Coughing Up a Room Full of Hate

At almost any given time during the year, you can be sure to hear someone say, "Oh you know, it's cold season". Much like any season other than winter here in Canada, the cold season isn't actually real. There are just always people who are sick. If it's not cold season, it's allergy season. If it's not allergy season, then it's that nasty bug going around.

No matter how hard you try, you will encounter people who are coughing, sneezing, or making that awful sniffing sound that indicates their preference of having mucus constantly dripping down the back of their throat while irritating everyone else around them over simply grabbing a tissue and getting it out of their nose already. This, however, you can deal with. As annoying as it may be at times, you're fairly used to it.

So, you're taking the bus home from school. Or you're standing in the grocery store checkout line. Or you're eating dinner our with the family. And then you hear or see somebody cough. Whatever, you're used to it. But then you notice what they aren't doing. They aren't covering their mouth. This you can't deal with.

You wonder, why on earth is this idiotic and inconsiderate lump of flesh called a human being incapable of performing the simple action of raising their elbow to their face? Why must they instead hack up a lung full of germs, that must be as vile as the person they come from, all over an innocent group of bystanders?

It's so awful that you can almost swear you can see the air leave them and permeate everything, as if it were dyed the most violent shade of gross, slightly green shaded, highlighter yellow. The exact colour of what their likely infected mucus would look like if they ever blew their nose. You can feel the back of your throat tighten slightly as you come close to retching.

Should you become ill, it is likely that you will become in the least, slightly miserable. This will grant you some sympathy. What it will not grant you is a free pass to spew that illness over whomever is fortunate enough not to have contract it also. If you choose to pursue this line of action regardless of every moral code that you must be aware that you are breaking, then anyone around you reserves the right to staunch the cough escaping you with a pillow, and then forcibly smother you with it. 

So please, if you feel the sudden urge to cough, it's okay. Just lift your arm and cover your mouth instead of being the next person on America's Most Wanted.

Thank you kindly!

Just Eat It

All of us, at some time or another, have had our hour of clumsiness. Whether we've tripped over our own feet, broken a dish, or burned our fingers on a pan we forgot was still hot, it happens to the best of us. This is why I'm fairly certain that at some point, you have either dropped a piece of food, or you have witnessed another who has. Sometimes this food is a Brussels sprout that you weren't going to eat in the first place. Sometimes though, this food is something that you were dearly looking forward to eating.

You're back in the third grade, and it's lunchtime. You take out the lunch your mom packed you this morning. You're eating and trading your food with your classmates. You take a bite of your bologna sandwich and look over to your right at the kid who's lucky enough to have a mom who puts smarties in his lunch.

As you look over, you see him fumble as he opens the package, and watch as a couple drop onto the floor. Still wanting to eat his smarties very badly, you here him utter the famous, "five second rule!" as he reaches down, scoops them up, and places them in his greedy mouth. Shouting this rule for some reason or another, negates his actions from being what would otherwise be considered disgusting. 

THIS MAKES NO SENSE!

When your food falls on the floor, it land on whatever it lands on, and those are the germs that get on it. It's not as if the there are little germs all around it that the second it falls, charge for it. And there is most definitely not some chief germ that upon hearing of your five second rule, commands, "No my brethren! You have heard the child! We must wait five seconds!". The whole concept is utterly ridiculous!

Furthermore, we all know that the rule changes according to both the desirability of the food, and how long it has been since it fell. If it is a particularly tasty morsel, then suddenly it is changed to the "twenty second rule" or even the "sixty second rule". How about the "no second rule". If you want to eat it, then go ahead and eat it. The world is unhealthily obsessed with germs as it is. 

So please, if you should ever drop a piece of food or something on the ground, do not call out how many seconds you have to retrieve it. Nobody cares. Just eat it. 

Thank you kindly!

