Category — Things I Hate

Listen, it’s pretty clear where my affiliations lie if you’ve been reading the Axe for any amount of time, but no matter who you support, just get out and vote.

I heard on the news this morning that this could be a record voter turnout with only 65 percent of eligible voters actually doing so.  That’s embarrassing.  I believe we’re better than that, dammit.

I tried to come up with an interesting take on the presidential debates, but really, there’s nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. It was exactly like watching the end of The Matrix, when Neo comes back from the dead and wrecks those three Agents without even trying. And it should be pretty obvious that John McCain is those Agents.

The thing that slays me about McCain is that he’s spent eight bitter years recovering from the character assassination that Bush laid on him in 2000, yet he now finds himself in the ironic position of acting like Bush’s fresh-faced sole male heir waiting to move into the castle with his exotic princess from the unexplored hinterlands from a policy perspective and laying out the exact same character assassination tactics that he spent eight years kvetching about to try and bring down Obama. Except we remember McCain’s rhetoric about running a clean campaign just a few months ago and we very unfortunately remember his shameful admission that he’d compromised his principles to get votes the last time he was a serious presidential candidate - which was the exact moment that a younger, much more conservative Jeff stopped respecting him.

Yeah, I know everyone does it, but confessing it is the worse crime when it comes to politics; moreso than Gossip Girl or Heroes or House, we want our leadership to sell us on its pleasant, pleasant fiction. In the past, I’ve told people that I don’t understand why Europeans are obsessed with their royals, but that is the answer - it’s like having network dramas without needing to watch TV. It’s a proto-ARG that engages our desire to have something vaguely related to a personal stake in government. To feel like our vote has weight. This is the same feeling that was ripped from the breast of so many DC faithfuls when Jason Todd came back a few years ago, by the way.

So, the debates. The debates were boring as hell, simply because none of the moderators wanted to actually make the participants answer the questions being asked of them. Instead, McCain and Palin each took the opportunity to reach out to their base in the ugliest way possible, by reminding them that the opposition was dangerous and couldn’t be trusted, and while I’ve heard scads of Republicans say that the rampant Obama-hate in their red-state ranks isn’t due to race, but the stump speech crowds and the diarists in the blogsphere and the talk radio die-hards can’t resist attacking on that front - so while I’ve never claimed that all Reps are racists, it’s pretty obvious that racism is a motivator on the right. And McCain, in the debates and in the ads, has been playing it up and then telling everyone to calm down. Which led to the Dems spending most of their energy on damage control and spin defense instead of really getting into talking about the issues. Hell, looking back at the second debate, Obama had to spend over his allotted time debunking McCain’s batshit assertion that Obama wants to start a Bush Doctrine-style war on Pakistan.

So that’s where I am on the debates - they’re a wonderful way to expose our bread-and-circuses hypocrisy but they have no real political value and I’m also jaded as all hell about everything.

No, it’s not what you think.

I don’t think I’m giving a lot away by saying that while I’m not exactly happy with my current status, I definitely think it falls into that ‘it’s for the best’ category. So this post isn’t my mighty moment of doubt.

Instead, it’s an acknowledgement that I am literally ten years off my game when it comes to dealing with sane, rational members of the opposite sex. Not that I’m actively seeking this sort of thing, but I’ve found myself falling into it repeatedly in the past few weeks and it’s been annoying.

Take, for instance, last Friday night. I was at a work function, or more accurately, the after-party of a work function, and these two distinct things happened:

1. Catching me totally unawares, a woman I have seen before in my life sneaks up behind me and wraps one arm around my shoulders, tousles my hair with her free hand and plants a kiss on my cheek. I turn my head to get a better appraisal of what exactly the fuck is going on, and the woman, who I have to reiterate at this point that I have never seen in my life, fumblingly apologizes and says to me, “You’re the wrong guy.”

Story of my life, huh?

Now if I weren’t nestled in a warm, moist bed of scotch by that point in the evening, or if I even gave a damn at all about this misfortunate piece of bar trash that is herself so impaired that she sees a bearded, six and a half foot tall man in a black suit, black shirt and a solid neon pink tie and gets him confused with someone else, I might have said something like, “Are you sure about that?” to try and turn it around or whatever. I didn’t do that, though; I had another beer. Hindsight tells me that it was the wiser choice anyway.
2. Later in the evening, I’m approached by a petite blond who wordlessly goes about the business of untying my tie and trying to steal it. It was “pretty,” she told me. I know, I say back. That’s why I paid money for it. She looked perplexed. Jesus, I am such a curmudgeon. After talking her out of the tie gambit, Mary - her name is Mary - and I ended up arm wrestling (I know you’re curious, so I’ll tell you I lost on purpose because really, are you going to thrash a girl at arm wrestling? That’s fun to live down at the office, I’m sure).

