Day Three: Pet Peeves

I’m a pretty happy, laid back person. Most everything that happens in life is dealwithable (yeah, that’s a made up word. I’m a writer. I do what I want.) Most things don’t count as a catastrophe in my life, and I can laugh off any issue that arises. But there are things. There are things that irritate my soul and get under my skin and make me swear more than normal. I dislike traffic and being talked to or bothered before I’m fully awake. I dislike when things don’t go as planned. I dislike rain and gloom and really just about every form of precipitation that exists. But these are minor annoyances that flit in and back out of my day to day that I can shrug my shoulders about and move on. There are a few things that are unforgivable and do more than irritate my soul. . . They actually hurt. They bring me down for more than just a moment and effect my outlook on life for awhile.

Day Three: what are your top three pet peeves?

First, I guess we’ll start with dishonesty.

As a child, I was taught to lie. I mentioned it in one of my posts (or maybe more than one, now that I think about it) how I could then and likely can still now lie well enough to pass a lie detector test. Growing up in an extremely disfunctional home, we were made to lie to authority figures and anyone else who may ask about the habits and day to day life our parents lived. Realizing how hard it was to keep all the different stories straight, and feeling like I was enabling their lifestyle choices, I put my foot down at the age of 12. I made it known I had told my last lie to cover up the things that were going on, so if there was something that they didn’t want known they best lie to me too and not involve me. It felt like a huge weight came off of my shoulders. There were issues because I was being defiant, but at the end of the day, I knew that they couldn’t fault me for wanting to be an honest person. I will not lie to save anyone’s ass, even my own. Ask the police officer who pulled me over for going 18mph over the speed limit. He gave me an out. “Ma’am, is maybe your speedometer broken?” “No, officer. I just wasn’t paying attention to my speed until I saw you behind me.” The look on his face was pretty priceless. He also didn’t hit me for reckless driving, just for speed. If you are doing something that you know you shouldn’t be doing, something that you are so ashamed of that you have to lie about doing it. . . Maybe you shouldn’t do it. In the end, honesty always ends up working out better.

I suppose second on my list would have to be intolerance. That covers about everything you can imagine in regards to people’s differences. Religion, race, sexual preference. . . If you’re different, fanfuckingtastic. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you for knowing yourself well enough to say you are a vegan or you don’t like any color of clothing but black or you’re a girl who likes other girls or you are a girl who should have been a boy. Applause here, please. Because there are people who live day to day and can’t figure themselves out well enough to settle on a career, let alone a sexual preference. People who don’t want kids or people who want 15, people who only want to care for animals and not other humans, people who choose to live in a cabin in the woods and not interact with society. People make their choices about who they are and what they do or don’t do and who in the actual fuck am I to judge? Is it hypocritical to say I have no tolerance for intolerance? Because that person is making a choice to actively hate another person for their choices? Maybe. But it hurts me to see others judged and ridiculed for their life choices. The only tolerance I can give to the intolerant is to walk away from them and not allow them to be a part of my life.

Finally, we come to my biggest bitch about things that bug me, and that is deliberate ignorance. There’s a distinct difference between plain old ignorance, which is to say the lack of knowledge about something, and deliberate ignorance. I think intolerance and deliberate ignorance go hand in hand, so that’s perhaps where this comes from. Deliberate ignorance is the refusal to learn about something. It’s the decision that you are right without doing your research and ignoring the facts. Hatred of an entire race or religion is deliberate ignorance. Saying all homeless people put themselves there is deliberate ignorance. It’s okay to not know about or not understand something. But to decide that you then are not going to educate yourself about the thing/person/situation at hand is a completely different problem. It’s saying that it doesn’t matter what the facts are – you have made your judgement, your decision, and it is without flaw. And to then belittle anyone who tries to educate you instead or hearing them out – unacceptable.

There are other things that rank high on my list – bad attitudes and feeling entitled and laziness. . . I can sum it all up. Live and let live, work hard at being your best, take time to observe and learn, and for fucks sake look on the bright side. . . This life is too damn short to concentrate on the negative, to allow others and their choices drag you down and consume you.