Despertar

crying children

Six words:

Everything else is way more annoying.

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Seriously, life is so retarded these days, the annoyances crowd each other out.

Or maybe it's just that I love kids, like, more than anything, and I can't imagine being annoyed by anything they do. They are pure. Where adults would wage war or write self-important editorials or set fire to their boyfriends' cars, kids leak a little moisture and make a little noise. WAY less annoying than the alternatives. And because they are pure, it's not even manipulative. Their tears aren't like mine, strategically timed so as to hide, or elicit a response, from someone (which I admit openly only because I'm kind of drunk); they are totally reactive, totally incidental, totally involuntary and untempered. Until they hit thirteen or so.

I can think of about a trillion things more annoying than crying children.

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On airplanes:

1. Fat people. My two-hour flight to Shreveport was made miserable by a row neighbor so obese, I had to press my face against the window glass just to keep it off his shoulder. Blah blah, yes, I'm sure this was more miserably embarrassing for him than it was for me, but I paid like four hundred dollars for that ticket, and I remain unconvinced that poor life choices don't factor into fatness at least a little. At least, that level of fatness.

2. Socially awkward people who can't tell you don't want to talk to them. Same trip, opposite direction: I sat in the B seat, between a fresh-faced A who wanted to talk about her upcoming wedding and a matronly C who wanted to listen and throw in her frequent two cents. I was nineteen at the time and had even less interest in weddings than I do now. They tried to include me in the conversation; I tried to deflect them by putting in headphones. Later, I found out there were open seats toward the back of the plane, and I switched to an aisle seat next to a black guy about my age wearing an American University hoodie. He spent an hour looking for an in to hit on me, and finally settled on the tried-and-true tactic of reading the Delta catalog over my shoulder/commenting on everysingleproduct on everysinglepage until I excused myself and went back to my original seat.

3. Snorers. Snoring is my primary argument as to how adults are disgusting in ways that children simply are not.

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In restaurants:

4. Bitchy self-entitled women who complain about the service. I recognize that I have a slight self-esteem thing, but I get seriously uncomfortable whenever people act like their total perfect contentment is more important than the group dynamic. I HATE when people send shit back because it's not heated to the exactly pefect temperature or because it doesn't exactly match the picture in the menu. It's kind of, I don't know, I never get what I want, exactly, so why should anyone else? But that's the bitterness talking.

5. Servers who, for some unknown reason, considering they are getting paid to do the easiest job ever, are bastards. In North Carolina last week, six of us went to a brewery for dinner, and politely asked our server to split the check. By our figuring, unless we were the very first table she had ever served, there was a one hundred percent chance she had encountered this request before, and would know how to respond to it. Wrong! She totally freaked out, couldn't figure out what we wanted her to do, begged us to please just deal with the single check she planned to give us.

"We can't," we chorused; "we all have separate cards, and wish to pay separately. If you want to leave us one check, we will give you multiple cards, and write in the amounts you should charge to each."

This freaked her out more; she turned fire engine red. "I don't understand," she said. "You want one check, or six checks, or what? And are you paying with one card, or six, or what?"

Matt, our spokesperson, finally said, "Hey--whichever's easiest for you. We're prepared to deal with a single check, or with six. We're just going to each pay for our own meals. What's easiest for you?"

Our server, a spritely little UNC-CH student with Chris Kattan hips, tossed her ponytail to one side and said, bitchily, "Well, what's easiest for me is if you guys pay one check on one card, but you're obviously not gonna do that, so..."

...Forgetting, obviously, that the very essence of a server's job description turns on servitude, which by definition involves kissing ass at the expense of one's natural bastardry.

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Elsewhere in life:

6. People who hate kids. I understand not wanting any of your own, but please, PLEASE, I'm still waiting for a compelling argument as to how, if you love adults so much, you can possibly take offense at the existence or presence of small people who, God willing, will grow into adults. Especially considering adults suck.

7. Assholes. Last night, at the diner, Valerie tried to get Hugh to rate me on the ten-scale, to my face. We have experienced other instances of her doing exactly the most socially awkward thing possible in a given situation, such as when she asked Hugh, in front of Katie, whether he would take Katie to the dance at the end of March, but seriously, who does that?

Then she turned into an even bigger asshole and twisted the whole rest of the conversation into an intense discussion of how people who have had as few sexual partners as I have are practically virgins and don't know anything about life. The whole thing was full of contradictions: first it was all, "men don't understand that women need love to want sex," then it was "whatever, having a high number is important, I totally have sex with anyone who asks because I want to push my number up past twenty before I turn twenty-six." ARGHRARHG.

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Kids are GREAT. Other people SUCK.

I recognize that I'm not making sense at all. Vodka/Red Bull, which looks like piss and tastes worse, is to blame.

Here's the problem: I want to have sex, but the cracks in my heart are only going to lengthen and deepen if I do.

To a greater, or lesser, degree, I also want to jump off of the H Street overpass. I don't, really. But I kind of do. The weekend is coming up. Weekends make my eyeballs hurt.