start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

"Actually, Fucking Douchebag is my dog's name."

Oh the messenger got the worst of it (but he was fine). I was annoyed more than anything.

One good thing about summer is that people have their car windows rolled down so they can hear me yelling, "This is a crosswalk, motherfucker!" as they buzz me and my toddler trying to cross the street.

Very true! It's easy to overlook life's little gifts.

one thing that bugs me a lot lately is unnecessary documents or tools in work. like i feel like it's a symptom of people trying to use technology to do the most basic easy thing that doesn't need a tool. there are people i work with who'd come back with a proposal to tie a couple of wooden spoons together if you gave them a shovel and told them to dig a hole.

it's not that i'm against tech solutions, i'm v much in favour, but people can be as stultified as any luddite by their own blind hunt for progress.

you seen any of Silicon Valley?

or met my mother?

Altogether too much entirely rational anger against pedestrian-endangering assholes showing up here in the irrational anger thread.

That's pretty much my constant state of mind so I have to irrationalize it somehow or I'll just lose it completely.

irrationally angry at people on public transit who hang on with two hands. i'd like to say that it's because i don't want to smell two armpits, but it bothers me even when i'm well away

increasingly irrationally annoyed at peoples' tattoos. they're 99% stupid, but it's nothing to do with me after all. *yells at clouds*

Well coming home from the bus today while crossing the side street, not the busy ass crazy bananas street but the god damn side street, with Ivy I had to scurry out of the way of five bros on bike share bikes who blew through the stop sign so I'm buying a car and moving to the suburbs fuck it.

the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of bros

Bike shares are simultaneously a really great and awesome idea (anyone can access a bike anytime!) and a really terrible and shitty idea (anyone can access a bike anytime without having demonstrated any ability to handle a bike around other people or ever even thinking about that scenario for like two seconds as if it were a thing they might actually do sometime!).

Reframing regular old meat 'n' potatoes A as IA helps me keep perspective. I'm constantly aggrieved by everything ever so it's good to occasionally recontextualize and remember that roughly 99% of the things that give me grief are seriously nbd.

Although most people who use public thoroughfares really probably should be euthanized asap, of course.

I use the bike share program all the time and I love it and the pack of bros was an anomaly IME but ugh they were so obnoxious. The one who came closest to hitting us saw us at the last minute and I could see the look of terror on his face so I'm just hoping as a result he has a sense of deep unease and nightmares he can't quite remember.

footnotes or appendices in novels really annoy me. both when they're almost entirely unnecessary, and even more so when they're a mix of necessary and unncessary.

i'm reading "to the lighthouse" at the moment and my edition has a really stupid appendix. the kind of one where like "teapot" will have a number beside it and you think "hmm well i know what a teapot is but maybe this is a hidden meaning" and then it says "a household instrument used to hold tea, a hot liquid drink popular in the british isles"

or the footnote takes the opportunity to give you an intepretation that's subjective. attention spans are short enough already without this shit.

i mean unless it's something deep with obscure language and references

I just got what looks to be a physical postal version of the Nigerian scam in my mailbox from Spain. & left wondering if people are just getting too used to getting them through the email that it might work if they go back to making them physical. Does mean they're having to pay some postage but if they get 10% back of €350,700 from a number of people then it might just work out worthwhile. Is completely free on email though isn't it?

& can't get over the nagging idea that since it is postal it might just be true. Which is presumably one up for them. So once i give them my bank details, whatever else they need to steal my i.d. and then presumably the €35,070 up front I get to keep €314,930 all to myself.
Could really use it, wonder how I can come up with €35,070?

Flip the script and tell them that your rich uncle will vouch for you and send them the money at a later date.

& forgot would need to change the order of my name around by deed poll presumably to be able to claim. Forename & surname interchanged

People who eat hot, smelly food on trains should be pitched off while the train is moving at top speed. Some guy sat down next to me last night on my way home and cracked open a foil container of spaghetti and meatballs that smelled like he'd bought it three days before and left it outside in the sun to ripen. I felt like leaning over and vomiting directly into it.

footnotes or appendices in novels really annoy me. both when they're almost entirely unnecessary, and even more so when they're a mix of necessary and unncessary.

i'm reading "to the lighthouse" at the moment and my edition has a really stupid appendix. the kind of one where like "teapot" will have a number beside it and you think "hmm well i know what a teapot is but maybe this is a hidden meaning" and then it says "a household instrument used to hold tea, a hot liquid drink popular in the british isles"

or the footnote takes the opportunity to give you an intepretation that's subjective. attention spans are short enough already without this shit.

