Grumpfest

I’m back. The Phlegm Fairy has relaxed her snotty grasp just enough so that I can think coherently again. Hurrah, etc.

Gigglewick has kindly tagged me for a meme that was obviously made with snarky bitches like me in mind: 10 things I hate about other people. The only trouble here will be restricting oneself to just 10 things. As you may have noticed, I’m not prejudiced. I hate everyone.

So, I’ve have a big bowl of crabby flakes, I’ve got my angry pants* on and I’m ready to give it all I’ve got. ~flexes knuckles, cracks grumpy bones~

So, in no particular order:

1. Watching them eat
There aren’t many things I hate more than watching other people eat, unless it’s John Howard and stepping barefoot in cat sick at 2am. My perfect weight-loss video would be watching a 300kg man in boxer shorts steadily working his way through three dozen double Whoppers with cheese, while chewing with his mouth open. I would probably never eat again. If you chew with your mouth open, I don’t want to see you eat. The same goes if you
* talk while you’re eating and spray lumps of half-chewed chip onto the table;
* jam huge chunks of food in your mouth; or
* you’re shoveling in the grub as though you were stoking the boiler of a steam train.

Take it home and eat it. I do not want to watch. And don’t even get me started on people who can’t hold their cutlery properly. I’ll forgive you for poor chopstick style, since Bloke used to say I held chopsticks like someone who’d been brain injured. I’ve recovered now, thanks for asking, and can hold my own with the fiercest of dumpling snatchers.

2. Their capitalistic greed
Everyone needs a house. No-one needs an $18 million house. How many rooms can you use at a time? Likewise, a car is a useful thing, especially in cities with lousy public transport. A Ferrari, a Mercedes, a Porsche or anything else that costs as much as an average home, is unnecessary. Similarly, $500 bottles of plonk, $1000 shoes, $2000 jeans, $5000 handbags, $30,000 home theatre systems and $500,000 diamond rings are simply not necessary. There are children starving in Africa and you’re buying, what? A pair of shoes that you’ll be bored with in a few weeks? Yay, you.

3. Sharing the road with them
I believe in carma. It’s similar to karma, but it relates specifically to traffic. You let people merge in front of you, you don’t block side streets, that sort of thing. Just like the wheels on the bus, what goes around on the road comes around. If you let other drivers in, someone else will let you in when you have to do a zip merge. (I love that expression. It sounds like a submarine manoeuvre. “Zip merge, captain, zip merge!”)

However, I know how the Dalai Lama feels, because not everyone embraces my philosophy. Especially in Oddelaide, home of weird serial killers, unpalatable meat pie dishes and uncontrolled wankers of the road. There are arsehats everywhere: people who are unaware of the purpose of an indicator, people who speed up to close the gap when you are trying to change lanes, people who tailgate when you’re doing already 62 in a 60 zone. So while I try to practise carma, I would also like a backup rocket launcher mounted unobtrusively on the roof of my hatchback.

4. Their pack mentality
As one of my friends says, “Nothing is any good once other people like it”. And she’s right. I don’t care whether it’s tickets to U2, a football team, Ikea, Stella McFartney clothes from Target or any other danged thing that suddenly becomes popular. Make up your own bloody mind, for Ford’s sake! Fashion – just say no.

5. Celery
“Hang on,” I hear you say, “Celery isn’t other people’s fault! It's a vegetable!"

Yes, it is other people's fault.

If no-one liked celery, then it would fall out of favour. It wouldn’t be grown, it wouldn’t be sold in green grocers’ shops and it wouldn’t find its way into my Asian takeaway with such monotonous bloody regularity. It’s easy to mistake celery for a piece of cabbage or bok choy and once you’ve started chewing, you can’t spit it out, can you? No. Death to celery.

6. Low food standards
The average café/purveyor of pies/food court shop-filler seems to put most of their effort into making their food look good while completely disregarding the taste of the finished product. Why? ~throws self to knees, punching fist at sky~ Just because a dish is cheaper than $10 doesn’t mean that the noodles automatically have to be gluey, the soup watery or the pasta stodgy and overcooked.

And while I’m hating people for their food, can we please stop playing hide the chips? It pisses me off no end. And why does an ordinary schnitzel suddenly resemble half a cow, steam-rolled, crumbed and flash-fried? For some reason, if it isn’t schnitzilla and if it doesn’t overhang the plate, it’s just not value for money. I’d be happy to pay 2/3 the price for half the schnitty. Frankly, it’s off-putting to see something on my plate that could easily feed a family of four.

7. Their nut worship
I’m allergic to nuts. Not peanuts, because they’re legumes and not water chestnuts because I think they’re just a random vegetable saddled with an unfortunate name. But pretty much everything else that calls itself a nut will cause my throat to swell shut. Most of them also induce hives. As a kid, my mother suspected I was allergic to cashews and asked my old House-style doctor about it. His response? "One afternoon when you don't have anything to do, give her some more and see what happens." Golly gee, I loved that doctor so much.

