Peeves of the Pet

I can be a harsh person. I won't deny it. I'm not going to coddle you or tell you your ass doesn't look fat in those jeans, because guess what? It does. Here are the things that make me terrible: 

1. I'm not going to pretend I like your hideous sweater and I'll correct you if you make a grammatical mistake while speaking to me. Does all of that make me a bad person? If it does, then I don't want to be right... I mean good! I don't want to be good.

2. If you have attended high school in an English speaking country and if your first language is English and you either don't want to learn or don't care about the difference between "your" and "you're" then I automatically consider myself a better person than you are.

3. I believe everyone should take a good look in the mirror before leaving the house in  the morning. The question you should be asking yourself when you do this isn't "am I comfortable leaving the house like this?" but "does my dress code and way of life offend people?"

4. If you're a hipster extremist, then yes, your dress code offends me, and no, I'm not going to listen to Five Arches of Sound's new EP. Maybe I'll take a stab at it when they're mainstream.

5. That said, I'm never going to tell you to hold back on your beliefs. Even if I may not like them or agree with them, I'll just let you do your thing. Unless of course you start shoving whatever it is in my face, then I'll politely tell you to fuck off.

6. I believe umbrellas are too cumbersome.

7. I think Corn Pops should try and develop a consistent recipe because every box I get is slightly different.

8. I'm not going to judge you for eating McDonald's because I do it all the time.

9. I don't see the point of paying for new books when you can get them second-hand.

10. I don't think the last rule applies to clothes or underwear.

11. I fail to understand why all people won't switch to energy saving bulbs.

12. I hate people who talk too much because they get in the way of my talking too much.

13. Like Liz Lemon says, if you're over 30 and still wear a name tag to work, that's a deal breaker!

14. I believe I am not alone in my hatred of people who get on an escalator and stand still on the walking side. Or large groups of people who just HAVE to walk shoulder to shoulder on a sidewalk. Or people who stop in doorways to think "Do I really have to go inside? Hmm...nope, I'll just stand here while everyone else waits behind me."

15. I can't stand people who try to act like they're superior - it makes it difficult for those of us who really are.

But that's enough about me. Tell me about you.

How to Maintain What's Left of Your Dignity on Facebook Part 2

First blog post of 2012 and we're going to use it to talk about Facebook...again.

We've already talked about it once before. I thought I had covered all the bases, but surprise, surprise: I was wrong. Turns out there are a lot more things people always fuck up on Facebook. Sometimes I wonder...

1. HASHTAGS: 

I've talked about this so many times I'm just tired now. I'm sure you've seen people using hashtags on Facebook. If you don't know what a hashtag is, it's the # symbol followed by letters. For example: #teamfollowback (another moronic issue we'll tackle later). Hashtags are designed to create trending topics on Twitter so once you use one, you can actually click on it and see if other people are talking about the same thing. I seek in vain to find that statement applying to Facebook. Is Facebook Twitter? Unless you're brain dead, NO it's not. Hashtags just don't work on Facebook! They do nothing. I don't know if people do it to be cool or just to piss me off but it has to end. NOW.

2. SELF-PHOTOGRAPHY... IN THE BATHROOM:

Let me put this as nicely as I can: No one wants to see your lame mirror shots. I don't care how good you think you look; you should never pose in front of a mirror, or even worse, a bathroom mirror, for a Facebook photo. If you want to take a photo of yourself, try to make it seem like someone else took it. At least that might insinuate you have real life friends. Or maybe not.

3. FAKE NAMES: 

Unless your legal name is John "Hard Ass MoFo" Smith, or Belinda Voluptuous Gucci PrincessGirl Terry, I don't want to see that shit on Facebook. This isn't Hi5 and you're not 12 years old. And if you are, you shouldn't be on Facebook in the first place. This fake name nonsense is one thing that I don't think I'll ever be able to understand. Do you have dissociative identity disorder? Is the middle part your stripper name? Who knows? All it does is make you harder to find, and we all know how much you'd love more Facebook friends. Don't you want to be more accessible to people you've only met once?

4. CHECKING IN EVERYWHERE YOU GO:

People keep moaning about the privacy issues regarding Facebook Places and check-ins when they should be moaning about the idiots who check-in wherever they've managed to stay for more than five minutes. It's even worse when it's part of the never-ending status updates: 
| "OMG driving to Taco Bell! Yay! - with Belinda Voluptuous PrincessGirl Terry at Highway 1." 
| "OMG taco night :)) - with Belinda Voluptuous Gucci PrincessGirl Terry at Taco bell." 
| "OMG finally home!! - with Belinda Voluptuous Gucci PrincessGirl Terry at Home." 
| "OMG those Tacos aren't agreeing with me - with Belinda Voluptuous Gucci PrincessGirl Terry at Toilet."