i mean unless it's something deep with obscure language and references

― doing my Objectives, handling some intense stuff (LocalGarda), Tuesday, July 14, 2015 7:16 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Norton Anthologies were the worst for this. I got the feeling that annotations were the result of a summer intern project or something.

xpost Add 'people who eat hot, smelly food in an office workspace' to that list. I'm not sure which situation-specific method of dispatch should be used on them, though. Fed into a paper shredder, maybe?

hahaha "teapot" footnote OTM

Pretty sure 'manspreading' is becoming more prevalent on my commute. The other day when it got ridiculously hot in London, a guy plonked himself between me and another passenger, widening his legs so far apart I had to sit sideways with one arsecheek off the seat. To top it off, he drank three cans of Strongbow and I hate the smell of it.

Next time, reach over and punch him in the balls.

ugh yes - just sit within the lines of the seats! the tube seats are p big. also hate people playing games on their phone and waving their elbows around.

on the footnotes, i swear they should add one in for like "veranda-23" and then when you look at 23 it just says "hahaha it's just a veranda you fool"

IA at the opposite of what you all had been complaining about in regard to pedestrians vs automobiles.

There's a busy two-lane one-way street that separates one building of my kids' daycare from another. The crossing guard is pretty good about getting out there to stop traffic, but on some days, Beeps and I are left on our own to fend the raging torrent.

Not a big deal. There's a light up the block and a light down the block, so the traffic comes in waves. However, like this morning, we'll get a straggler who decides to be such a Good Samaritan, coming to a dead stop and trying to wave us on. Meanwhile, another wave surges behind him.

Keep in mind this is a two-lane avenue, so even if traffic was to stop behind him, there's still the other lane to traverse. It's dangerous and for us to cross out of turn like that sets a really bad example to the Beepster holding my hand next to me. Meanwhile, the surge arrives and the driver gets all mad and peels out down the road because we didn't take advantage of his good intentions. Now I know how you broads must feel when you don't smile after a fella suggests that you do.

And here's one for the irrationally embarrassed thread: Sometimes, after I drop off Beeps, the crossing guard will run out into the intersection and hold the stop sign up just for me, the 41-year-old who's been crossing streets since at least 1990 or so.

Sometimes footnotes can work, I mean if you're David Foster Wallace or Douglas Adams or something you can use them for amusing asides or over-do them on purpose or what have you. It is annoying when the footnotes are kept in a weird section towards but not right at the back of the book, and they're numbered in a strange way, so for example the numbers reset on each chapter so it's really difficult to find the one you want.

the confidence man was one book where the footnotes were fascinating and an organic part of reading it.

That's funny because I was about to say that my copy of Moby Dick does the whole 'teapot' thing a lot of the time.

xxxpost As I've said for the longest time, politeness has no place in street traffic interactions. Just follow the rules and go when it's your turn to go. Save the 'no, please, after you!'-s for situations where everyone is on foot and well away from motorized vehicles.

Is that mid-block with a crosswalk or without one?

We have a long drag in our town that has traffic lights with crosswalks on each end and two unlit crosswalks (just paint and signs) somewhere in the middle. I wish I could say "It's totally insane how no one stops when there are people waiting at the crosswalk!" but sometimes I'm guilty of it too. I mean, I still occasionally blow right through and then end up smacking myself in the head when I realize there was someone standing there. I feel like the worst shithead when I do that. I try to be real conscientious about it, but invariably after I stop, two or three cars will blow through coming the other direction before someone in that lane stops and the pedestrians are able to cross.

Well, that's another thing. We're in the middle of the block, so technically, we're jaywalking.

It's sweet that the driver is stopping for a little girl and her daddy, but WE'RE BREAKING THE LAW. JUST GO.

Obligatory mention of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker for those with a footnote fetish.

I was behind a Tesla the other day, and the driver stopped and allowed literally everybody and everything to cross, even not at crosswalks, corners, etc. Other cars, bikes, pedestrians ... It's one of those things where no doubt the driver thought they were being a good citizen, but in fact they (I assume obliviously) ended up backing up traffic.

My latest bugaboo - or maybe I've mentioned it before, because it pisses me off so much - is people who take corners so fast that they essentially cut into your lane, forcing you to stop your car about five or so feet before the intersection, for fear of some idiot clipping the front corner of your car as they bisect your lane at a 45 degree angle.

