You Know What I Hate?

It seems that people are getting bolder and nastier in their communications. I’m not much of a hater, but when I thought about it, there were a few things at the top of my list.

I hate consecutive months with dates that fall on the same day of the week. Let me explain. My hairdresser called me at work one day wondering why I hadn’t shown up for my appointment. “I don’t have it on my calendar,” I said. Flipped the calendar and sure enough there it was—same day of the week, same date, different month.

This calendar issue has caused me grief in the past and came close to causing me grief this week. I’ve been planning to go to a conference Friday and Saturday. It was on the wall calendar for February 3-4, but while setting up a conference call for next month, I saw the conference on my electronic calendar for March 3-4. Holy moly, sure glad I didn’t drive to Jefferson City an entire month early.

I hate the paint MO-Dot uses on the roads. It doesn’t take long for the lines to fade away and I don’t have confidence that I’m inside my lane. This is especially dicey driving through town in the rain with streetlights and car lights glaring off the pavement. The older I get, the harder it is to see the lines. I want glow in the dark paint on our highways like the Netherlands has. Is that too much to ask?

I hate tax time. It isn’t even so much paying the taxes as it is gathering all the papers together, bringing everything up to date in Quicken, and then putting the info on TurboTax. Everything is complicated, and it makes my head hurt. I’d so much rather be doing something else. Much, much rather, be doing just about anything else.

I hate junk mail and junk email. Try as I might, I can’t get rid of those two. I unsubscribe, report as spam, block, grit my teeth, and swear. Nothing helps. Right up there with junk email is email that requires me to complete a task when I’d rather be relaxing. It’s easy to be sucked into a project that’s taking much more of my time than is warranted.

I hate debilitating disease especially Alzheimer’s. And Cancer. And heart disease. And diabetes. And anything that makes a person suffer. I hate to watch someone dying. I wish we could live long, healthy lives, and when it was our time, we’d leap on that chariot of fire and ascend into heaven in a blaze of glory.

I hate homelessness. Every time I go to D.C. for the Alzheimer’s forum, I see dozens of the 11,623 homeless people that live in that city. No one should have to curl up on a park bench or huddle in a doorway on a cold winter’s night. One year, I was sitting in the lobby of a five-star D.C. hotel when this lady walked inside. She was dressed in a long flowing dress, but I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.

A hotel worker rushed out from behind the desk and confronted her. “You have to leave or I’ll call the police,”  he told her.

“Please don’t call the police. I don’t have any place to stay and it’s cold outside,” she replied in a soft voice.

“There’s a homeless shelter a couple of blocks from here,” he said. Then, he showed her the door on a cold winter’s night, and she went on her way.

I hate that we are never going to have world peace. It is impossible in a world where power means more than people, and religion means more than faith, and we focus on our differences rather than our commonalities.

I hate Cajun toast. The identical twin look of Cajun and cinnamon seasonings caused me to serve my granddaughter Cajun toast when she was little. To be sure, it had some sugar in it, but it was still nasty. Earlier this week I went to sprinkle cinnamon sugar on my toast and I reached for the Rubbermaid mini container where I keep it. Well, I also keep cinnamon creamer in an identical container, but caught myself. I reached into the cabinet and pulled out another container thinking this was surely the right one. The smell was a clue that my husband used one of the minis for something that smelled suspiciously like Cajun seasoning. Finally, third time was a charm.

Yes, there are a few things I hate in this world, but many, many more that I love.       

   

Copyright © February 2017 by L.S. Fisher

http://earlyonset.blogspot.com