Pet Peeves

While sitting at a couple of cafés, I came up with a list of Pet Peeves. I made the first part of the list in the US. I did it partially as therapy.

In general, bad manners and rudeness, but where to start?

1) the old classic, spitting on the side walk. If you need to hawk a wad of phlegm, at least make sure that ball of green goo goes in the street or the bushes where nobody will see it or step in it.
2) broken glass on the road or sidewalk

Next are some pet peeves involving annoying sounds. I never have been able to tune out distracting sounds and sights. I can't ignore little noises most people seem to tune out. For me, they get louder and more irritating each time the sound is repeated.

3) Loud eating noises:

LIP SMACKING -- Gross! Is that an Asian custom? I see Asian immigrants doing it more than natives.
Slurping Again, mostly Asian tourists on a bottom tier budget vacation package and new Asian immigrants of lower social caste do it, and it is usually with soup, ramen noodles, or coffee. Somebody said it was to cool their food,
but my food is hot too, and I don't subject others to that noise.

Sucking sounds. I went to a coffee shop the other day, and an old lady sat 2 tables away and immediately started attacking a cookie. She would peel the plastic wrapper bit by bit and alternate between nibbling the cookie and doing something that sounded like sloppy fellatio to the inside of the wrapper. It took her nearly an hour to finish and she was busy working at it the whole time. It was a frosted cookie, and the wrapper had frosting and crumbs stuck to the inside of it. The fact that I had headphones saved my sanity and her life that day.
tapping and scraping eating utensils against the vessel, especially in public: plate, dish, bowl, cup
If you are so poor that you need the sustenance form the last morsels of food that are stuck to the inside of your bowl at a restaurant, you should probably be saving your money by eating home-cooked food at home, preferably in private so you don't annoy your housemates.
saying "AHHHH!" after every sip
Eating potato chips in public with open mouth. This happens most at sandwich shops and is done by college age or younger people who still have a lot of irritating little idiosyncrasies and lack social skills. I don't eat at sandwich shops. The most obnoxious way to eat potato chips is to rattle the bag, stick you hand in it, rattle it some more, get exactly one potato chip, crash it in your mouth with you lips open so it makes that irritating crunching sound, and finally smack your open hands against your jeans or shirt and wipe noisily. Repeat that sequence of irritating sounds around 1000 times. Rattle, smack, rattle again, and wipe -- for each potato chip in the bag.

4) Loud nose blowing in public. If you really need to take care of a runny nose, wipe it quietly. If that doesn't work, excuse yourself to the toilet and do it where nobody will hear you. If you really can't avoid doing it around other people, GET IT OVER WITH! Don't sit there blowing noisily for 5 minutes. Cold season is here already.
5) cell phones and video teleconferences (Skype) at cafes or enclosed public space.
6) talking too loudly in public (indoors)
7) Proposing a toast and clinking glasses before every sip of a single alcoholic beverage. "Cheers!" Clink! Sip!"Cheers!" Clink! Sip!"Cheers!" Clink! Sip!"Cheers!" Clink! Sip!"Cheers!" Clink! When it's a pint of beer, that's a lot of toasts. It's excruciating and I'll never drink with you again. I hate you Andrew.
8 ) When you're at a restaurant and your date reaches across the table and helps herself to a bite of your food. Worse, when she does it over and over, as if she didn't notice your glare the first time she did it. If you want to sample my food, ask me and I'll set some aside on a dish or on your own plate. If that's not enough, order your own. But never touch my food. I didn't have enough to eat growing up, and when I did have food, people were always stealing it. It still bothers me.
9 ) Writing "loose" or "looser" when you mean "lose" or "loser." Why does everybody do that?
10 ) Smileys when I'm trying to make a numbered list 18)
11 ) driving a car when a bicycle or even walking is faster. Bad driving habits such as nuisance driving, cruising, and idling. All this does is make a bad situation worse. America has some severe traffic congestion problems, and San Fran is one of the most congested. And that's without getting into the ethics of wasting petroleum products obtained from war-torn regions of the world or AGW.
12) Nuisance barking. If you can't keep your dog reasonably quiet (multiple sessions of more than 15 minutes of non-stop yapping per day), you shouldn't have one.

I'm half deaf. If these things bother me, they must bother people with good hearing even more. It can't be "just me," right?