5. TAGGING FRIENDS IN PHOTOS THAT AREN'T OF THEM: 

Let's get this straight: You do realize that the photo of your new haircut is going to show up on my profile if you tag me in it, right? Ok. Then why the hell are you tagging me, fool?! Am I in the background? Am I in your hair? No. Ok, so no one looks at the random photos you post, you're desperate for some likes and comments, so you just up and tag everyone you know. Sure it guarantees I'll see your photo but it also guarantees I'll want to break a champagne bottle on your head. In other words, if I'm not in the photo, do not tag me in it.

6. CREATING A FACEBOOK PAGE FOR YOUR HOUSE/APARTMENT: 

Checking in to your own house can be bad, but checking in to your own house with it's own Facebook page that can be "Liked" is even worse. Believe it or not, I've seen people give their apartments their own Facebook pages, compete with photographs and a description. People say Facebook is for narcissists but it's rather hard to agree until you see shit like this. Unless you're trying to sell your apartment or put it on the cover of Home and Garden magazine, making a Facebook page for it is just tacky. Oh, and also stupid.

7. LANGUAGES SPOKEN:

Ok, maybe saying you can speak Klingon or Pig Latin can be funny in a "haha, look what Dave put on his profile" way. But listing your languages as British English, American English, Australian English, South African English and Canadian English is just moronic. You know there's an option for just one English, right? Sure, there may be some subtle differences but I don't think knowing the two spellings of the word 'colour' is enough to classify you as bilingual.

8. DEAR BLANK PLEASE BLANK STATUS UPDATES: 

Writing fictional letters to abstract ideas was a sign of mental instability before the explosion of Dear Blank Please Blank. Although some remain funny, they quickly lose their value when they make up 75% of your status updates. Hasn't anyone told you DBPB on Facebook is so 2010?

9. OBSSESSIVE TWITTER LINK:

This is basically the Twitter version of the hourly status update. As mentioned, Twitter is a completely different place. On Twitter it's ok to be super narcissistic and tweet every 5 minutes; after all, it's not like there's anything else to do on there. Now, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, you can actually link your Twitter to your Facebook and have tweets show up in your Timeline like little status updates. Do you see where I'm going with this? If you tweet more than twice a day, do not link your Twitter to your Facebook. Spare us. The last thing I want to do is log in to Facebook and have my News Feed saturated with 7 successive moronic tweets about how your dinner is going, complete with cliché pouts and drinks. Which brings me to... 

10. JERSEY SHORE DUCKFACE: 

Looking like a Jersey Shore reject is something only the Jersey Shore people are allowed to do, and they're still hated for it. What on earth makes you think you can pull it off? Your plucked eyebrows, fake tan, and pouty duckface lips are an affront to the entire human race. Get your shit together!

11. I'M SOOOOOOOOO DRUNK!!!

"I'm sooooooo drunk right noooowwwwww!!"
"Drunk :P"
"Getting crunk at da club!!!"

What do the above have in common? Besides being stupid, they're all supposedly being posted on Facebook on Friday and Saturday nights by people who want the world to know that they are getting shitfaced. Firstly, if you're having an awesome time, you wouldn't be thinking about updating your Facebook status. Secondly, if you were as drunk as your status claims, you wouldn't be able to post status updates because your phone would be lying in a pool of vomit (yours? your friends?) on the floor, or you would just be too inebriated to do anything besides bother people who clearly do not want to talk to you. 
In other words, you're simply bored and not drunk. The end.

The Potential Relationship & Mating Triad

Have you ever wondered why none of your relationships work out? Why you’re sad and alone? Where all those cats came from?
I was discussing relationships with a friend today (while pretending to write an art history essay) and I had an amazing epiphany – that’s a sudden realization of great truth, for those of you who haven’t seen The Simpsons Movie. I realized why it seems all relationships are doomed to fail: you can almost never get your ideal person. Now before I go any further, let me describe what I think is the perfect partner:

Your perfect partner is:

1. Good-looking (to you at least)

2. Employed

3.  A person who will never cheat

Ok, so maybe I skipped some stuff and maybe I’m being a little superficial, but hey, that’s my opinion so SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN. Either way, those are the three basic things, right? Anyway, for the sake of this blog post, we’re going to call those three qualities the Potential Relationship and Mating Triad (maybe we need a better name...). We will therefore define the Relationship Triad as the three most important qualities your potential partner must have for the relationship to work at its most basic level. So unless you’re like Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Theresa, you bloody live by the Triad.

Do we understand each other so far? Yes? Good.

So here’s my theory: from your perspective, any given person can possess either none of those qualities or a maximum of two. You will NEVER find someone with all three! Crazy, right? That means that the person you like is either: 

a) good-looking and employed BUT will cheat on you at some point, 

b) has a job and will never cheat BUT is not good-looking, and finally, 

c) is good-looking and will never cheat BUT is broke as hell. 

