So Sick of It!

Back in April when I invited you, dear friends, to read my blog, I promised that I wouldn’t subject you to weekly rants.  However, there are just times when a person needs to get some things off her chest.  Am I right?

This is one of those times. It’s been coming on for now for a while now, so please bear with me.

Have you seen the TV commercial where the Dad is dipping his kid’s feet in white plaster, and the Mom comes home and says, “What are you doing? What is this?” and the Dad explains that he’s invented an alternative to white gym socks because the ones they’ve been wearing just don’t stay up, and apparently he’s, “Sick of it!” And the kids, says, “Yeah, sick of it!”  And of course the Mom, smarter by half than the both of them together, has bought them a brand of never-fail gym socks and all will be well.  

Well, Ken and I have been saying, “Sick of it!” as a running gag for weeks now.  Mostly, it’s about minor irritations. Like Standard Time. When we turned the clocks back last week, we experienced the inevitable readjustment period for, oh, I’d say, a day and a half, when Ken said, “I’m sick of it!”  And I said, “Yeah, Sick of it!” We actually weren’t fed up with Standard Time, but it made us giggle to say it anyway.

Not all irritations in life are minor as we all know.  But as positive as I try to stay about things like socks that don’t stay up and political ads on TV, they can get on your nerves. So, here we go.

The Top 5 Things I’m Sick Of:

5.            Those tiny scan code stickers stuck onto fruits and vegetables. I hate them!  Just try to pick one off your apple or your pear or your tomato. If you wash your piece of fruit first, the glue sets up and rrriiippppps the skin right off your apple – or worse, the glue leaves sticky residue and you have to cut that bit off. Or maybe you always remember to peel your code stickers off before washing your fruit?  They’re still a total nuisance.  Why?  Because one of those annoying little labels isn’t worth the effort of opening the kitchen trash container to toss it out.  So what do you do with it? You stick it on the side of the kitchen sink until you have a big enough collection of them to justify opening the trash. Or maybe you have a small sticker graveyard behind your flour canister. Either way, those labels are irritating and I'm sick of them.

4.            Flossing. I am so sick of flossing. I have been flossing once a day, every day, for maybe 30 years.  I committed to flossing in early adulthood out of fear of dentistry.  Since then, sure, I’ve come to feel good about the health benefits  of keeping food bits out of dental crevices and I don't mind being my hygienist’s “Mouth of the Month” for two years running.  But there are times after a big night of falling asleep in front of the TV when I just want to get to bed.  Flossing just seems like way too much trouble. 28 teeth?All four surfaces? Really?

3.            Plastic bags that won’t open. You know the ones. Doesn’t matter how many times you turn these bags in all four directions, you just can’t figure out which is the edge that opens. You can rub the plastic between your finger tips or you can blow on a rim hoping that you might find the sweet spot. But by the time you get it open, you’ve wasted a significant chunk of a perfectly good day.

2.            And while we’re talking plastic, has anyone out there figured out which plastic “numbers” can go in the recycle bin? I haven’t.  I toss them all in and let somebody else sort it out at the recycle depot. Frankly, I’m pretty sick of recycling altogether. We have been dedicated recyclers for 25 years or more. I swear we put out more recyclable materials out to the curb than anybody else in the neighborhood.  It feels virtuous. But sometimes I throw a piece of paper in the trash, just in an act of total rebellion.

1.            I reserve my number one spot, biggest “Sick of It!” for writers of newspaper and magazine articles that tell me how to do all things better.  All of these experts expounding on how to do things better than anyone has ever told us how to do these things ever before.  As if we are all in training to perform everything at an Olympian level.  Better eating. Better exercise. Better financial planning. Better nose picking. Better. Better. Better. Surely it must be because we are all such miserable slubs at everything we do.  It’s totally exhausting!

My favorite in the paper this morning is the annual, “How to Avoid Holiday Pounds” which is about how to be behave better at a party at not failing on your diet.  More on this one next week – this deserves its very own blog.

Oh, look, here’s another article in today’s paper that tells you how to use recycled materials to make holiday decorations! Hooray!  Two “Sick of Its” for the price of one!  Maybe it has an idea for using those fruit labels.