Personal Blogs

If there’s one thing that really annoys me it’s people who say ‘if there’s one thing that really annoys me...’, because, let’s face it, if there’s only one thing in your life that really annoys you then you’ve pretty much got it made, haven’t you? What you should really do is shut up whinging about the one thing in your life that really annoys you and start focussing on all the countless billions of other things that don’t annoy you. Or ‘count your blessings’, as my dear old annoying mum used to annoyingly say.

Now as far as things that really annoy me go, I can honestly and confidently claim that there are literally thousands of them, ranging from the trivial – like sipping from a cup that you think is coffee and then remembering you’d made tea a fraction of a second after your brain’s confused your taste buds by sending them the ‘incoming coffee’ message – all the way up to the major, like, say, America’s political shenanigans in the middle-east or Greg Wallace being on TV again. If I’m perfectly honest, some days I find myself being really annoyed by so many things that I end up being really annoyed about there not being enough hours in a day for being annoyed. Like that old joke about the man who hated his wife, the only logical solution would be get up earlier and go to bed later, but that’s not only annoyingly impractical but also implies increased levels of tiredness, which tends to make me grumpy at the best of times, let alone when I’m already feeling annoyed.

And speaking of getting up earlier, that’s another thing that really annoys me - waking up. Why the hell do we have to wake up in the mornings? It’s horrible. Sometimes, if there’s an alarm going off to wake you up on purpose for something annoying like work or getting the kids to school, it’s extra horrible, but even on days when you wake up naturally it’s still completely horrible. I mean, there you are, perfectly happy one minute fast asleep, having lovely dreams about lovely things or possibly horrible dreams about horrible things, and the next minute you’re aware that you’re not in that lovely or horrible place at all but in your bed, and it’s time to get up and start being annoyed again.

Okay, it’s marginally better to wake up from a horrible dream than a good one, I’ll admit, but is it worth the annoyance of knowing that your brain is subconsciously trying to work out your anxieties by offering you horrible metaphors in your sleep that you’re incapable of decoding when you’re awake? I mean, if even your own subconscious is trying to highlight how shallow and stupid you are by showing and telling you stuff that goes straight over your head then what hope have you got in expecting any better treatment from anyone else? None whatsoever – and how annoying is that? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing I can imagine that’s worse than waking up is not waking up, which, let’s face it, is on the agenda at some point whether I like it or not. OH JOY...

And as for that whole dreaming thing – I bought a book on dream interpretation once and what a waste of 50p that was! I’m never going back to that charity shop again, I can tell you – the robbing bastards. Basically there seem to be two meanings to most dreams: 1) You’re going to have some unexpected good fortune (these dreams usually involve fishing) or 2) You’re subconsciously worried about something (these dreams usually involve fishing and the fish getting away). The only conclusions I came to were that the author was probably J. R. Hartley or someone else equally obsessed with angling, and that most of us spend most of our time subconsciously worrying about stuff. The latter I knew anyway – it was why I shelled out 50p on the book in the first place. And just to make the whole exercise even more annoying the book then went on to explain that many dreams are ‘dreams of opposites’ – i.e. that what they seem to be saying is precisely the opposite of what they actually mean. I interpret this as meaning that if you have a ‘good fortune’ dream it probably just means the same thing that all the other dreams mean – i.e. that you’re subconsciously worrying about something and your subconscious, being the contrary bugger that he/she/it is, is just trying to put a happy spin on it.
 
Oh, and that’s another thing that really annoys me – people who try to put a happy spin on everything. Why would the annoying gits want to do that? If life has taught me anything it’s that most clouds DON’T have a silver lining, and that trouble doesn’t come in threes but by the bucket-load. I’ve no problem with people trying to delude themselves – I expend a huge amount of energy on that myself most days, which is probably why my subconscious has such a hard time of it – but the last thing I want or need when I’m having a bloody good rant at the world is someone offering me platitudes about ill-winds or gutters and stars. Try walking along looking up at the stars and see just how long it takes before you’re scraping dog-egg off the instep of your trainer. Go on, I dare you. And you probably won’t even be able to see any stars anyway, unless it’s the ridiculously named ‘ursa minor’ constellation (another example of someone being unreasonably upbeat and delusional – seeing a giant, mythical beast where everyone else just sees a dented saucepan), what with all the light pollution and stuff. Twenty minutes digging crap out of the tread in your plimsolls with a teaspoon, for that? I ask ya!

Personally, I’d rather keep my eyes in the gutter and avoid the turds. Who knows, you might even spot a fifty-pee someone’s dropped, which is enough to buy a disappointingly annoying book in most charity shops.

In other news:

The cash machine up the road has just eaten my debit card. No good reason for it – there’s money in the account and I never go overdrawn – the bastard just did it to annoy me. And it worked. PAH!