Fashion pet peeves of the day:
Here are some sartorial mistakes that hurt my eyes as I sat here and typed:

13 ) Acid washed blue jeans (including the high waistband that goes halfway up the chest) from the 1980s and cut off shirts from the 80s. A 20-something year old female German tourist wearing this get-up just walked by. These outfits were on display a few weeks ago in the window of the clothing store "Forever 21."
14 ) Sleeveless shirts with flabby arms. A decrepit Baby Boomer just walked by sporting a sleeveless vest over a sleeveless shirt. He doesn't have the arms to pull off the look. The effect was of reverse biceps that look like turkey waddle.

15 ) Drumming on the table.
16 ) Extreme extroverts who can't go without talking in between breaths. Being in the presence of someone with this diarrhea of the mouth is exhausting, especially when you can't leave. Silence is a good thing. Why does it make some people uncomfortable?

I noticed all of the above within the past week (summer 2014 San Francisco), and it's impossible not to encounter some of it when going out. I ignore it all as much as I can, but some of it just too hard to tune out.

17) Hats with animal ears. These things just will not go away. Unless the person wearing it is younger than 10 months old, she looks like a like a mentally disabled person. The other day day, a 60 something year old woman was wearing one of those things, and she and her non-mentally handicapped 'helper' sat at a table near me.
I have no idea what the appeal is. They think the hat says fun-loving and care-free, still-young-at-age-60, but all anybody else sees is Ree-Tee.

18 ) Subwoofers in apartments. In college, I was in a dorm and it seemed like half the students had subwoofers. They played them all day every day. It was Hell. I've avoided living in apartments all my life because of that - until now. Thankfully nobody in my building has them.

19) Creaky Girl. It's also known as "Vocal Fry." New names for an epidemic vocal affectation that plagues American college aged females. It"s the "Valley Girl" sound of the 2010s. To my disgust, it has spread to Europe and to some males. It fills me with rage whenever I hear it. At work down the hall from me, there is a male who does this, in French, and I want to murder him every time he talks.

I heard it again!!!!! Some twit tourist was doing it!!! Google 'vocal fry' and listen to some recordings if you don't know what it is.
Just like those animal hats with cat ears, you might think it's vaguely cutesy for the first 1/2 second you hear it, but then you realize that it is only appropriate for 1 year olds and adults with Down's Syndrome.

What makes me even madder is that you can't even criticize it without being called 'sexist.' Fans of this annoying speech pattern jump on anybody who complains and say they hate women and can't stand the fact that women are allowed to express themselves in modern society. Where were these defenders of teenaged voice patterns in the late 1990s when "Burned Out Stoner Voice" was popular among college aged males?

Whether it's a boy or a girl doing it, it grates across my nerves and causes me physical pain. It makes me want to kill. It sounds both childish (like an 11 year old trying to sound like an adult) and extremely irritating. Apparently Britney Spears or the Kardassian scum of Reality TV started this obnoxious fad.

Some morons at a bottom tier university wrote articles in a non-peer un-reviewed psychology journal about it claiming that 11 year old girls started it. They further claim that common suburban 11 year old girls are linguistic visionaries and trend setters and that in 1/2 a generation, we all will be speaking in 'Vocal Fry.'

Valley Girl Speak started in the 1970s and has never stopped sounding stupid. Teenie-bopper injection of the word 'like' every other word hasn't stopped sounding stupid. Vocal Fry/Creaky Gril Voice will always sound stupid too. I wish these people could hear how they sound and could experience the pain they inflict on anybody who hears them.

19) Neem body lotion. Very popular among women in the US. Over the years, I've blown off dozens of women who were only being friendly or flirting because I thougth they had a hygiene problem. This popular scentf smells very strong on hot summer days. For years, I thought it was crotch rot. The smell is very similar. Why so girls where this stuff? It's an insect repellent and fungicide. It's also a people repellent.

Now for some French ones.

20) "Ahh Buhhhhhh ouaui." This French phrase is like finger nails on a chalk board. For the most part, uneducated people here do it. It sounds closest to somebody doing an imation of someone with a mental disability in English. Lenny from Mice and Men I think made similar idiotic vocalizations.

21) Stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. French sidewalks tend to be elbow-to-elbow crowded. People just stop and block the flow of traffic.