After the big throwdown, Mary continues to hang out and talk to me. She was really affable despite being completely tanked, and so I got my hopes up slightly when she casually asked me, “Are you seeing anybody?”

“No,” I said, despite the twinge of guilt that forming and aspirating the word caused me.

In an almost total act of non sequitir, Mary reached out to touch me and said, “I’m married. And I love my husband.” WHAT? It was a bit like the ending of The Crying Game or Ang Lee’s Hulk in the way that the big climax makes the viewer almost enraged that they’ve been fooled into thinking that guy was totally a chick or that a summer tentpole action movie wouldn’t turn into a high-budget Beckett play that ends with a giant green monster fighting a body of water. I’ve long believed that my life is a series of interesting misfortunes strung together for the amusement of others, but it’s rare that the examples of this follow so close on one another’s heels.

I should probably amend the title of this to Things I Hate: Random Encounters With Drunk Women, but honestly, it’s a less compelling headline. It’s probably also true that I’ve just described two episodes that are annoying or irritating but not indicative of any kind of fumbling lack of skill or grace on my part. It just never feels like that in the moment that it happens, does it?

September 25 is likely to become a holiday among gamers in years to come, a less obnoxious alternative to the grudgingly-fun but way-played-out Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Why? Because Jack Thompson is disbarred. And while this doesn’t mean that Thompson is no longer two servings of Grape Nuts shy of a well-balanced breakfast, it means that his ability to antagonize gamers through the courts and as a talking head has been diminished pretty substantially.

As a sometimes gaming journo and a former Penny Arcade forums regular, I tingle with an undefined glee at the news of his long overdue comeuppance.

One of the programming ingenues from my place of employment recently left us to go to college, and he’s not happy with his roommate.

My Roommate Is A Creep is his chronicle of daily proof that hell is not other people per se, just the people that live with you (a truth I can attest to).

Some of the observations on display:

This morning I sprayed the entire room with Oust. I just got back from lunch and the room smells even more than before I sprayed it. Now, there’s a faint smell of Parmesan cheese. I really don’t appreciate the level of sanitation that it has come to in here.

Welcome to college, Matt.

I don’t normally hate DirecTV - it gives me Food Network, Jurassic Fight Club, reruns of the 90s Iron Man cartoon, and records shows for me, too - but right now, I kind of do.

When my wife worked second shift at el hospital, it was imperative for us to record new shows and watch them later that night. Once she switched to days, the habit stuck, and we’re exceedingly used to watching stuff whenever we want to, a habit that betrayed us tonight.

We were visiting my wife’s grandmother in the hospital following a joint replacement surgery, and didn’t get home until maybe 8:40. Of course, we weren’t worried about missing House or (my wife’s current favorite show) 90210, because they were set up to record. Just like Fringe was set up to record immediately afterward at 9pm.

Which is great in theory, but in practice I came home to find that the Tivo box had malfunctioned, leaving us with duplicate 3 minute recordings of both House and 90210, duplicate recordings that started at 8:12 and ended at 8:15. I would later discover that Fringe didn’t record at all.

I can set up the Tivo (if it still works) to record the latest installment of the 902-verse when it reairs tomorrow night, but damned if Fox is planning to rebroadcast that episode of House anytime soon.

Image from FlirtyKitty’s Flickr.

Pictured above is some delicious raisin pie. How good does that look?

You know what doesn’t look good? Fitness. It looks like hard work, sacrifice and, worst of all, no pie.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been on what my wife refers to as “The Fitness Express,” which means that I exercise five times a week, cut back on my daily calorie intake and basically have all of the joy sucked out of my sad little life.

Logically, I know I need to get in shape. I even stopped making lameass ’round is a shape’ jokes a few years ago - because I’m capable of growth and personal advancement. But the pie, well, it’s a compelling fucking argument.

If I’ve seemed more disagreeable or irascible lately, it may have something to do with a marked decline in my alcohol consumption. And that, too, all goes back to fitness. Whiskey, my wife is fond of informing me with a smug grin, has calories, too. That’s totally true, but it also makes me able to interact with the world. Or, at the very least, interact with the world without getting angry.

Why do I get so angry? People like George Stella.

