Over the life of this blog I have shared not one, not two, but three different blogs about five things that I love. They aren’t meant to be big deals (you know the easy ones like I love my wife, I love my daughter, I love baseball). They were meant to be smaller, everyday things that I love (I love podcasts, I love the smell of fire, I love bookstores). I got so into it that Rizzo even tossed up a blog of five things that make her happy. With all of that work sharing things that I love I thought it would only be appropriate to give the other side some ink. With that, here are five things that I hate.
1. Realizing you forgot to put on your deodorant after you put on your shirt: Let me play out the morning for you. It is a regular day getting ready for work. Like everyday you have lots to do (shower, take out the dog, get the kid ready for school, get dressed, eat breakfast)(note: this is not in chronological order) so you are trying to get things done quickly. The morning goes smoothly and you are finally on your way to work when the thought hits you: did I remember to put on deodorant? The morning was a fog. You can’t remember. You smell your own armpit. It doesn’t stink (thanks to the morning shower) but it doesn’t smell like deodorant so you know you forgot. DAMMIT! I’m going to stink later.
Sometimes you remember before you leave the house. That isn’t much better. You run up to your bathroom and do the “pull up my shirt as much as I can and slide my deodorant under the shirt and into my pits without getting any on my shirt” maneuver that no one can quite pull off with grace. Even Michael Fassbender looks like an asshole trying to put on deodorant without taking off his shirt. This sucks.
2. Play-doh: Kids love this forking shirt (This isn’t a typo, this is The Good Place reference added to this blog just for Rizzo). It makes me want to throw up. For starters, play-doh smells a bit like vomit. The toxic fumes that escape a can(?) of freshly opened play-doh can only be matched by being downwind from New Jersey in the summer heat. I’m not entirely convinced that play-doh isn’t just vomit mixed with nuclear waste to give it a more solid state.
Gross
In addition to the awful smell, play-doh has the magical ability to stick to slide under your fingernails and never escape. Play-doh is sort of like that Nicolas Cage/Sean Connery opus The Rock in reverse. Nothing can keep Sean Connery from escaping Alcatraz. Nothing can keep plah-doh from getting under your fingernails (or on your hands, clothes, or anywhere else you don’t want it to go).
And don’t even think about mixing the colors. Sure, it seems cool at first to see the neon orange mixed in with the neon green and the neon pink but give it three days. In three days those three colors will mix together and somehow turn into baby poop brown. Any plah-doh colors mixed together will turn into baby poop brown. Probably because plah-doh is made out of baby poop.
3. Long pants: It seems logical for this to be included as something I hate. It was in my first blog about things I love called, ironically, Five Things I Love, that I espoused my love for cargo shorts. They are big and baggy. They can carry everything you could possibly once without being encumbered by carrying a bag. Cargo shorts are everything a man needs in a garment that covers up lower extremities. They are everything that pants are not.
I hate pants so much that I wear shorts in the snow.
Pants are restricting and cumbersome. The pockets are virtually useless. Go ahead, put your wallet in your back pocket if you want. Then you can sit lopsided your entire life and earn back problems and perpetual discomfort. Just ask George Costanza. Feel free to slide your cell phone into your front pocket for safekeeping. Now try to dig it out while you are sitting down. Pain the ass, isn’t it? I bet if your phone was in your cargo short pocket you could reach it faster than Doc Holliday would be your huckleberry.
“But they keep me warm”, you say. I have some news for you. No, they don’t. Do you really think that the millimeter thick piece of wool that make up those dress pants are keeping out any of the elements? Do you truly believe that those khakis are keeping the wind from freezing your calves? You couldn’t be more wrong. Believe what you want. I’m sticking with shorts.
4. Having to pee: I remember having this idea for an invention when I was a kid. It was completely crazy but it was something that I think everyone would want. I believed that scientists should come up with an emergency escape hatch for when you had to pee really bad. A way you could just open up the entire front of your crotch instead of peeing normally and allow all of the pee to come out all at once. Maybe it was only for limited use, maybe once a month or once a year, but it was there just in case you needed to get all of the pee out of you all at once.
I hate the feeling of having to pee. The anxiousness of not knowing if you will make it to a bathroom in time. The pee dance. The pain that can occur if you have to wait a really long time. I’d rather have to pee 48 times a day than to feel like I’m about to pee my pants. I hate it so much that I’ll go pee right before bed no matter how recently I had already peed. For example, let’s just say I got up and went pee. Then right after I finished I take our dog, Ellie, out one more time for the night then immediately go upstairs to bed. What do I do? I go right to the bathroom and go pee even if I’m just squeezing out the very last drop. I don’t want that feeling of having to pee in the middle of the night.
I know one day I’ll get to the age where I will have to get up 15 times a night to pee. I’m dreading that day more than actual death. At least when I’m dead I won’t have to pee. Unless, of course, I’m sent to hell (which I’m sure will be the case). Lucifer has a special place in hell just for me. It isn’t all fire and brimstone. It is me desperately having to pee but being forced to stand outside the bathroom because someone is already using it.
5. People using speakerphone in public: We live in a truly amazing world. It is literally the set of Star Trek everywhere you go. The phone that you are inevitably using to read this blog has more computing power than the computer in the ship that was used to land the first person on the moon. There is no way that Alexander Graham Bell had any idea that one day his telephone would fit in your pocket of your cargo shorts and carried anywhere.
The ability to carry your telephone anywhere comes at a price. That price is that anyone next to you can hear your side of a conversation. We, as a society, are no longer in the privacy of our own homes chatting with grandma on the telephone. We aren’t even hiding in a phone booth (look it up kids) to keep our conversations private. The very least we could do is to respect those around us by keeping our voices at a normal level of conversation. What you absolutely shouldn’t do is to use the speakerphone option on your cell when in public.
You already live in a magic age that you can talk on the phone while wondering around the Food Lion. Is it really such an inconvenience for you to lift the device that weighs less than a roll of quarters? I know the strain put on your underutilized bicep by raising the massive hunk of plastic to your ear may be intense but just consider it your workout for the week. No one around you needs to hear your girlfriend screaming at you not to forget to pick up the Baked Lays. Think of the speakerphone option on your cellular device like that DNA splicing from Jurassic Park. Just because you can use it doesn’t mean your should use it.
What kind of nonsense in this world do you hate? Let me know.