Guess  how the Triad can (and possibly will) apply here.

And those are just the best-case scenarios. Things could get a lot worse; for example the person may be 

a) employed BUT not good-looking and a serial cheater (trust me, it happens) or 

b) extremely faithful BUT not good-looking and not employed.

Until I conduct more in-depth research and studies, I am not at liberty to say that this applies to everyone, but it sure as hell seems to apply to me! One of my friends has this theory that the more attractive someone is, the more likely he or she is to cheat on you. At first I laughed the idea off but now looking at the Triad, it doesn’t seem as crazy as it once did. What is crazy, however, was her solution to the problem – “just, like, date, like, unattractive people duh!” Ok, I may have embellished that last quote just a little.

I’d love to know if the Triad applies to anyone else’s life. Misery does love company after all.

How to maintain what's left of your dignity on Facebook

Let's talk about Facebook.

By now, I'm sure most of us can't live without it, and if you can, there's something wrong. Of all the times I've mentioned Facebook in a conversation, only twice have I heard the phrase "I don't have Facebook." (I slapped the speaker of those words both times)
Joking aside though, this isn't about why everyone should have Facebook. It's about all the little things people do on Facebook that drive me crazy. For example:

1. LIKING YOUR OWN POSTS: 

Come on guys, this one is a no-brainer. Doesn't having an entire page devoted to you and you alone give you enough of an ego boost? Why on earth would anyone like their own post? If you posted it, it comes without saying that you already "Like" it. If you didn't, you wouldn't have posted it in the first place. Logic.

2. 10,000 PHOTOS: 

So you just spent the last three hours of your life taking pictures of yourself in a mirror. You made some faces, you used some "cool" effects and you made sure the toilet behind you was flushed. Now that you have 246 photos of yourself taken by yourself, it would be absolutely insane not to post them on Facebook, right? WRONG. In this particular case, sharing is not caring. Don't punish your friends with your face featuring an infinite number of expressions from infinite angles. And don't pout either; it's very MySpace.

3. FARMVILLE: 

Lord, I can't begin to describe the pain that moronic game has caused me. I once fell victim to its not-so-distant cousin, Cityville. I'll tell you right now that it was a monumental waste of time. The only thing worse than Zynga Facebook games are the requests you get from friends who play them. They pop up on your page every other day, talking about "lost cow" this and "chicken shit" that and "I need fertilizer or my crops will die!!" Guess what? I don't give a shit! Go and tend to a real fucking plant. Or even better, go out and talk to actual human beings. I can't believe people pay money for that crap.

4. THE EVER CHANGING RELATIONSHIP STATUS:

Some relationships are rocky - trust me, I get it. We all break up and move on. What we all don't do, however, is change our relationship status after every fight/breakup. It's not so much annoying as it is disconcerting to see someone bounce from "Single" to "It's Complicated" to "In a Relationship" every other week. Should we be worried?

5. HAVING 8,000 FRIENDS: 

No, I'm not jealous of people who have more Facebook friends than I do. I just don't understand it. Eight thousand people? That's the population of a small town. Ninety nine point nine per cent of people with that many Facebook friends haven't met at least 60 per cent of them. Ok, I just made that statistic up, but it's probably true. And that brings me to...

6. ADDING PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW: 

Now this is annoying. Every once in a while, I get a friend request from a person my eyes have never had the displeasure of seeing. Just because we have a mutual friend, doesn't mean you can hit the "Add Friend" button. 

"Hi, let's be friends" is the message that sometimes comes with the request. You're kidding me, right? I don't care if we live in the same town or if you know my friend's aunt's brother's sister-in-law. NO. And by the way, re-adding someone as a friend after they've turned you down? Err... think about it.

7. POOR GRAMMAR/SPELLING:

No, I don't care that it's the Internet. Try to write like you have a brain and were taught how to speak English at some point in your life. Facebook is good for many things, but proper grammar isn't one of them. And neither is proper spelling. 

"Wat did u guyz do lst nyt?" 

Seriously? Would it kill you to type in an extra letter? For Pete's sake, S is right next to Z on a QWERTY keypad, and it takes just as many presses to type an S as it does to type a Z on a numerical keypad. Grow up.

8. HOURLY STATUS UPDATES: 

I honestly don't give two shits about what you had for lunch today, unless you ate that lunch with Bar Rafaeli or Ban Ki Moon (in that case I'd expect a photo). But telling the world your every move? No.That's what Twitter is for.

9. FACEBOOK CHAIN MAIL:

If you're dumb enough to believe that Mark Zuckerberg personally messaged you and asked that you forward his message to prove that your account is active and urge others to do the same or else Facebook will shut down, then you don't deserve to be on Facebook. That is all.