Who is he? The host of the blessedly no-longer-airing Low Carb and Lovin’ It, a show in which he commits the Herculean task of making healthy, low-carb versions of genuinely good foods and pretending that these ‘improved’ dishes are just as good or better than the originals. He’s obviously banking on the lie being big enough to pass for truth, but he fails so thoroughly at it.

Check it out:

The fake enthusiasm for what he’s preparing and the soulless eyes make me really wary of fitness, like it’s a cult or something. The number of times he talks about loving the food sounds to me like he’s trying to convince himself that he loves it, and that wolf-hungry look he gets when he talks about the unhealthy version of his recipes really kills my ability to take him seriously. All this does is convince me that eating like this is the diet equivalent to ShamWow or other products sold only from shady infomercials and state fair kiosks.

Memo: It’s not a Cheesesteak if you put two ounces of meat on a leaf of lettuce and lightly dust some shredded soy cheese on top of it. That’s a salad, whether you hold it in your hand or not. A salad.

I don’t want to become that guy. He’s an asshole, hopped up on some Mosquito Coast, convert-the-ignorant power trip. My biggest fear about losing weight is that this will happen to me, too.

So, you know what, fitness? Get out of my face and let me enjoy my pie.

Okay, that’s probably an incorrect title. I love me some Dairy Queen. I am, after all, fat.

What I don’t like is the experience of going to Dairy Queen, because it entails interaction with the sort of people who work at Dairy Queen. Just consider Parker Posey’s performance in Waiting For Guffman for a dead-on portrayal of the empty-eyed lack of skill and personality inherent in working at the DQ.

This is basically the same complaint I could level against every fast food chain - that the people who are best at the job are already overqualified to do the job from an HR/personal dignity standpoint - but the DQ near my house is different because it’s only open on a seasonal basis, meaning that the core of long-term permanent employees who actually care about the success or failure of the Dairy Queen in Kingston, PA is infinitesimal.

I have never - never - had a good experience at this Dairy Queen, and yet it’s so close to my house. And it’s Dairy Queen, so maybe, like the US Postal Service, it banks on a customer’s ability to ignore poor service because of the strength of its brand. Which is stupid. There’s roughly a 60% chance that they’ll mess up my order, even on something simple, like “Reese’s Cup Blizzard,” and the certainty increases to 100% on special orders, like my wife’s perennial “Can you put extra pie crust pieces in that?” That order leads to an extra $.49 charge and NO pie crust pieces at all. It’s a given that going off-menu is going to lead to an increased incidence of employee incompetence, but not on such an apocalyptic level as is on display here.

Last night, we went to Dairy Queen. They got our order wrong - which is a given - but that wasn’t the only annoyance. No. When I started to order, I got cut off with a shrill, “I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU!” Which, frankly, shocks me. I’m a native English speaker, and I don’t have any regional accent at all, and this person can’t understand me? I just got off the phone with the local paper of record, and not once during the interview did the reporter say to me, “I can’t understand what you’re saying.” And I was talking about algorithms.

And listen, I don’t care that she can’t understand me, but at least be polite. At least be apologetic. Tell me your speaker isn’t working right. Because if my wife wasn’t sitting next to me, and if she didn’t really, really want Dairy Queen, I’d have driven away after launching an invective assault that the likes of this Dairy Queen manager hasn’t seen.

But my wife is sitting next to me, with my arm in a death grip signifying “don’t open your mouth,” and she really, really wants Dairy Queen. “Excuse me,” she asks, “what’s in your Turtle Blizzard?”

“WHAT?!”

“Turtle Blizzard.”

“WHAT SIZE?!”

“No. What’s in it?”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, “WHAT’S IN IT?”"

I chime in. “WHAT ARE THE INGREDIENTS THAT YOU USE TO MAKE ONE?”

“Jeffrey!” My wife hisses.

“PECANS!” the DQM (Dairy Queen Manager) shouts. “CARAMEL! CONE COAT!” I don’t even know what that last thing is.

My wife asks, “CAN YOU REPLACE THE CONE -” (The shouting is infectious.)

“CONE COAT!”

“Yes. Can you replace that with pie crust pieces please?”

“WHY?”

“BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT SHE WANTS!”

“Jeffrey! They’ll spit in my Blizzard! I’ve seen Waiting!”

“FINE. TURTLE BLIZZARD WITH PIE PIECES. WHAT ELSE?”

“Can I also get a hot fudge sundae?”

“HOT FUDGE!”

“Yes.”

“NO, I MEAN THAT’S ALSO ON THE TURTLE. IS THAT OKAY WITH YOU?”

“Yeah.”

“SO WHAT DID YOU WANT AGAIN?!”

