December 2002

Things That Get On My *#@!ing Nerves - 2002

As I get older, I find I continue to get crankier and crankier. Most people go through their 'hater' phase in college or high school, but I was never the disillusioned youth type. No, my impatience with stupidity and willful ignorance (they're not the same thing) deepens in direct proportion to the deepening of my crow's feet.

So, for your edification and for my catharsis, these are the top 5 things that really piss me off at this point in my life:

1. Sappy Pop Song Remixes with Voiceovers - You know what I'm talking about. They did this with every halfway-slow song after 9/11 and, if you want to go way back with me, during the Gulf War. You take a song and make it more poignant (and more commercial) by weaving real-world sound bytes into it. They do this to Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be an American" every time there's a holy patriotic crusade to fight. The absolute last straw for me, though, was when they had a little girl pretending to talk to her dead firefighter daddy in-between verses of DJ Sammy's cover of "Heaven" around the first anniversary of 9/11. Not even a real little girl talking to her real daddy. An actor. God, manipulate me if you want, but don't let me know I'm being manipulated...
   
   
2. People Who Want to Define Other People's Morals For Them - Andrea Lafferty (and the entire Traditional Values Commission, for that matter) can kiss my ass. It astonishes me that in the 21st Century we still have people who are so small-minded they think they can impose their taboos and Puritanical values on another person's right to choose who they want to have sex with. Get over yourselves.
   
   
3. Music Fascists - Take note: just because somebody likes N'Sync's "music" doesn't make them a retard or in anyway inferior to you. If they like the Spice Girls, on the other hand...
   
   
4. People Who Overuse "And/Or" - I'm a technical writer by trade, so I can't even read a takeout menu without mentally correcting the grammar. Usually I let that stuff wash off of me like a cool spring rain because, let's face it, nobody likes that one guy in a chatroom who's always dotting other people's I's and crossing their T's for them. That said, there are one or two common mistakes that really get under my skin, and the insidious "and/or" is one of them. 99 times out of 100, simply writing "or" would work just as well, but whether it's because "and/or" sounds more intelligent or just because you all hate me, that damn slashed non-word is what most people go with.
   
   
5. George W. Bush - I'm going to be disowned by certain parties in my family for saying this, but...doesn't it skeeve anybody else out that this guy's presidency was basically decided by a state over which his brother is the governor? We talked for years about Clinton getting a BJ in the Oval Office, but something truly fishy falls under the radar as soon as the guy's in office. I mean, if I was running for president, and my sister Jo was the governor of Iowa (say what you like about Iowa, at least they know how to fill in a ballot), and Iowa had the deciding vote in the electoral college, I'll bet I'd win too. And don't give me that crap about him being a strong hand after 9/11. What did he have to do? Show remorse for the dead and promise to go after the bad guys? Yeah, that was tough, bet he had to reach really deep for that one. And god knows his righteous anger has gotten results, right? Oh wait, no it hasn't...

Whew. I feel much better now. Now maybe I'll do a Top 5 list of things that make me happy next month, just to kick the new year off on the right foot.

- Russ, 12/20/02