Cut It Right The First Time

Being a person who lives in the great nation of Canada, I am one of the many people who get to enjoy the perks of drinking milk out of a bag. What are the perks you may ask? Truthfully, there are none. Should you be one of these fortunate people, it will not take much imagining on your part to understand what it is I am talking about. Should you drink your milk out of a jug like we crazy people up north ough to, then consider yourself lucky to not have to deal with what I am about to talk about.

So you are sitting around one evening, oh I don't know, studying for a math test the next morning or something. You decide that to help you with your studying, you will have a snack. You choose to eat some oreos. Why wouldn't you want to eat some oreos? They are delicious, you tell yourself, and the deliciousness will be a sort of reward for your hard work. Rewarding yourself will motivate you to work harder. Deep down you know this is a lie, but you convince yourself anyways.

You gather your cookies and sit back down to work when suddenly you realize something's missing. Your snack is not complete without a nice tall glass of cold, refreshing milk. Everybody knows this. So you make your way back to the kitchen, pull a glass out of the cupboard, and open the fridge to pull out a fresh new pitcher of milk.

You grab the handle to tip the contents into your glass. You quickly notice, however, that your glass is being filled at a snails pace. Somebody cut the hole in the milk bag ridiculously small. Of course by the time you've realized this and decided upon stopping and cutting the hole bigger, your glass is more than half full, and it would seem silly by this point to stop pouring. And so, you sit there for what feels like another ten minutes emptying the contents of the bag. It took so long that your arm now feels sore from holding it up.

You have your glass of milk now, which is fine and dandy, but you now face yourself with a new problem. What should you do about the milk bag? Having been through this numerous times before, you know that the dunce who caused this problem in the first place has left you with only two miserable options.

Your first option is to leave the bag as is. This tends to be the more tempting option for it allows you to forget about your problem, if only for a brief time. The problem with this though is that every time you go to get a drink of milk from here on out, you will be faced with this problem and making this decision all over again.

Your second option is to deal with the problem there and then and pull out the scissors and make the hole a bit bigger. This of course, is not necessarily the best option. Although you will never have to face this problem again with this bag of milk, you run a high chance of cutting the hole too big. If this happens, then every time you get a glass of milk, you have to be careful, for the slightest of tippings may cause an excess of liquid to pour forth. You don't want to be crying over spilled milk.

Whichever course you choose to take, you are doomed. So you begrudgingly take your milk back to where you are studying and eat your cookies with a frown. Your snack doesn't taste as good anymore, and you can't concentrate on studying for you are too busy trying not to go around your home asking who cut the milk bag so terribly. You know by now that that doesn't yield any positive results, for not a soul ever admits to doing so.

So please, I realize that slipping up when cutting the hole happens to the best of us, but please try to limit these happenings. Try really hard to get it right, and if you know you can't, do not try. Ask for assistance. You may sound silly, but it's better than what you would look like if you didn't.

Thank you kindly!

You'll Get There When You Get There

As I'm sure you have noticed, in your x amount of years of life, you spend a lot of said life waiting. Waiting for the doctor to call with your results, waiting for the water to boil, waiting for the bloody commercials to be over and for your show to come back on. You wait for your mom to stop nagging you about your messy room, and you wait in line at the coffee shop in the morning before you start your day. Although it sucks, waiting is a part of life, and you simply have to learn to be patient and wait it out.

One thing though that I cannot patient is when you're standing in that coffee shop line, or whatever line you happen to reside in, and the person behind you tells you to move up a bit. And you know what? No! I will not move up a bit! There's a reason whtI left that bit of room there, and it's because I do not need to smell what shampoo that guy used this morning, and I don't want him to have to feel my hot, sticky breath on the back of his neck like I am currently feeling yours. It's very creepy.

And frankly, what difference would it even make? Whether or not we take up an entire city block, or cram into the shop like a bunch of sardines, it will take as long as it will take and you will get there when you get there! The only difference is that now that you've not so politely told me to move with no good reason, there's a slightly higher chance of you getting smacked upside the head. So now you will get there at the exact same time, only with a lovely bump on that dense noggin of yours.

