Ever since I decided to cave and get myself a Twitter account (that I actually use), I’ve found blogging to be a bit pointless, since I’m able to get my ranting out using the restrictive 140 character rule. Of course, there are ways to bypass it – Twitlonger, for one. Spamming my followers’ timelines for two. As much as I tend to rant on Twitter, there comes a time when there are just way too many things I feel the need to complain about. This is when I utilize my blog. I didn’t name it “The Soapbox” for nothing.
So, I present to you, dear reader, the 5 things that are bothering me at this very moment:
1. My job. I complain enough about this on a daily basis, so if I complain about it here, I’ll just be beating a dead horse. I do, however, just want to say that if the place would burn down tomorrow, I would only be upset because my mini-Union Jack guitar on my desk burned with it. I found that sucker on Ebay and haven’t been able to find another one since.
2. Music. Yes, music is bothering me at this very moment. Why? Have you heard some of the crap they’re throwing out there these days? Lady GaGa? Justin Bieber? The only saving grace to this new music coming out is that I think the emo kids have all grown up, thus saving the razor blades for the people who really need them. What really bothers me about this isn’t the music itself. No one is forcing me to listen to this crap (if my 4-year-old starts listening to music like this when she gets in that tween stage, I will consider myself a failure as a parent). What’s bothering me about all of this is that I have turned into my parents. I find myself saying phrases like, “This isn’t music. This is noise.” and “What is this on the radio?” and, sometimes, “Turn that shit down!” I have become one of those people who insist that the music of their generation is the best. You know how it goes – your parents did that. “Music will never be as good as it was in the 60s and 70s.” “No band will ever be as good as The Beatles.” “Elvis is rolling over in his grave right now.” “I can’t believe they remade that song and butchered it.” I find myself feeling sorry for these kids growing up right now, because they will have never experienced the amazingness of Britpop blaring through the speakers. Grunge? They don’t know what that was really all about. Nirvana is overrated and, while they were good, there were many bands better, like Soundgarden and Sonic Youth. You love The Pumpkins, you say? Let me tell you the story about when I saw them at Lollapalooza in 1994. By the way, Lollapalooza was once cool. That was before I changed from one who loved arena shows to one who now prefers the biggest venue to catch a show be the House of Blues. Maybe I’m getting bothered by all of it because I’m going through one of my nostalgia trips that tend to pop up sporadically, usually triggered by a song I hear on the radio or a conversation with an old friend. These kids will never know what it’s like to walk into a music store – not a chain music store, either – and buy something just because the clerk recommended them to you. I don’t even think they know what a music store is, unless it’s called iTunes. They missed out on the 90s, and now the voice of their generation is Miley Cyrus. Liam Gallagher was so much better.
3. The inability to run away. I’m not joking. I want to pack up my daughter, gather the essentials and just run away from home. Go on a massive, life-long road trip with no destination. The kind where you don’t know where you’re going until you get there. But I don’t want it limited to wherever I can get via land transportation. I want to take airplanes. No boats – I have an irrational fear of the water, especially big ships, that can only be attributed to watching “The Poseidon Adventure” with my mom when I was a kid. Yes, I have that dream of seeing the world. Who doesn’t? I’m not letting having a child stop me from doing it, either. She’s coming along. We’re going to travel, we’re going to be amongst the people, we’re going to act like the locals, we’re going to learn about different cultures… Just not yet. See, I’ve got this problem with being a “responsible parent” who needs to provide stability in the life of the child, or whatever that new bestselling book on parenting says you’re supposed to do. My problem is that I listen to other people too much instead of taking my own sanity into consideration. This causes me to get that icky anxiety-ridden feeling in the pit of my stomach that makes me a nervous wreck about every little detail of my life, not because I’m scared of it but because I’m scared of what it’s making me become. I’m a free spirit, for God’s sake. I never wanted to be here. I was always bound and determined to get away from here. I don’t want to be like them and end up waking up on my 50th birthday and wondering why I’m still here. I’m only 30, yet I sit here and wonder when I became that person that is stuck in that mundane daily routine – wake up, shower, get dressed, wake up the kid, tote kid off to school, tote myself to work, work 8 hours, drive home, pick up kid, go home, cook supper, clean the kitchen, bathe the kid, put kid to bed, chill out, put myself in bed. That is not me nor is that who I want to be. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get that “free time” after high school. I think that’s the problem with a lot of people. Take a year off after high school to just be carefree, that way when you’re older you won’t regret not doing it.
