Things I Motherfucking Hate

I’m giving a little shout out to Amy Fisher (seen here) for giving a great post idea.

People who know me know that I don’t like the cold. At all. I hate wearing a jacket and I hate wearing boots (I actually don’t own boots) and I hate walking anywhere in the snow. Unfortunately, I have to deal with the weather in Montreal. In the winter, Montreal barely meets any of the necessary requirements for sustaining human life.

I bet you that when the explorers landed here 400 years ago and came to Montreal, one said “Let’s cheat death during the winter and try and live up here!” And then another said: “I’m going to move south and get a tan!” And the first one responded with: “Tans are for Italians!” (If only he knew how true that would be 400 years later) And the second one laughed and then promised the first one to return in two weeks to attend his funeral, because yes, 2 weeks of this weather 400 years ago means you are dead.

That’s the story of Canada.

Anyway, I can live here in the winter because… well there really is no good reason. But for all you lucky readers (all 2.5 of you; I say 2.5 because my mom only counts for half) the winter makes me bitter, and when I’m bitter, I can write about stuff that I hate.

So what is it today? It’s people who take up too much room on the sidewalk. I can’t stand those people. They are either fat (and lucky, because fat insulates) or in pairs, or, God forbid, in threes. I can deal with slow fat people because I do a ninja style sidestep and then move on. It’s actually kind of impressive how fast I move around them. I hop, shuffle and then burst in front. They never even see me until I’m kicking snow dust on their legs from my super speed.

When you are a pair of people, and shoulder to shoulder, my blood will boil a little more (which isn’t bad, because anger=warmth). You two are probably talking about something important, like that time you almost slipped on the ice or that other time you were late for class. (Disclaimer: subjects of conversation might not be important). If you are two by two, I do one of two things: I either walk around one of you, trudging through the knee deep snow on the side of the walkway, or I ’split’ which means I raise my elbows to shoulder height, angle my shoulders at 30 degrees to the direction I am walking in, and then slip between the two of you. I probably shove both of you into the snowbank a little. Get over it, you’re slow.

If you are three people walking together and are stupidly unaware of how many irate and ready-to-snap commuters are behind you, then please purge yourself from the gene-pool. When three people walk together on a winter sidewalk, there is rarely enough room to go shoulder to shoulder. I blame Joe the lazy apartment custodian who refused to shovel the entire sidewalk for this, but you three are still at fault. When you go in threes, there is one formation: Two people side-by-side and one person floating in the back. When this happens, I can’t do my split technique because the gap is blocked off. Furthermore, I said ‘floating’ because this person never decides to stay behind his two friends in the same spot. He’s ducking and diving, looking for a wider bit of sidewalk to try and level out with the other two; trying to get a few words of conversation in. He’s always jockeying for position.

You know what? Jockey my balls, you no-good sidewalk hogging piece of shit. I don’t know what “Jockey my balls” even means, but I hope you do it. Get out of my way. I don’t want to push you, but I will; I don’t want to kick a clump of snow at you so you know I’m there, but I will.

You know what I will also do? I will motherfucking hate you for the rest of my walk.

Edit: This post first appeared at the original site and I am copying it here for posterity. Be patient, the new site will be up and running soon, and there won’t be any more of this double post stuff.

I know that a while ago I said that I wouldn’t update here anymore and was moving to bigger and better things. That’s all happening, don’t worry, but I thought that I would break through into a new style and SIMULPOST (trademark pending) between this site, my temporary location, and the old one at Blogspot.

I am trying out new things in the blog world and if you guys are all patient with me, then I should have my own dedicated site with more frequent posting. This post, though, is about Thanksgiving, so if I were to post this in January, you’d all be like: ‘Thanksgiving? January? What?” So yeah, I’m breaking formation on this one.

I really like Thanksgiving. I celebrate the Canadian one which was last month, but I recognize the American one as being just as turkey-filled and awesome. Everything about Canadian Thanksgiving is perfect: stuffing, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, lots of booze, giving thanks, and stuffing. I mean, who can hate on all that stuffing?

The American one has all of that great stuff(ing) too. It would be the perfect sequel to Canadian Thanksgiving (like Rocky II, but with more turkey and spice-infused bread and fewer raw eggs). But American Thanksgiving is ruined by the cornucopia.

When I went to school in the states, we learned about the pilgrims and the indians and the pilgrims feasting after slaying the indians, or something (this isn’t a history lesson). And then after learning the whole story of the holiday, our teacher, as an afterthought, mentioned the cornucopia, a sort of horn shaped produce basket. As a young kid, I didn’t understand the horn shaped basket and as a Canadian celebrating his first American Thanksgiving, I was wondering if our fruit bowl wasn’t legal down here. Did my mom know that Americans eat their Thanksgiving produce out of gigantic woven shofars?