 

Pet Peeves Continued.
22) Cigarette smoking in public. Butts on the ground. They don't biodegrade. The amount of cigarette smokers in France is shocking. It's like 1980s USA. I was exposed to the chain_smoking of a chronically unemployed father during the first 17 years of my life. During that time, I became extremely senstized to the smell. I was so sick that I missed more days of school than the kid who died of cystic fibrosis. At least I got to tell my father "I told you so" as he lay dying of cancer.

So even now, when I'm too close to somebody smoling cigarette tobaco, I immediately become nauseous. Not only is it a nasty habit, but I don't even get it. If you're going to become addicted to a drug, at least pick one that gets you high. The only psychoactive effect cigarettes have is to annoy everybody who can smell them.

If you're going to smoke something in public, it had better be marijuana. I'd even prefer second hand meth fumes to cigarette smoke. That's how disgusting it is to non-tobaco smokers.

23) People who "do" food. "I'll do a melted cheese tuna sandwhich." "I'll do a medium white chocolate laté." It sounds gross. There really are people who perform sexual acts with food items - cucumbers, melons with a hole cut in them, etc.

24) People (almost always an extreme extrovert) who assume I'm shy because I won't talk to them. Most conversations are nonsense that is forgotten over the next day anyway. I was at a party the other day and this woman kept trying to make eye contact with me. I knew I didn't want to speak to her the minute I saw her. She was obviously an extrovert, and I didn't like her 'energy.' I always avoided her eye. As I was trying to turn to leave and get away from her, she literally jumps in front of me and starts doing her introduction. Worse, she lectures me on how I should talk to people and make friends and don't be shy. That's when she crossed the line from being annoying to being hated. Briefly, she was a know-it-all YUPPIE. She was a psychoanalyst and was bragging about how she was going to "go live in wilderness in the desert for one year" and write some crappy self-improvement book on "the 6 pillars of the mind." Her desert turned out to be a fancy cottage in Yuppie retirement town of Sedona Arizona or some other YUPPIE-fied quasi-New Age tourist town. I didn't say anything to her about my own background or anything I have done. Just mumbled "yeah ok yeah huh" a few times hoping she would go away faster. I never looked at her while she spoke or I spoke; but she wouldn't take the hint. I didn't like her. I hate yuppies.

How do you just tell somebody to fsck off? I almost told her to put her life plans in her blog. That's what I did, and I don't go up to strangers and start telling them my life story. That's what blogs are for. You can read it or ignore it. You can't ignroe somebody who is in your face and won't take a hint. When I see somebody I want to know, I talk to them. But I hated her the minute I saw her and was avoiding her for a good reason. I'm too polite to say all that to her. She even handed me her card and said we should keep in touch. I threw away after she was out of sight. I'm like a cat in that I might like 1 or 2 people and avoid the rest. I throw away a lot of cards. On average, there are only 1 or 2 people in a crowded room that I find to be worth speaking to of either gender. I'm pretty good at spotting most who aren't. When I'm quiet, it's because I don't want to talk to anybody around me. Maybe I'm waiting for somebody else to come along.

25)
People who sit in the front of a theatre early but stay turned around facing the back and watching everybody who comes in. This is a bad behaviour and should never be done. If they really need to see everybody, they can either stand by the front door and watch everybody come in or stand in the lobby or sidewalk after the performance and watch everybody leave. That's a much better and less ignorant looking way to people watch.

26) The Chinese language. When spoker loudly, it sounds like a combination of fingernails on a chalkboard and cats fighting. It's the combination of the tones changing and sylables being drawn out painfully long that makes it so one can't just tune it out and ignore it. I have had to leave the room many times when people started speaking it loudly near me. It is truly painful to hear and has given me migraine headaches when I couldn't escape or they wouldn't STFU. When spoken quietly (which is very rare) it doesn't bother me. Female Chinese speakers seem to be the worst offenders and seem to have no sense of common courtesy. I've seen co-ed groups speaking Chinese where all the women screeched (==bad) and the men were so quiet (==good)I couldn't even hear them. I have suffered many many bad experiences. I blame the phenomenon on Mao.

27) People who take pictures all the time. For decades, it was only Japanese tourists with their big cameras who were guilty of this, but with the advent of phone-cameras, everybody is doing it. This phenomenon is really bad at restaurants. They get a plate of food that is nicely presented then sit there taking pictures of it. It's even more obnoxious when it is a dark, fancy restaurant and they use the FLASH.

28) When people say "Vegas Baby!" I have no idea how it started, but it's obnoxious and Frat--boyish.