Please, regardless of how eager you are to get your morning coffee, don't be that annoying chump who tries to make everybody else physically uncomfortable just for the semblance of getting there sooner.

Thank you kindly!

The Status Report

For this post, I am going to assume that you have a Facebook account, seeing as it's is more likely that you do than it is likely that you don't. Should you not have one, just use your imagination a little, and I'm sure you will be able to empathize.

So you're sitting at home one day, lazing around, looking for something to do. Suffering from severe boredom, you log on to Facebook account, and search for any notifications. You have none. Just like when you checked five minutes earlier. You creep another one of your old friend's photos. You haven't talked in years, but they still look relatively the same. You've already looked over these photos before so that gets old fast.

You run out of profiles to look at, so you start scrolling down your news feed. Some person is now single. Mary what's-her-face just won a pig on Farmville. Your old camp cabin mate posted thirty-five photos of him and his friends eating a burrito. Fascinating. And then you see that that girl who sits two seats behind you in fourth period English made a status post. It says something like, "Off for a Timmie's run!". You realize it's a good thing she posted that. Whatever would you do if you didn't know that she was off to her local Tim Horton's?! However would you have lived?!

You continue to scroll and you realize how many people are making these mundane posts about everyday things that absolutely nobody needs to know, much less cares about. Are you going to start telling me every time you go to the bathroom too?! You suddenly find it a challenge to find one post about something that actually matters.

Wait! You found one! It's a good thing he made a post about abortion. For we all know, the best way to change a person's opinion on fetuses is to make your Facebook status about it! Because that never leads to a small group of people with polar opinions debating a political issue and getting nowhere really fast.

You soon come to realize that no matter how long you look, you won't find anything of interest (other than the odd humourous pun or cat picture). Worse though is when you realize that no matter how pointless this all is, you can't bring yourself to delete that account. And so, you go back to looking at pictures of that kid that you once knew that no longer has that bad over bite because he wore braces and now doesn't look half bad. Yeah, we all know that kid.

So next time you find yourself tempted to post about what cereal you ate for breakfast, ask yourself, "Does anybody actually care?".

Thank you kindly!

Get a Move On

You're walking down a corridor. Or a sidewalk. Or a hall. Or I don't know, the plank. It doesn't really matter where you're walking. What matters is that you have somewhere to go. You have somewhere to be. It's not that you don't want to slow down and smell the roses, you know, enjoy the little things that life has to offer. Unfortunately, this is just not the time and place, and sometimes you simply want to be on your merry way. You just want to get where it is you need to go.

But wait. You can't. Why is that you ask? Well, because there is a group or a person in front of you taking up the entire way and advancing at the pace of a severely injured snail moving an inch every dozen eons. And you can't be quite certain if they really are just incapable of seeing you constantly trying to politely bypass them without acting like a very angry bowling ball, but it sure does look like they are trying awfully hard not to notice it.

With increasing frustration, you decide it's time to properly assess the situation at hand. You have one of four options:

1. You can give up, and make the choice to stop caring about punctuality or where it is you would rather be. Slow down and make it the time and place to enjoy the scenery. (But let's face it; this really is the least likely decision).

2. You can continue to try and give subtle hints about your discomfort and anxiety, and pray that you are wrong about your suspicions of their blindness and deafness, and overall stupidity.

3. You can become vocal. Clear your throat, utter a small, "Excuse me", and if they are polite, or not actually deaf, then they may just finally clue in and give you the room to pass.

4. Should you be less of the auditory type, you can always resort to the old fashioned turn-slightly-sideways-and-push-through-with-your-shoulder way. This is considered to be one of the most effective methods (if said subject isn't the violent type), albeit being the slightly more rude of resolutions. Let's face it though, they've already wasted your time and energy, and you really just do not care anymore.

But when it comes down to it , it really doesn't matter which option you choose, because you are now a once pleasant, though somewhat hasty fellow, who is now filled with rage induced by a person who really just needs to learn to take a hint!