Having to negotiate your way around people on a busy high street in tourist season. Where somebody is standing blocking a part of a street and you try to step around them only to discover that somebody isn't going to accommodate you taking up space on the street when the normal thing to do would be to just adjust their trajectory slightly.
& the amount of people who just stop right in front of you or cut straight across you without notice.
& adding into that people jaywalking with phones, or whatever else. 4 people or more walking abreast of each other .
Like tourist season means that at any moment a person could be coming at you from any direction and not taking in that you're already trying not to walk into other people.
Also dizziness of cold/flu doesn't help things.

Oh, people fucking love walking abreast.

My latest bugaboo - or maybe I've mentioned it before, because it pisses me off so much - is people who take corners so fast that they essentially cut into your lane, forcing you to stop your car about five or so feet before the intersection, for fear of some idiot clipping the front corner of your car as they bisect your lane at a 45 degree angle.

Ugh, this.

On the same strip described above, at one end there are two right-hand turn lanes to get onto a larger road. I always take the leftmost of the right-hand lanes, which according to the lines on the road, will put me into the middle of three lanes. About one in ten times that I take that turn, the person adjacent to me in the rightmost turn lane ALSO makes a play for the middle lane, basically forcing me into the left-hand lane to avoid a crash. About a month ago there was a COP behind the other guy when this happened and I was like "thank god, we are going to see some justice in this world, because that's a moving violation right there" but the cop just pulled around us both and sped off somewhere, no lights or nothing.

abreast walkers who dont move into single drive me fucking craaaaazy

my coworker and i walk twice a day & the amount of groups who would happily plow right through us is ridiculous

there's a v handsome tall guy i see most days who walks with a huge group, but he wears one of those stupid samurai topknot hairdos and he is the LOUDEST talker ever and he is an inconsiderate non-mover so his handsomeness is now basically moot

I was like "thank god, we are going to see some justice in this world, because that's a moving violation right there" but the cop just pulled around us both and sped off somewhere

agh

once I watched this cyclist weave in and out of pedestrians on the pavement (I think cycling on the pavement outside a bike lane is illegal in the UK but cbw, too lazy to check), on a stretch of pavement with limited visibility, phone to the ear with one hand, narrowly missing a whole bunch of people including an elderly woman with a walking stick

and then two cops came walking the other way, and I didn't expect an arrest or anything but I thought at least they'd tell him off but no, just strolled on past

tbf they were probably Community Support Officers i.e. not actually cops and can do fuck all, but still, it would have been nice if they'd done something other than smile benignly past him

people who cycle on the pavement are reprehensible. words can't express my disdain for them.

I have to cross a small roundabout right near my house each evening on a reasonably busy suburban st. It was dark, and pissing with rain the other night but that didnt stop one lady from approaching, and tearing thru, the roundabout/intersection at 60+ without even remotely pausing for breath. Good thing I'd pointedly not crossed when I saw her coming. Its raining you cow, slow the fruck down!

Well, that's another thing. We're in the middle of the block, so technically, we're jaywalking.

It's sweet that the driver is stopping for a little girl and her daddy, but WE'RE BREAKING THE LAW. JUST GO.

― pplains, Tuesday, July 14, 2015 10:54 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh my fucking god. These people deserve to die, I don't care how well intended. I never experienced this this until I moved to western Mass. When plastering your car with COEXIST bumperstickers fails to assuage your white liberal guilt the next step is apparently self-flagellation for driving in the first place. HEY IDIOT: there were three people patiently waiting to cross, and now there are THIRTY in the traffic jam behind you. Oh look—the light ahead just turned yellow again! FUCK YOU, STAY HOME.

btw "COEXIST" with who, exactly? The other lady in the Subaru?

xp lololololol okay that's a good rant, worthy of this thread

I never experienced this this until I moved to western Mass.

lol and otm.

Actually, I learned a few weeks back that Chicago is notoriously behind the curve when it comes to yielding to pedestrians in any context. Iirc Boston and Los Angeles were held up as paragons of cities where drivers let people cross, where it's just been drummed into drivers to yield. In Chicago, it takes effort to get people to stop even when they even put up a sign in the middle of the street, with pictures and words and everything, compelling drivers to stop for pedestrians under penalty of fine.

Speaking of IA, I don't know if it's anger so much as bemusement every time I see a sign on the highway that says "Hit a worker, up to $10,000 fine or a year in jail." As if they need to incentivize people not to hit other people with their car. "Careful, you're on the highway, you don't want to run anybody over!"

I'm almost to the point of thinking the government should issue a stipend to law-abiding citizens for not being flagrant assholes. When appeals to morality and the common good fall on deaf ears, it's time to dole out the green.