What were the pilgrims even thinking, making these ridiculous baskets? They are hard to carry, they roll around on the table and all the indian corn just spills out of them. That’s not Thanksgiving, that’s being wasteful and inefficient. And if that’s all the hackery associated with cornucopias, you know what? I would have given them a pass. But it isn’t. This McDonald’s commercial singly ruined the word for me:

(watch especially closely at :22 and :23)

Who is that guy even kidding? And why the FUCK do people from Cape Breton Island talk like they’ve taken one too many cornucopias to the head? It just doesn’t make sense. And then it did. Those filthy filthy pilgrims wanted wicker smurf hats and really, who could blame them? Smurfette is one hot item.

But even with all of that thanks and all of that smurf-envy and all of that pariah-centric McDonald’s content, I still motherfucking hate cornucopias.

HOLY MOTHERFUCK I JUST FOUND THIS:

Edit: This appeared on the original site and I am copying it over here for posterity.

To my 3 readers:

In case you were wondering what happened to me, and wanted to know why I stopped posting with such fervor, such weekly (or bi-weekly) gusto. It is because I am moving sites. I am going mainstream and dropping the ‘.blogspot’ (yeah, .blogspot, I motherfucking hate you).

So no, it is not because I started loving everything again.

No, it is not because I am quitting the writing game.

No, it is not because I died from so much hatred.

It is because I am striving for some bigger and better things. (Disclaimer: they may not be bigger, or better, but they will be different.)

So thank you all for eagerly returning day after day to check up on the next thing that ticks me off a little too much. Stay patient, there’s a lot of motherfucking hatred in the future.

God, I motherfucking hate explaining myself.

You know those pictures of the Loch Ness Monster? Nessie? Yeah, I know them too. They’re the pictures of that garden hose looking thing that pokes out of the water in pretty evenly spaced humps and valleys and then a head at one end. That’s kind of what monsters look like I guess and it’s kind of bad ass. I mean, it scared all of Scotland, right? And even though those guys wear skirts, they are manly. I’m talking hairy eyeballs manly. Shit. Is. Real.

But what the FUCK is up with the bike rack designers who choose to put Nessie in front of all these buildings? Right? I understand that there is a shortage of bike parking, especially now with expensive gas and the new cool thing to ‘rediscover your dad’s ten speed from the back your garage.’ So why do the bike racks that go in have to be the most inaccessible and most damaging to your bike/sanity?

Let’s look objectively at the racks for a second. There’s the ‘under’ method, where your bike slides in under the bar; there’s the ‘over’ method, where your bike has to jump over the rack, and there’s the ‘beside’ method, where your bike goes up to one side of the rack and locks to that. Cool. It’s so versatile! Three ways to lock a bike, oh my, the efficient readers both grew wood and drooled on themselves (simultaneously, because that’s how efficiency rolls).

But what does that mean for the commuters? It means, dear readers, a lot of smashing, bashing, carrying, scuffing, chucking, sliding, yelling, thrashing and tears. Oh god the tears. Every time I try and lock to these racks the coveted side spot is gone as are the less coveted and only barely acceptable ‘over’ spots. This means that I have to seek out the last ‘under’ spot, go Moses on the red sea of rust buckets that are locked adjacent to that spot, and part them out of the way. And then I do what many would consider an athletic maneuver in launching my bike under the rack. It is no easy feat.

And then you have to lock to something.
And then you have to make it out of the tangle of bikes.
And then when you’re done doing whatever you’re doing, you have to retrieve the bike.

My method of retrieval is much less graceful than my method of locking. While some would call my locking ‘toss’ athletic, my retrieval ’scoop’ is… ruinous. It’s a rampage forth; it’s a mother lunging after her child as he’s being swept away in the rapids; it’s a Shaq-style drive through the lane, complete with elbows to the face, knees to the groin and yelling. I push what I can, throw what I can, bend what I can and step on what I can to get to my bike. It. Is. Not. Pretty.

By the time I’m done, I am so tired from the retrieval process that I don’t want to bike anywhere. I usually walk my bike, all dejected and sad, to Nessie’s next building and start the horribly tedious process all over again.

I motherfucking hate Loch Ness Monster Bike Racks.

What’s the deal with all the swinging dicks in the men’s locker room?

There. I said it.

I once heard that there are only two instances where it was heterosexually acceptable for more than one male penis to be exposed: Ancient Greece and a men’s locker room. I’m not going to dive into the whole Greek thing, so I’ll leave that in the past and just say this: Herodotus wrote that Sophocles was hung like an elephant. True story. And that’s accurate since Herodotus went to Africa and saw the elephants so don’t bring that shit up here.

Enough on that. Back to the locker room.

