any more food until the bowls were completely empty, I guess just because I wanted to annoy them as much as they were annoying me.
– I’m not a road rage kind of person, but there are two driver-related actions that make me want to scream. One is when people refuse to use their blinkers while turning. It’s really not a difficult action and I can’t for the life of me understand why so many people flat-out refuse to do it. The blinker is right there, two inches away from where your hands (presumably) are on the steering wheel. You can literally reach out with your pinky finger and flick the handle in the right direction. It takes a quarter of a second of work and absolutely no brain power. Nothing frustrates me more when I’m out on the road than when I’m waiting for a car to be out of my way only to have it turn before it reaches me, sans blinker. Except, possibly, this other thing frustrates me a little more: people who (blinker or no) take half the damn day to make a turn. No, I’m not in a rush, and no, it’s not really affecting my day in any meaningful way, but if I’m a hundred meters down the road when you start to turn and I end up having to come to a dead stop to wait for you to finish your turn, that seriously makes me want to speed up and push you wherever the hell you’re trying to go. Turns do not hurt your car, people. You can take them at a little faster than 0.5 miles/hour.
– As much as anyone, I enjoy sharing things I like on social media. I’ll share a funny video I found, or an interesting news article, and sometimes – just sometimes – I’ll even share an inspirational message of some kind. But something that fills me with an indecent level of fury is when I see a post of any kind that involves the words “most of you won’t even read this” or “let’s see who cares enough to share”. The second I see these words, or any variation of, I immediately hate whatever your post is about. It could be about saving baby puppies from being tossed in a wood chipper, but the second you try to guilt me into sharing, or somehow suggest that I’m a bad person if I don’t share, I immediately delegate your post to the junk pile. If I care about a topic, I’ll share it in various other ways, but I refuse to share something that I’ve been bullied into sharing. It makes me genuinely angry that people think that this method is the best way to get their message out there.
– Toys of any kind that require assembly and subsequently do not assemble properly. As an adult who enjoys a few guilty-pleasure-type collectibles, this is something that frustrates me. As a mother who has now had to assemble many playthings, this is something that makes me want to punch toy manufacturers in the throat. When I used to collect Todd McFarlane Dragons it would bug the hell out of me when a tail refused to click in properly, or when the dragon was designed in such a way that it literally could not stand up, because believe it or not some of us actually like to open and display our collectibles instead of leaving them trapped in plastic for all time. Now that I’m a mother and am regularly assembling toys for my daughter, this annoyance has reached an all-time high of animosity toward toy-makers. I have an entire box on the top shelf of my daughter’s closet, full to the brim with pieces from toys that I had to put away because they refused to stay together and will just end up lost otherwise. Can someone please tell me why Master Splinter’s tail comes packaged as a separate piece? There is absolutely no good reason for his tail to ever need to be detached, and yet it comes in the package as a separate piece that all the super-glue in the world can not keep together.
We all have our things that bother us in a fist-clenching, tooth-grinding, eye-twitching kind of way. These are a few of mine. What about you?
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