My Unfavorite Things

Because it's that kind of day.

• The stickers on apples.


• How very cold it is in my bathroom. We're keeping our thermostat down low to save energy/money, and mostly the house is tolerable if you wear a big sweatshirt, but my bathroom is just frigid. Especially the porcelain toilet seat. Brrr.


• People who don't understand four-way stops.


• When your child wakes up whining that she's so siiick and she can't possibly go to schooool today, and then fake-cries pitifully when you tell her to get dressed anyway.


• When your child then proceeds to throw up everywhere, and then cries that you're so meeean because you didn't belieeeve her that she was sick.


• Stomach viruses.


• Mouth noises of any kind. Smacking, slurping, crunching, munching, snoring, gargling, whatever it is, don't do it around me. Often I have to leave my desk for a moment while my cubicle-mates eat their lunches. Gah.


• Grocery shopping.


• When a book I really want to read is not available in Kindle format.


• The Suite Life of Zack and Cody


• When authors drop startling or confusing facts and then fail to elaborate. For example, whilst researching a paper about Alexander Pope, back in college when I did things like research and write papers, I came across this line: "His sister, who was born with a tail, died young." And that's it. No more information about the sister, or the tail, or why she had a tail, or why people can be born with a tail, or whether or not her having a tail contributed to her early death. Or, in a book about the Terra Nova polar expedition, this line about Apsley Cherry-Garard: "His shivering was so intense that his teeth shattered." Yikes, but there was no follow-up about his teeth. Did all his teeth shatter? Did he have, like, jagged bits of teeth left? How did he eat? How did he not have a constantly bleeding tongue? You can't just say that someone has a tail, or that someone's teeth shattered, and then not follow up on it, you know?


• When I obsess over silly things like sentences in books I read over ten years ago.


• Mopping.


• The fact that every night I swear to myself that I'm going to get up ten minutes earlier the next morning, but each morning the alarm goes off and I just lay there and think, But I'm so tiiiired.


• My hair.