 

29 )
Pharmacy Tourists. It's so stupid it's hard to believe, and you have to wonder WTF is the matter with these idiots. I'm not talking about people going around trying to get narcotics illicitly either. My neighborhood pharmacy has become an international tourist attraction. There are always at least 3 or 4 monster touring buses parked along the street near the pharmacy all day every day just for that one pharmacy (rue Monge pharmacy). These buses bring foreign tourists (always Chinese or Korean) who crapflood into my neighborhood pharmacy by the busload. At any given time, and I've walked by dozens of times, the store is so crowded you cannot walk 5 feet down any aisle without having to push people. Every aisle is packed with people.

Even stranger, this activity is highly organized. Often, some old lady from the bus usually stands at the front door handing each tourist a list and a shopping basket as they enter the store. Chinese people, some single, others couples, others entire families from grandpa to the screaming babies in strollers, camp in front of every section, product type, and display while they puzzle over the foreign letters and French words trying to find what is on their list. If you want something they are blocking, you can forget it if you are shy, because they will not move.

Even to get in there, you have to shoulder through the mob of tourists (by mob, I mean several hundred people crammed into something only a little bigger than an average American house) who are stuffing their baskets with cosmetics and soaps and shampoo. I don't go there any more. Not many locals do any more.

What is really ridiculous is that there is nothing special at all about the store. You can find the same stuff anywhere for similar prices. When they get to their hotel, they fill their luggage with all this crap and drag it all back to China and Korea. Why would any sane person spend one of their days on a once in a life time trip buying generic soap? And why would they waste their luggage space by filling it with soap when there are some truly unique things that one can find only in Paris? (This soap is not unique.) Maybe it's a 'nouveau riche' phenomenon? Illiterate peasants survive the famines of the Great Leap Forward and eventually they have money and this is what they do with it.

This is unusual because there are only 3 people in the corner at rue Monge Pharmacie. Usually it is elbow-to-elbow throughout the entire store and impossible to walk without physically touching and PUSHING people.

 

Bwaaaaaahaha you are getting as cranky as me! I agree with many of the peeves, especially cigarettes. Talking loud, especially on cellphones. The Smiley/ Emoticons automatically popping up wheb you type numbers. If you ever do come to Cambodia though you might get insane, people squatting on a city curb to take a dump, peeing everywhere, forget about saliva.

 

I was cranky even as a child, as I recall. I get crankier as I get older. Mornings are the worst. Nothing helps except total seclusion.

There's poo and urine all over the sidewalks and streets here in Paris and in San Francisco as well. The origin is mostly dog but plenty is from people too. Both human and dog will shamelessly squat in front of you and take a dump. It's hard not to laugh sometimes. There is an old Chinese woman who wears all white who is notorious for this on the metro in San Francisco. Here nickname is 'White Ghost.' She silently approaches passengers and stands or sits extremely close to them. Then she pisses. She doesn't even bother to lift her dress. It just runs down and through her clothing and onto anybody sitting too close to her. A friend was a victim.


But not nearly as much poo as Cambodia I imagine. Strangely, the poo doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would UNLESS it's spread all over the place like DIARRHEA (diarrhea on sidewalk = Pet Peeve number 30 ) . In Paris, like everything French, it tends to be deposited in petite little piles set discretely off to the side.

 

31 ) Ugg boot faux-pas. Something I saw on YouTube reminded me of this. Millions of girls in California wear them every day. They wear them with shorts, black tights, pyjamas, sweatpants, and swimming suits. Basically, the only way to wear uggs without looking like an idiot is to keep them covered. Girls in California nearly always wear them with shorts. If the girl is short, stocky, and Asian, wearing them that way or tucked in makes her look like an Eskimo. Wearing them with tights gives the impression of being mentally challenged as well. Also, they are only appropiate in cold weather.

This is one of the reasons I don't miss California. Every college aged girl wears them. With shorts.

 

32) Backpacks worn on the chest.


A fat man wearing a little baby backpack in the front just walked by. It looked like it was about to be eaten by his big man_boobs.

That''s a quick way to spot a tourist. Must make it easier for pick pockets and cons and beggars.

Seems like it would be easier to steal worn in front. Go behind a tired looking tourist, grab the strap, yank it forward, and his arms will be tangled. He wouldn't be able to fight back.

Is there any place in the world where it is the normal way to wear a backpack? Maybe the crowds wearing them all come from the same backwards country.

Turn your backpack around you idiot!