This happened for another 3 or 4 minutes.

As we drove away from the Dairy Queen, I started ranting about the erosion of face-to-face customer service, and my wife shut me up in the most efficient way she knew - she started feeding me spoonfuls of hot fudge. I hate that that works, but what can I do? I’m fat.

This was going to be Things I Hate: Being 30, but Phil ‘Poptown’ Looney reminded me about Chick Fil-A’s breakfast sandwiches yesterday.

I thought about that subject for a little while, and you know? Die in a fire, Chick Fil-A.

Why?

Because any sap you grab off the street will tell you that this

…is like a little piece of breakfast Nirvana.

Any sap except me. Because I’ve never had one.

Among a certain subset of my friends, it’s become legendary - all the times I’ve tried to purchase this sandwich and been denied, either because I, hung over, sleep through the alarm, or am not woken up, or because the restaurant, in some cruel, cosmic, Serling kind of joke, is closed for renovations when I happen to show up right at open.

Hell, they were out of chicken once. At least, out of the kind of chicken they put on that I-know-it-has-to-be-delicious biscuit. That time, they offered me coupons and told me to come back tomorrow. “I live out of state,” I said, “I’ll never be here again!”

“Argh!” As Charlie Brown might say.

The worst feeling of all is that of getting up early, dressing silently, and slipping out of a friend’s house to drive to the Chick Fil-A, pull into the drive thru, wait for a minute or two, and then realize belatedly, the last wisps of gossamer sleep evaporating like fine dew, that it’s a fucking Sunday.

If I hate Chick Fil-A for anything, it’s that crap.

See, Chick Fil-A is a front for the vast Southern Baptist Conspiracy. What conspiracy? Well, frankly, I don’t know. That’s how good a job they do. Because of this, their stores are closed on sunday to traffic cocaine “honor God.” And I get that. Honest. But all I ask is that you have maybe one atheist there on Sunday morning to pick up that handful of people - like me - who forget sometimes. See, it’s just not smart. That’s money they’re losing. And because I live in what some of Chick Fil-A’s consumer base still calls “The Union,” my access to a franchise on, say, Tuesday at noon is…problematic.

Now, I know that there are some misguided people who dislike Chick Fil-A because of its Southern Baptist roots; as a lapsed Catholic, I’m prepared to tell you (if you’re one of them) to get over it because religion is probably just a shell game anyway, but chicken is real and palpable and it means something in our everyday lives. And their chicken is goddamn delicious. And that’s why I hate them, really. That and those stupid Sundays.

And, well, my own serial lack of planning and/or forethought. But that’s not my fault. Surely not.

As a blogger, it’s basically a given that my urge to create content is equal to the urge I have to destroy other things. Not only that, but it’s the exact sort of content that readers react to because they, themselves, are tiny, hateful things. So, what I want to talk about, starting today, are things I hate.

Like grocery shopping.

An overwhelming majority of the time, I feel distinctly sub-average in comparison to the people surrounding me. And then, I go grocery shopping, and it makes me feel amazingly better about myself. Shopping for food - much like shopping for Christmas gifts - is the sort of essential activity that presents our worst face to the world.

At least, that’s how it looks when I see fat people wearing ragged tank tops and sweat shorts lumbering down the chips/pretzels aisle, aloft on both feet thanks only to the support of a wireframe cart full of Crystal Light, pork and beans and Ellio’s freezer pizza.

Or a couple loudly debating which brand of chocolate syrup is the “best deal for the money.”

Or a listless employee staring at the deli hardware, wondering how much damage he could do with the slicer before someone took him down.

Or a frazzled mother, telling her four-year-old son that she “would break your other leg, you little shit,” if he didn’t put down that box of store brand fruit roll ups.

This, my friends, is us. The grocery store is the abyss we each look into.

Of course, the day I saw all of this, my wife had sent me to the store to buy a can of cheddar cheese sauce and a pack of cigarettes. I can only imagine how I must have looked to the objects of my ire - my hair crazed from speeding down the highway, the windows down because “Thunder Road” was playing. I’d just gotten out of work, so my dress shirt was untucked and my tie was undone. I probably looked a little like Bruce Willis at the end of Blind Date, except much fatter. Carrying a can of Utz mild cheddar sauce and a pack of Marlboro Menthol Ultra Lites through the store, I can imagine that the same people I’m imagining horrible, misspent lives for are looking at me thinking, “That’s his dinner.” Oh well. The universal thump, as Melville would put it, goes ’round, and all that is left for us is to fight over the few sale-priced Lean Cuisines that are left in stock.