So, I don’t quite understand why everyone loves nuts to such an extent that they put them in anything they want to look a bit schmicko and fancy. Walnuts are not necessary in salads. Pesto tastes great without pine nuts. Butter chicken is way better sans cashew paste. And having two nut desserts on a two-choice menu is just rude. It’s nearly as bad as then serving me a fruit platter when I have clearly requested the Belgian chocolate ice-cream from on of the nut desserts. Grrr.

8. Their rampaging self-esteem and sense of entitlement
I’m not quite sure how this came about, but suddenly every man jack thinks he is God. And not just a god: the God. They may be presented with dozens of reasons why this is not true – laziness, surliness, lack of application, poor marks at school, attitudes that are even worse than mine (and believe me, I could give attitude for Australia) – yet they continue to labour under the misconception that they can all be brain surgeons. Nay, that they have the right to be brain surgeons and that anyone who suggests they can't is just not working for them.

I blame the parents. And Paris Hilton. Sure, I only have to discipline a cat, but there’s constructive encouragement and then there’s encouraging your kid to believe in something that is never going to be true. And that latter is doing them a serious disservice. I’ve heard all that stuff about positive thought and encouraging good self-esteem and that’s great, but please, can we have some realism?

When I wor a lad, we used to live in a rolled up newspaper by t'side of t'road and every day we'd have to get up, before we went to bed, and lick the road clean with our tongues. When kids are brought up to believe they are the best there ever was even when they have fairly solid evidence to the contrary, then that’s really not doing them any good. As Cloris Leachman’s alcoholic mother character says to Tea Leoni’s highly unpleasant daughter in Spanglish (which is really rather a cute movie, I must say), “Sometimes, dear, your low self-esteem is just good common sense”. What's wrong with teaching kids to work hard to be the best they can instead of suggesting they just deserve it automatically? /rant

9. Their cursed ignorance
I’m a history nerd and I follow world events. When someone asks me a question like, “Was Germany involved in World War II?” or “Was there a war in Yugoslavia?” or “Where’s Japan?” I want to do them a serious injury. How do people grow to adulthood, breed, hold down a job and still be so damned ignorant?

10. The way they try to use my innate politeness against me
On Saturday, I was in a shopping mall. Icky, I know, but there’s a supermarket and a book shop there, so I can get Diet Coke, cat food and books in the same place and I only have to park once. Bite me, all right? Unfortunately, there are also other things in these hideous places where the sun don’t shine. Like charity muggers. When I went yesterday, I was crook, sleepless and miserable, but I dragged my sorry arse out to get needful stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah – it’s the world’s smallest violin playing “My Heart Bleeds”. I know. Anyway, as I was escaping the ninth circle of hell, I tried to manoeuvre around a tall lad wearing extended-toe pimp shoes, which he had inconveniently shoved into the aisle. “Hi,” he said, turning on the 1000 watt Colgate smarm and holding out his hand for me to shake. “Can I ask you a question?”

“No,” I growled, ignoring his outstretched mitt and walking on as the smarm melted from his mug.

Of course, what I should have said was, “You already did. And you wasted it. Ha ha bloody ha!” But I was diseased and not thinking of anything but getting the DC, kitty fodder and books back to the car boot and then going home to bed.

These people are turning me into a nastier, less polite person than I used to be. If that were possible, of course. Come on - I'm already pushing a trolley that has all the responsiveness of a stoned, retarded crab. Do I really look like I want to stop to chat? I’ve already had merchandising chicks in the supermarket offer me a bit of apple on a stick, a stodgy-looking chunk of sugar-laced muffin and something white and sludgy that may have been yoghurt, custard or fabric softener. So, Mr Ring of Fricken Confidence, if I’ve resisted the seagull urge for free food in the supermarket, then I’m damned sure not stopping to chat to you about whatever charity you represent. I make informed choices about who I donate to, not spur of the moment decisions based on your happy smile and faux mo. Now fuck off.

Gosh, I could have gone for miles and miles and now I’m all out of space. Perhaps I’ll tag myself later on and gripe some more. But in the meantime, I’m tagging Audrey, Ariel, Sakura, petstarr and killerrabbit. Come on, loves give us a big blast of your grouch.

* In case you were wondering, my angry pants are a "bargain" pair of black size 11 bootleg Levi’s that some wretched underfed little shop girl told me would surely stretch enough for me to breathe if I just put them on and loafed on the couch for an evening. She assured me that she did this all the time. Such was my lust for the bargain black Levi’s that I bought them, despite serious misgivings. A couple of hours on the couch later, I was losing feeling in my everything and the jeans were swiftly bundled into the bottom drawer, waiting for the day when I skinny up. Now I just put them on when I need to rustle up some angry. I also own some whiny pants, but they’re floppy trackies that I like to wear when I’m hungover or disease-ridden.