4. Parents who let their daughters dress like sluts. I’m all for allowing kids to express themselves via their self-style choices. My hair went through many color cycles and my style of dress wasn’t (isn’t?) what one would consider “normal” (if one had the right to deem anything normal, of course). My parents let me express whatever I wanted to express with my clothing, save for the two or three times they tried to get me in jeans that weren’t so baggy or shoes that weren’t so tattered. No matter how outlandish my style choice may have been, they were always comforted in the fact that I never walked out of the house looking like I was going work the corner somewhere. Yes, I often embarrassed my mother, so much to the point where she didn’t make me go anywhere in public with her (like that was supposed to punish me), but at least I had the sense to not walk out of the house with my boobs popping out of my shirt or my buttcheeks showing at the bottom of my shorts. Every single time I venture out of the house, I see one of these little 14-year-olds wearing clothes that were once refined to strippers. I could understand if they changed into these clothes after leaving their house, sneaking so their parents wouldn’t see them dressed in that garb, but 9 times out of 10, when I see them, they’re standing right next to their mother. And another thing that annoys me is when you hear a mother saying her little 15-year-old has a nice body. Mom should be worrying about her 15-year-old daughter’s grades in school, not whether or not she could pull off the g-string bikini you just bought her so she can go down to the beach. People always want to say that pop culture is to blame for these body image issues kids have. I say that these girls’ mothers have as much to do with it, if not more. They prop up their beautiful little princesses, then complain when they end up knocked up by some punk kid when they’re 16. And if they don’t end up pregnant, they end up socially inept because when they venture out into the adult world they realize that, yes, people do indeed value a brain instead of boobs, then they sink into a deep, dark, alcoholic depression because “ZOMG I AM WORTHLESS!” Of course, this doesn’t happen in every case, but when girls are allowed to be slutty when their young, they have no respect for themselves when they get older, and will more than likely be turning tricks for her next binge instead of being an upstanding citizen in society.
5. Left-handed people discrimination. You know, in today’s world, there are rules and laws made to accommodate everyone, except for us left-handed folk. I’m not 100% left-handed; I’m ambidextrous, actually. Many of us are. But there are some things I just cannot do with my right hand. I can’t use a fork or spoon with my right hand. I can’t bat a ball right-handed. My handwriting is just about non-legible when I use my right hand. And I simply cannot use a computer mouse with my right hand. School was horrible. I had a hard time in certain classes in school where the desks were made for right-handed people. You know, the ones where you only have half a desk top and it’s on the right-hand side. I’d have to turn my body completely around to write, which, in turn, made the teachers think I was more interested in socializing than learning about the Pythagorean theorem (which was true, but I did pay attention in class). Another pain was notebooks – all geared towards the righties of the world, with that evil wire ring on the left side of the notebook that cause us left-handed people to have indentions in our wrists. Sure, there was a moment where you could find these glorious left-handed notebooks where the wire ring was actually at the top of the notebook, but I haven’t seen those since high school (not to even mention that they were twice as much as a standard notebook). The same with those three-ring binders. And have you ever seen a left-handed pencil sharpener? Everything in this world is geared towards right-handed people, and frankly, I’m not going to stand for it anymore. I’m tired of being made out to be some sort of freak because I’m not like everyone else. Yes, I have excellent handwriting for a left-handed person, and no, it’s not so difficult to write like that. We’re not clumsy because that’s our nature. We’re clumsy sometimes because there’s this societal standard somewhere that says we are inferior and, therefore, must conform to a right-handed world. So screw you, light switches on the right side of the walls! Screw you, keyboards with the key pads on the right side. Screw you, notebooks and binders. And screw you, Mrs. Keller for that 0 on that geometry test you swore I was cheating on.
