This Weeks Top 5 Piss Offs

Since this pandemic came about, I have been trying to practice gratitude by writing out 10 things every day that I’m grateful for. I apparently ran out of gratefulness on day nine and started to repeat myself in my daily journal. It became irritating, re-writing the same things that I was grateful for the day before-so much in fact, that I started writing ‘See yesterday’s gratefulness list’.

To break up the monotony of my gratitude (which has included being thankful for hot tea, cold beer, blue skies and healthy bowel movements), I decided to list just a few things every day that are grating on my nerves. I have had to keep it down to five.

My top 5 piss offs this week that are grating on my nerves-in no particular order.

P1.

Living with someone who thinks dressing up is wearing a sweatshirt that doesn’t have mustard and BBQ stains on it. I’m all for the relaxed look, after all, if you’re working from home why not take advantage of some of those comforts? The problem with this theory? It relates to people that have an assortment of relaxed attire. The key word here is assortment. Long before this global virus had us hunkering away at home, the guy I live with had exactly three lounge around ‘outfits’. To be fair, he also has duplicates of each of the said outfits. We have the grey hoody with red lettering, paired with the dark blue over sized sweats. There is the dark blue hockey sweatshirt paired with the dark blue, over sized sweats (or if they are completely covered in cat hair and BBQ sauce, then the secondary grey sweats will do). And finally, we have the grey shorts with grey hoody. If I thought it was irritating seeing the exact same outfit every single effing weekend for almost 10 years, I obviously could not have predicted just what it would be like to see the exact same outfit every single day for 51 days in a row! To be fair, he put on a pair of jeans 4 days ago and a nice sweater after I commented that ‘I was so glad he dressed up for me by putting on a clean sweatshirt’…

P2.

Being 55 years old and not 20 years old going through this pandemic. Pisses me off. I am sure there are loads of people that would argue this point with me, but since it’s my personal ‘pissed off’ list, there’s no argument and I am right…(I started to write out why I was right and came to the conclusion that I may have been slightly wrong…which has pissed me off even more).

P3.

Baking. It pisses me off. Anyone who can make pancakes that are edible or bake cookies or muffins that aren’t burnt, is a savant in my books. I can cook. Baking is for those that have patience and measure things and shit. I don’t have time for that…even during a pandemic.

P4.

Ordering something on line and having a set date of arrival for said items, only to be told that unfortunately they were wrong in their estimation of arrival date. Logging onto the account to see that they LIED to me!!! They didn’t REALLY ship the items as they TOLD me they did 2 weeks ago on their tracking app. “Oops! We apologize for the inconvenience. We will email you to let you know when your new arrival date is arranged”. Inconvenience?!! Let’s see, is that a new expression for “we lied”?! Let me try that one out the next time I’m put in a situation where I feel a lie would be appropriate:                                                                                                                  

Question: “Margaret, did you drink all of the beer”?

Answer: “Why my goodness, it does seem to be all gone! We apologize for the      inconvenience”….(This possibly could work…).

P5.

Over thinking the grocery store trip. This pisses me off. What used to be an incredibly enjoyable experience for me, has now become a ridiculously particular and peculiar event. Donning a mask, I enter the store where I am met by a cheerful cart cleaner who has an uncanny resemblance to Shaun Murphy from The Good Doctor (although I’ve only watched the show once and could be wrong).  He asks if I need hand sanitizer. I ask him if he hasn’t already sanitized the carts. He says yes, he already has done so. I ask him why I would need hand sanitizer if he already has sanitized the carts. He says it’s just if I want it…

I stare at him. He stares back at me. I am smiling (he can’t tell). He is smiling (maybe), but I can’t tell. I decline the invitation to partake in his hand sanitizer. I bid adieu to Shaun, take three steps into the store and pull out my own hand sanitizer (acutely aware that if the cart handle wasn’t sanitized properly, that I now have a pocketful of Covid-19). I duck around the corner and quickly re-sanitize the cart handle, not wanting to make The Good Doctor feel inadequate by scrutinizing his one and only job.

Furtively glancing around, my mask firmly in place, I pray that my glasses don’t fog up again like the last grocery trip where I had to remove my glasses and subsequently ended up with Bean-O instead of Advil and beef soup bones instead of beef short ribs (which, in retrospect, I remember thinking how odd it was that beef short ribs had gone down so much in price); I head to the far end of the store.

There are arrows on the floor and occasionally someone will come onto the intercom explaining that we are to do our shopping the way the arrows are pointing. I notice there’s no music-they want us in and out of there quickly. I briefly look at my shopping list and rush up and down the aisles, passing people in two way traffic because they don’t seem to understand what the effing arrows mean. These are the morons who need to stay home. As I pass by one of these spreaders, I silently mouth ‘asshole’ and am pleased to recognize that I can do this to anyone whilst I wear a mask (making a mental note to myself that perhaps I should occasionally don one at home) without them realizing that I am merrily deprecating each one of them. I continued my trip, silently mouthing some delightfully awful swears, which I won’t write down here, but that I can tell you, really cheered me up!

My grocery store never seems have everything that is on my list, or if they do, I rarely will ask because I am always in a great hurry to get out of that cesspool and get home so that we can spend the next glorious hour or so washing our groceries -the effing highlight of the week. Thereafter, we can look through the pantry at label less cans of food and play the game ‘guess what we’re having for dinner?’. What a bonding time that is! A date almost.

So that’s it…well, that’s all I’m going to write for now. Going to put on my mask and go talk with the guy I live with now…😉.