I get it when you’re finished playing a game of shirts and skins where you were left to guard Harry, the hirsute grandfather of that guy Michael in your finance class. It’s gross when he decides to drive the lane, you go for the ball, and he goes for the face with his veritable rug of salt ‘n’ pepper chest hair.

I get it when you’re about to go for your P.R. on the bench and you arrive just as ‘Tiny,’ the starting nose tackle for the varsity squad gets up leaving the 6th great lake behind as he waddles away.

I get it when you do a 5k on the treadmill before that 8:30 conference that you shouldn’t have signed up for and don’t want to be the guy who smells like public transportation.

To the man who invented the captcha:

I hate your work. I bet you are a software designer of sorts and, although software designer gets less respect from me than “waiter who shits in my food,” they still get more respect than “child molester” so your eternal stay in hell isn’t guaranteed yet.

However, software designers should stick to Microsoft Word. Let me tell you: until I have the ability to put my mouse wherever I want to write, and then write from that spot, the program isn’t perfected. I don’t care how many “cool new features” are in this version. Great, version 13.6r has “bug fixes” and “resolves compatibility issues with ancient Greek scripture from the pre-Homeric period.” I couldn’t be happier with this information. Just last week, in fact, I had so many bugs in my Hesiod translation that I had to shut it down. The program wasn’t responding and I lost all unsaved changes. Shit sucks.

Anyway, this is turning into “I motherfucking hate software designers” so I’ll bring it back to the captcha.

You see, at the software designer graduation ceremony, nothing special happens until the end. The teachers come around to the new graduates and say: “how do you feel, now that you control the power to make everyone in the world punch their computer screens?” The noblest of the group say: “I am going to spend my life huddled over a filthy desk with cheetos in one hand while the other types code to help people translate ancient Greek in Microsoft Word.”

The less noble ones say: “I’m going to make people wish they were fluent in Wingdings.”

And that is how the captcha was born. There is a fine line between making sure computers can’t do human jobs and making sure humans can’t do them. It is really fine. It is not fine enough to type in a Farsi-Hebrew hybrid while making the unsuspecting computer user translate into English. This, of course, would be less horrible were Microsoft Word version 13.6s released, since it includes bug fixes for a rare Farsi-Hebrew hybrid. But it doesn’t yet exist and my computer screen is starting to look like a pretty awesome punching bag right around now.

So yeah. I motherfucking hate captchas.

This year was the first year that I have had to use a laundry facility that is not in my house. What this means is that a whole building of filthy animals gets to use the same washing machine that my carefully selected clothes get clean in. It sucks. I hate sharing, but I especially hate sharing washing machines and here’s why:

I don’t know what kind of dog shit you sat in that is now going on to my clothes.

It’s simple. Everyone (except me) makes some mistake. They sat in ink that spilled. They walked through a mud puddle and got hobo piss and dirt on their socks. They fell in a park on some dog feces stained grass. I don’t know what they did, but I do know that they are filthy and that filth gets cleaned off in the same machines that wash my clothes, my exquisite t-shirt collection.

And that’s just the washing machine. The second half of the ‘cleansing experience’ is the dryer, which is potentially worse. You see, dryers reach this perfect temperature that is calibrated and selected by the folks at Maytag. We trust Maytag to get our clothes fluffy in their dryers and they do a pretty good job at it. What Maytag doesn’t tell us, is that the 62 degrees centigrade that our clothes spin and flip at is the exact same temperature that promotes bacteria multiplication.

After the washing machines have effectively deposited some sort of filth on to my clothing, my perfectly fitting not-too-tight-not-too-baggy jeans, the newly transmitted bacteria culture and grow.

Furthermore, the lint traps are never cleaned out. Usually I don’t care about this and I am okay with cleaning out some lint. My clothes give off an acceptable level of lint, as I have checked this, but some clothes do not. Occasionally I find a lint trap that looks like someone has stuffed a Christmas sweater down the slot. I don’t know what type of clothes you folks wear, but next time that bitch from down the hall decides to spin-dry her grizzly bear, tell her to clean out the lint trap. It’s just common courtesy.

I motherfucking hate laundromats.

Have you ever eaten a slice of pizza and had the roof of your mouth completely scratched up and in pain? I have, and it sucks.

I also call this problem corn-pop mouth syndrome.

It happens when you eat crunchy yet flaky foods and they scrape your palate until it has grooves combed in like some miniature zen garden. But the only person who knows it exists is you, and it makes you want to shoot monks, not act like one.

The situation is made infinitely times worse when you eat a large slice and have an ice cold coke to wash the bready goodness down. Not only does the hot-cold fusion of the pizza and drink tumultuously combine into a whirlwind of hurt, but the pizza crust raking at the roof of your mouth paired with the icy blast of the drink form a synergy of carbonated purgatory.

If you didn’t follow that last bit, it means that I motherfucking hate pizza mouth.