Things making me angry: 10/22/08

I'm generally a pretty upbeat person. If you look through my family's old photo albums, you won't find a single picture of me as a baby where I'm not smiling. It's a disposition I've successfully tried to carry with me as I've grown older, save for a couple of puberty-fueled years of awkward rage.

When something is bothering me, I'm an enormous fan of taking those thoughts and/or emotions, locking them somewhere dark and distant, and tossing the key in my duodenum. I believe this to be the best way to handle problems because A) The bad feeling goes away (duh), and B) It's been medically proven to be extremely healthy.

The lone downside to this otherwise watertight technique is that once every 60 days or so I absolutely explode and make everyone I come in contact with feel the way Van Gogh did every day.

Today is one of those days.

I'm fully aware that none of what you're about to read has any business being on this blog, but when I rage I enjoy reaching the absolute greatest number of people possible. That said, here are 11 things I do not care for at the moment.

1. Exclamation points

This is a war I've been waging since my introduction to punctuation.

If you're a girl and you're using seven exclamation points in a two sentence email or text message, whatever, I can let it slide. Am I going to make fun of you? Absolutely, but we can still be seen in public together. If you're a guy exhibiting similar behavior ("Did you see that game!" "Let's go to the bar!" "I heard you don't have syphilis!"), we will not be speaking again until you make the drastic adjustments your life so desperately needs.

Exclamation points should only be used three ways: 1) Ironically. 2) For comedic effect. 3) In dialogue.

If you wouldn't scream, jump up and down and clap hysterically simply because it's one of your casual friends' birthdays, then don't give that impression electronically. You're ruining language for the rest of us.

2. My bank account

How this was bested by exclamation points I'm not entirely sure.

The worst five seconds in my life have become the ones that occupy the time it takes for my account to load after I type my user name and password in on the Chase website. Dirty looks and obscenities are hurled in the direction of the ATM every time it asks me whether or not I'd like a receipt to conclude my transaction.

I realize this isn't the best time to ask, but if someone out there could hook me up with a high-paying, do-nothing job, I'd definitely make up stories about how cool you are and post them on here. I have blue eyes, I know all the words to "Disturbia," and I'm quite charming for about three hours every week. Take all that and mold it however you like.

3. Putting smiley faces at the end of comments

When did typing a colon and closing a parentheses one space after calling me a dick absolve you from any wrong doing? It's like the TV news stations putting question marks at the end of misleading headlines.

In real life, if you refer to a female member of my family as a whore and then follow it up with a grin, I'm even more likely to walk away angrily and get someone I know who's big to make you wish you'd chosen your words more carefully.

If any of you ever employ this "style," I'm going to f$%#ing ban you, and then send you five threatening emails every day for a year. :) We cool?

4. Jim Bulleit

First things first, where the hell did this notion that morning shows need to be unbearably annoying come from? Is there anyone out there who actually wants to be seeing and hearing this less than an hour after they've started their day? If you're trying to blatantly piss me off then why don't you just show me 30 minutes of someone who looks sort of like me sleeping amazingly well in an enormous white bed?

This leads me to WLKY's Bulleit, who appears on the scene of a different event or seasonally appropriate locale every morning and proceeds to act like the annoying fat kid who we were all too mature for by the time 3rd grade rolled around, but never openly mocked because he had a cool house and his birthday was coming up. It blows my mind that there are human beings out there who find this sort of thing even mildly entertaining. A couple of weeks ago he was at Kentucky Kingdom groping a young lady dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz no more than five seconds after she'd just finished talking about how she was creeped out by grown men grabbing her while posing for pictures.

Stop.

5. College football

This isn't partly about my hatred for the sport's postseason, it's entirely about my hatred for the sport's postseason.

I am so sick of hearing about the sanctity of college football's regular season. If I go to the theater and the movie I see is amazing for an hour and-a-half and then mind-bogglingly awful for the last 25 minutes, I'm not going to come out of there raving about the character development in the first hour. If people ask me if it's worth their money, I'm going to tell them no.

The 2007 season was amazing...until the games that are supposed to be the most important. Ohio State/LSU was an absolute joke, and I doubt 1/5 of the people reading this can remember the final score without looking it up. Every athletic team's goal should be to win their sport's championship, and when you have a system in place that almost ensures ambiguity even after all the games have been played, it taints the entire process.

It makes absolutely no sense, and it's putting an increasingly large dent in my love for the sport every year.

6. Christmas activities before Thanksgiving

I'm tackling this one earlier and earlier every year.

Christmas is the only thing that can compete with March college basketball in my world, but if you push it on me before I'm ready, I will respond violently. Decorated house before Thanksgiving: black paint all over your windows. Humming Christmas songs before Thanksgiving: two-handed shove into something that will make a loud noise the next time we're out in public. Singing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving: utensil to the eye.

Do not test me on this.

7. My broken lap top

It's been a solid six weeks. This is why you don't spend your 45 minutes of weekly computer class chasing a goal to have the top score in Number Munchers on every unit in the room by the end of the year.

8. Blog humor

If college taught me anything, it's that the number of un-funny people who think they're funny is considerably higher than it should be. If you ever responded to a teacher or professor postponing a test with an "aw, but I was really looking forward to taking that" joke, you're not funny. You actually suck and are going to be making everyone around you miserable without knowing it for the rest of your life.

When I first started to spend a sizable amount of time reading some of the more well-known, snarky sports blogs, I was blown away by just how hilarious it all was. It was fantastic and refreshing to know that other people watched Nickelodeon in the early '90s and could quote some of the more subtle lines from Swingers when appropriate.

But there's an individual saturation point for just about everything, and I have the sneaking suspicion that I could reach out and touch mine. More and more sports blogs are popping up every day and they all seem to think everyone at ESPN and everyone who works for their local paper is a douchebag. It's the opposite of funny. It's depressing.

Maybe if we all get serious for a year then the humor will return. Says the guy who referenced Number Munchers four paragraphs ago.

(Note: I don't want this to sound like it encompasses everyone, there are some truly funny people with blogs out there, it just takes more effort to find them now)

9. People who stop liking bands once more than five people have heard of them

I get it, every band you've mentioned tonight that I haven't heard of is awesome. You're totally right, Bloc Party sucks now. Lupe Fiasco's old stuff was amazing, but he has completely fallen off in the last couple of years.

Let's not hang out anymore.

10. Needles

Fuck you.

11. No one dressing up as an astronaut on Halloween

The single greatest indicator of NASA's steady decline in the public eye.

Also, if you're nine and you're reading this, nobody is going to think your Joker costume is cool. We're going to give you candy like the rest of the kids, but inside we're going to be hoping that you misspell something really easy in front of your entire class on Monday.

Again, I apologize, but this had to be done.

Go Cards.