It's Because I Hate You

Here are the top ten things that I hate right now, in (as far as I can tell) descending order.

10. Billy Packer. This prick bastard son of Satan doesn't ever seem to die, as much as I wish evil upon him. If I prayed, I would ask the omniscient, omnipotent, anthropomorphic, Anglocentric, American-loving God to smite that chicken fucker. Whose brilliant idea was it to give him the microphone, and who listens to him talk and nods their head in agreement? Who offers him contract extensions? How many angry "kill that asshole, please" emails and letters does CBS have to dismiss before they finally pull the plug from his back?

9. Winter. I may have spent my childhood in a snowy region, but I hated snow in March back then just as much as I do now. Now that I no longer ski, I have no need for snow, or for the ice that caused my car to slide into the house on the side of the too-narrow driveway that leads back to the parking spot I pay too much for so that I don't have to pay for the inevitable parking tickets my landlord guaranteed me I would not get on the street in front of my apartment. Whose brilliant fucking idea was it to build a civilization in these states, even if there were plenty of trees to cut down a century ago? They could have left much more easily than sticking around and dying in the cold. And why is it that we let the backwards, deep-frying, superficial, intolerant conservative Jesus freaks dominate those areas of the country that have reasonable weather conditions? Why do I have to move to either Madison, WI or Boulder, CO to live in a liberal community? New York isn't bad. Maybe I'll follow the academic exodus, just because the weather is better.

8. People I don't know. They're always going to be pricks before you introduce yourself, which is why they're all more or less intolerable. Take those shitheads at the bar the other night, rooting for Belmont over Duke. Sure, I was nearly rooting for Belmont as well, just so that I didn't have to suffer through the travesty that I knew all too well would happen this afternoon, but these guys couldn't be louder or more aggressively sophomoric. Perhaps if I had introduced myself and gotten to know them, I might have changed my mind and thought, huh, they're not intentionally moronic assholes; they're just having a bad day. But refusing to do that - standing my ground and letting them eat away at the very nerve center of my brain one precious fellow-human-loving cell at a time - allows me to hate them with more earnest.

7. People who walk directly behind me. I'm never going to get over this. People walk at different speeds, and I accept that, but if we are going to continue to live together in society - actual, not virtual - then you might as well learn a few ground rules, the first of which seems to be DO NOT FUCKING WALK DIRECTLY BEHIND ME, especially when I'm trying to carry on a conversation. I simply fall apart; I can't think; I can't talk; I can't do anything except activity despise the person behind me until they have either wised up and moved beyond me or walked directly into my back when I stop abruptly.

6. Exclamation points. This is self-explanatory.

5. Scales. I'm tired to listening to people who are thin and fit and healthy worry incessantly about their weight, to the point where it dominates conversations, decisions, and thought processes. I am especially annoyed when these people are way too intelligent to buy into the way body image is constructed in our society. It seems that many of the same people who are able to both recognize and denounce the array of advertising phenomena that go into creating these unattainable, unrealistic, and frankly unattractive ideals are the most susceptible to them. Stop worrying about your weight unless you are a) on a high school wrestling team, b) overweight enough to worry about your health, or c) concerned about having a heart attack before the age of 30.

4. Money. It's easy to hate what you don't have.

3. Food Shopping. It takes so much time out of my schedule, and every trip to the grocery store is a reminder that I never learned how to cook. (Laugh at me all you want, but in my defense nobody has ever bothered to teach me; to give you an idea of my mother's culinary skills, most trips back home involve me chipping in for takeout (see #4). She can cook when she feels like it, but she just never feels like it.) This, in turn, is a reminder of all the other things I should know how to do but don't: any kind of handiwork, simple arithmetic, play videogames, take apart a computer, relax. It's an overwhelming experience of ineptitude, hunger, and despair. I inevitably leave disappointed in myself. What's worse is that I buy only enough food to last four days, which means that for two full weeks after the bananas, milk, cereal, frozen pizza, mac and cheese, and bread are gone, I have to spend too much money (again, see #4) eating out.

2. Graduate School. Nothing makes me feel dumber than spending all of my time working for negative reinforcement. Never in my life have I worked so hard to feel so stupid, and the worst part is that the overwhelming evidence indicates that I was stupid to even come to graduate school in the first place. Professors are leaving, the degree means about as a stalk of moldy broccoli does to a starving lion in terms of finding gainful employment, and I could have been doing other things in other places. Once I do finally finish classes, take prelims, and write a dissertation, the odds are fairly good that I'll end up at a no-name school in a no-name town in nowhere, Texas, teaching freshman composition to kids whose idea of an academic essay means a more formal, stylized, and detailed summary of their personal life to age 18.

1. Duke Basketball. If you're going to root for the most hated team in all of American sports (a phenomenon which has never been entirely clear to me; is it just envy? Am I missing something? Is it the elitism of Duke? Because I've been there, and, with the exception of a privileged few, the students at Duke are every bit as insecure about themselves as college students anywhere else in the country), they might as well fucking win. Otherwise it's just a matter of getting shat on while everyone you know consoles you by rubbing the shit further up your nostrils. The entire country is not celebrating that UConn lost in the first round, but they are for Duke. (This is something I would like to explore further. I'd like to know why it is that Duke students taunt opposing fans by sticking their arms out and wiggling their hands, but when I wore a Duke shirt in the Comcast Center in Maryland the security guard warned me that I might get killed.) I know it's me; I know that the Buffalo curse just extends to Duke and that I will never see a team I love win at anything. I know that I will continue to devote entirely too much of my time to a group of over-hyped athletes that will continue to let me down. It might be time to join one of those "I hate Duke" or "Duke sucks" websites. I'll buy the fucking t-shirt, I'll put the fucking bumper sticker on my car, I'll pay the fucking yearly dues. I'll root for Georgia Tech. Just make everything else go away.