Thursday Thirteen #5

Thirteen Things That Bug Me

1. The fact that Yahoo! automatically assumes I want the new “web enabled” format on my groups, thereby making every email 20k rather than 4k and making me go in and manually change them all, and then not changing it when I request it, but instead, sending me a series of complex confirmation emails.

2. That the most common response to, “I’m engaged!” is a grab at your left hand and a demand to “see the ring.” Um, I didn’t do it for the jewelry, folks. Have you been brainwashed by DeBeers, too?

3. People who misuse “begs the question.” It does not mean “raises the question.” It means, “skips past the question entirely and assumes the answer to the question has already been agreed upon by all.” If you think, for some odd reason, that “raises the question” does not adequately reflect the urgency to which you believe the question must be asked, “begs us to raise the question” might be a good substitute.

4. The fact that misuse of this terms is so widespread that it will become accepted usage within my lifetime. Damn you, descriptives!

5. Ditto for “impact” the verb. (Exception made for teeth and meteorites.)

6. My Space. Specifically, that it routinely crashes my browser, gives me error messages for the simplest requests, won’t let me update for weeks at a time, and other indignities.

7. Cockroaches. Cockroaches that won’t die die die diediediediedie m*****f***ers!!!!!!!

8. The fact that it now gets dark at five p.m.

9. Junk mail that arrives at the house thoroughly and convincingly disguised as bills. I just got one that alleged that I’d somehow signed up for some “search engine registering” scam that wanted to charge me $65 for the privilege, and it wasn’t until I flipped through two pages of this hogwash that I caught the fine print of, “This is not a bill. This is a solicitation.”

10. My favorite local pizza place has stopped taking online orders, which means not only that I have to remember Sailor Boy’s latest topping preference (usually saved online), but that I have to call up said pizza place and re-input all of my delivery information (“Yes, it’s f-r-e-u-n-d. F as in ‘Frank.’ It’s like ‘Freud’ but with an ‘n.'” and let’s not even get started on the weird spelling of the name of my street), as well as listen to that moment of incredulous silence when I place said order. (To the pizza guy’s credit, he did say that they’ve received more unusual topping combination requests.) It’s worth it to know that other people have weirder topping requests (now I’m going to spend all evening ruminating on what they could be) and that this pizza is unbelievably good, and I say that as a former resident of New Haven, where they make the best pizza ever.

11. The people who live in this apartment and are not me that like to load the dishwasher to capacity and then do not actually turn it on, which I feel will only aggravate #6 on this list. of course, I could never be referring to S.B. here, as he is currently going out to get me ginger and lemon, and so can do no wrong. It’s the other person living in our apartment. Yeah.

12. The fact that I had to write this whole list twice because, as the error report told me, “Camino unexpectedly quit.” No kidding.

13. I spent a good portion of the day writing from the point of view of Poe, and it’s rubbed off on me, as evinced by this blog post.