So if you're that person who just can't seem to get a move on, please, for the sake of the rest of the world's little remaining sanity, either kick it up a notch, or just let the innocent victim through.

Thank you kindly!

The Number One Rule of Book Borrowing

I'm fairly certain that there has been at least one point in time where you have owned a book. There's also a fairly good chance that at some point in your life, you've lent this book of yours to another person. Now when you let someone use a book of yours, or any belonging of yours for that matter, there's an understanding that your possession is to be returned to you in the condition in which it was given.

So you get your book back, and it's the exact same as when you gave it. Great, you have your book back in one piece, and your friend, or family member, or acquaintance or whoever got to read a beautifully written story and everybody is just peachy.

Except they aren't. Before you got your novel back, you noticed something. You were just passing by, minding your own business when suddenly you saw it. They were reading peacefully in their seat. They were absorbed in their text. They approached the end of the page. They raised their hand to flip it. And then it happened.

They licked their finger. They rubbed their disgusting digit along their saliva covered tongue, and used that same offensive finger to flip the page of your book. Your dear, beloved book now marred. And you ask yourself, "Why?” . Why on earth would they ever do such a blasphemous thing?

There is no conceivable reason as to why anything of the such should ever be done. The page was not difficult to turn. With the right angle and friction applied, it turns as easily as... well something that turns a lot! And it's not like it saved them any time either. They have to go to all the effort of licking that horrific finger. A person simply does not do that. You do not drool on another person's book. You ought not to drool on any book, but if you absolutely insist, then at least make sure it's your own god forsaken book!

Thank you kindly!

It Doesn't Matter

Have you ever had to listen to people argue? Although entertaining at times, it's usually quite unpleasant, right? Now add that to the fact that this discomfort you're feeling is caused by a discord over something that is really quite unimportant.

The only thing worse than listening to your two friends fight is listening to them fight over whether or not the colour of the ice cream scoop is fuchsia or coral. Who cares what colour it is?! All that matter is that the ice cream that you are starting to care about a lot more than your ridiculous friends is melting to the point that you will soon no longer need the scoop, but a straw.

Not only that, but should you choose to make any comment on how silly it all is, you risk the chance of having the wrath of both parties turned towards you, and getting no ice cream. All in all, it's a horribly frustrating position to be in, since you can't pick a side, you can't not pick a side, and most of all, you are stuck listening to a conversation that not only is aggravating, but that you truly do not care one single bit about to the point where you would rather drink your ice cream than be stuck there for one more second.

Should you ever find yourself arguing over colours, or what you think a person said, or which actor is better looking, by all means, go ahead, but speaking for all those slightly too loyal friends, please do not subject others to your discussion!

Thank you kindly!

Keep Your Mouth Shut

Seeing as you are reading this, it is fairly safe to assume that you are alive. It is then quite reasonable for me to think that unless you've spent your whole life consuming through a tube, that you have already eaten your fair share of meals.

Although it's not likely that all of those meals were absolutely delicious, I'm confident that there were a number of them you enjoyed, because food is good. In many ways eating is an experience, and often times, a nice one at that. And as much as we all like good food, what we don't need is to see someone else enjoying it.

I'm not talking about sharing a meal with friend as seeing them look pleased, I'm talking about literally seeing them physically enjoy it as their jaw moves up and down, making the sound of a horse trudging through gloopy mud. Having to see their molars turn that substance into wads of saliva infused mush.

Nobody needs to see that. If they did, your cheeks would be see-through, and we'd be able to see what's going on inside your big fat trap. But we can't because it's really disgusting, and we wouldn't be able to keep the food down, which would completely defeat the purpose of our eating in the first place.

Let's be honest here, if you chew like that because you sincerely just don't realize what you're doing, then just look around. The dirty looks that you get from anyone within a five days train ride should be enough of a hint. So should you find yourself at the receiving end of those looks, just close your mouth and stop acting like a cow, because you aren't one. You are a human being who is very capable of eating in a fashion that will not drive off any living creature within throwing distance.

Thank you kindly!