Ways to really bug me

Here are some things you can do if you are ever looking for ways to really annoy me:

1. Cut me off and then slam on your brakes.

2. When I send you a document to review, reformat the whole thing before you send it back to me (my manager loves to do this).

3. In the aforementioned document, correct my grammar so that it is wrong.

4. Leave an empty container of anything put away on the shelf (this pertains to both things at work and home, i.e., empty toilet paper rolls).

5. Park in more than one parking space.

6. Stop moving and have a conversation in a narrow passage or doorway.

7. Be really really late and don't have a good excuse like "My dog was hit by a car."

8. Ask me a question and then argue with me about why my answer is wrong.

The dumbest thing I've done in a long time

We live in a townhouse. We only have a 6 foot x 3 foot patch of land that is ours to deal with. We are terribly negligent gardeners, so by Monday, when our next door neighbor was out gardening, ours looked like a small jungle. I was embarassed enough that I went outside to deal with it.

About half an hour into the work, I looked at the plant in my bare hands and realized that it looked an awful lot like poison ivy. Poison ivy to which I am exquisitely sensitive. Stupidly, I thought to myself, "Well, I'm already kneee and elbow deep in it, might as well finish the job."

Now it is 60 hours later. I have the worst case of poison ivy I or the physician's assistant in my doctor's office have ever seen. I have rashes fully up to my elbows on both arms and less scary ones crawling up both legs to my knees.

I was dumb enough to wear sandles, so the tops of my feet are red and swollen. I must have wiped my face, because my entire face is covered in a painful, itchy, hot red mask of torture.

The PA had a really hard time not laughing at me. I would, too, if it weren't so uncomfortable.

I kind of enjoyed parts of it.

Traffic was miserable today, so we took an alternate route home. Along this route, there's a point where the left lane ends and merges into the next lane. It's well marked, you're well warned it is coming up. There's always one "special" person, though, who feels he or she should be able to ride that lane until the last possible second and then bully their way into the lane regardless of the placement of other cars.

Today, that guy really wanted to cut me off.

It was a rainy, icky day and I was in no mood. I held my lane and used the horn to express my displeasure as he tried to force his way into my lane by making me think my only other choice was to be side-swiped.

It worked.

I won.

I kept my lane and he began to rant and rave behind me. He went so far as to lean his head out of his car window to scream and yell at me. 

I smiled and waved in the rear view mirror.

He tried to pull up on my right to cut me off, but he was in a dinky little Honda Civic and I was in my Matrix with the rather powerful Toyota Celica engine. While he was next to me ranting and raving, my fellow carpooler smiled and waved. Apparently, the only part of his rant my passenger could make out was this guy demanding that I pull over so he could either beat or shoot me (not sure which).

All of this left me thinking 

(a) who would be dumb enough to pull over and let this guy beat or shoot them? 

(b) what kind of man threatens a small woman in a car?

(c) how bad would he look on the side of the road threatening a five-foot pregnant woman (who looks about nineteen)?

(d) how much of a jackass would he have felt like when his first swing landed him on the pavement and not because of the  six-foot man riding in the car with me?

Things I Overheard on the Train (Part II)

1. Some woman somewhere behind me talking very loudly about her son/brother/nephew who's back on the streets in the old neighborhood in Newark and back on the drugs.

2. Three women who prepared lots of gear and power foods for the 5K Revlon Run/Walk for Women...which they were simply preparing to walk.

3. Some woman and the conductor discussing how horrible it was that everyone was so mean to that nice Miss California. Highlights include:

             "Nowadays if you're heterosexual you're wrong."

             and "I don't care who you think you can love, you still can't procreate."

Things I Overheard on the Train To and From Newark

1. Three very loud women discussing how loud they were.

2. A discussion of how some woman's fifth grader smells when he comes in from outside.

3. A very involved cell phone conversation trying to explain where to women were to people on the same three-car-long train.

4. Two conductors talking about mini-cheeseburgers.

5. Far more questions about where the only train on the platform goes than is reasonable from a pack of adults.

6. Tales of the girlfriends of the fifth grader in #2.

What is wrong with people?

When it's pouring rain, and you're in your nice warm, dry SUV and I am walking through the freezing cold, wet parking lot, why on Earth would it be okay to speed up and block my path on my long walk, rather than just pause for a moment and let me keep walking?

Overheard in a bookstore

Bookstores are sacred places to me, so it really really bugs me when people walk the aisles having loud conversations on their cell phones. Tonight, every aisle I went down I was plagued by a woman with a particularly loud voice having a particularly odd conversation. Here, are the parts I heard. 

"Is this person someone you can confide in?"

"Is this the person you're going away with?"

"Why are you being so secretive about everything?"

(At this point, I dodged her for several minutes, so I missed a lot.)

"No. Coming out is very difficult."

"No. I wasn't shocked."

Okay, so here's what I pieced together. She was talking to a friend who was telling her about someone special in his/her life and whomever she was talking to was playing the pronoun game avoiding gender and then the person on the other end of the phone came out of the closet. All this while loudmouth was browsing the shelves in a bookstore...wow.