10. CRYPTIC POSTS: 

You know what I'm talking about: the cryptically ambiguous status updates that may or may not be about your (ex) lover/crush/sex master. 

"I'm tired of being treated like second-best." 

By who? If you're that pissed about it, write it on the perpetrator's wall instead of leaving it hanging there hoping your lover/crush/sex master will read it and get the hint. Because, guess what? He/she/it probably won't. Listen to the voice of experience.

And that, dear readers, is that. I don't want you to be an upstanding member of the Facebook society just to improve your sex/love/work life (and possibly, reputation). I wan't you to become an upstanding member of the Facebook society so I don't have to cringe whenever I see one of your misdeeds.

Vampires. You know the drill.

I love vampires. Really, I do. I love how fast they are, I love how they have super-hearing, and I love that they are always attractive. I have that last part covered though.
What amazes me is how people are still interested in them. After everything Twilight has done to vampires, and after all the exposure they have received, it's amazing people still bother. I guess vampires are kind of like Rolling in the Deep - refer to my previous blog post.
When I was 10 years old, the word vampire would conjure up pictures of coffins, death, blood and evil. Now when I hear vampire, I think of Edward Cullen. 

Scary in a different way.

When I see a movie or TV show title with vampires involved, I automatically assume it revolves around a love story, usually between a human and said vampire.
The woman is usually the human one (cue analysis of sexism in vampire fiction) and the male vampire resists his evil, carnal urges to suck her dry because they fall deeply in love. But because they are deeply in love, she is exposed to all the dangers that obviously accompany a relationship with a blood-sucking, undead, mythological beast. However, love prevails, and through many trials and tribulations and attempted murders, the unlikely couple emerge at the other end a little shaken up, but all in all, better than they were before they started.
That's usually how it goes. Oh, and there are usually other supernatural beings involved. I'm sorry if I just ruined a number of vampire novels for you. You'll thank me later.
The first vampire novel I read was Twilight. I'll admit it had me hooked. I read non-stop, I dared not bend a page of the sacred book and I even picked a side (Team Edward, if you're wondering). Then when it all came to an end, I stepped back and looked at the entire series without the haze of vampire love clouding my eyes. It was then that I realized vampires had been ruined. I was never going to look at them the same again. No longer were they the creatures that occasionally haunted my illicit drea- err... I mean, nightmares. I thought I'd never be scared of vampires again. 
Before any real vampires decide to instill the fear in me once again, I'll have you know that I was saved by my author-god Stephen King's novel, Salem's Lot. After I read that masterpiece, all was right in the world again.
The moral of the story? 21st century vampires suck, pun intended. Still, I'll admit it'd be nice to be one. Of course, I'd go on the "vegetarian" diet, as Stephanie Meyer so elegantly put it. Or maybe I'd try some friends. We'll see. But just in case, hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband 'cause they suckin' er'body out here.
Wait, that sounds wrong...

Rolling in the Deep. Seriously?

Ok, so you know how every year there's one album and one song that just won't leave the spotlight? No matter what the Hollywood machine throws at it, that one little album holds on to its 15 minutes like a cat that's just dug its claws into your arm. This year, that album seems to be Adele's '21'.

The album cover doesn't quite convey how I feel right now.

Don't get me wrong, I think the album is fantastic. I love(d) the songs, I love Adele. But seriously, I think it's time we gave it a rest. How many times am I going to have to hear 'Rolling In The Deep' every time I turn on my TV? (Here's one more time for good measure)

How long is that very song going to be playing in one of those hip stores all the kids love to go? I don't know. All I know is enough is enough.
I don't know about you, but excessive song playing eventually ruins the song for me. If I hear it enough times I start to hate it. It kinda goes like this:


1st time: Meh, what's special about this?
4th time: Ok, this song is kinda cool.
6th time: I freaking LOVE this song!
18th time: Hey, it's an old favourite of mine! Don't change the channel!
30th time: Yeah, it's cool. Skip ahead though.
50th time: Again??
70th time: Turn that shit off already!
98th time: Seriously? I'm gonna fucking break that CD, bitch!


So that's basically the life cycle of a song. Keep in mind this doesn't all happen in a short amount of time; it takes weeks. Right now, Rolling In The Deep is somewhere between the 50th and 70th marks. Lady GaGa's Born This Way is between 30 and 50, just to give you a better perspective. I love the women, I really do. But haven't you ever heard "Too much of a good thing is bad?" Even though it may not apply to awesome stuff like ice-cream and cake and money and s... yeah those things, it definitely applies to music.
To make a long story short, please quit playing the same shit over and over again. We can only take so much before our brains start to leak out of our ears like guava puree, and I'm too young to die.