Courtney’s Thoughts:
It is 5 a.m. and I am sitting in Newark airport, a literal hotbed of pet-peevery. I am surrounded by a gaggle of row-32-ers who just rushed to the gate as the agent announced that anyone needing extra assistance was welcome to board. Pet peeve, reporting for duty.
Why the airport, in the former murder capital of the world, at the crack of dawn, you may ask? We were in the Garden State for a funeral but decided to use the opportunity to also visit my dad’s grave. We hadn’t been back since his funeral and had yet to see the “three-thousand-dollar bronze is the only option in this section of the cemetery flush-to-the-ground grave marker” we’d designed more than a year ago.
But alas, New Jersey was covered in a deep blanket of snow. So, as I stood in the road, looking out at acres of white fluff, in sub-zero temperatures with the wind whipping my face into submission, flush-to-the-ground grave markers became a new pet peeve of mine.
Shall I continue? My list could go on for miles, but I’ll stop at 10 for now.
1. When people make a plural possessive. As in, your Christmas card shouldn’t be from “The Smith’s.”
2. The Rose Hill Residents Facebook page. We can do better, neighbors.
3. Passive aggressiveness. Let’s just be aggressive and get on with it.
4. On that note, people who move at a glacial pace. My love language is getting $hit done, so let’s just get it done for the love of all things holy.
5. People who don’t get the “toe pick” reference.
6. Raw dogging mayo or ketchup – condiments belong on other food items. Don’t lick that stuff off a spoon, your finger, or other utensil of your choice.
7. The term “raw dogging.”
8. Replying all.
9. Not replying at all.
10. A know it all.
I could do this all day, but Barry is right (also a pet peeve). By definition, a pet peeve is simply something you find annoying. They shouldn’t ruin your day – like watching the news does. Pet peeves are small inconveniences. Things you can joke about. Or write a column about. We have bigger fish to fry – real world (as in our actual world!) problems. And it is easy to feel helpless against politics and policies.
Focusing on the good is a solid survival skill.
One of my best friends almost died last month. He was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, his status was “minute-by-minute,” and we were terrified. His superhero wife was a rock star and provided multiple times per day updates, but I would be lying if I said my breath didn’t catch with every text ding and phone ring.
The surgery he needed can be handled by only five (five!) surgeons in the entire country. Luck had it that one was based at Mayo, but he was scheduled to go on vacation. That sweet doctor called his wife, told her the situation, and she said, “Go save that man’s life.” And he did. Two eight-plus hour surgeries in four days. A week intubated and unconscious. And this week, he walked back into his home. A literal miracle.
So, I’m going to focus on the good. Wrap my friends, family, and community in love and pretend their habits don’t drive me freakin’ crazy.
Barry’s Thoughts:
As always, it was Courtney who came up with the central thesis of this month’s columns, in which we unleash our biggest pet peeves. As someone with unresolved anger issues, I was initially onboard. Because, hoo boy, have I got a list.
As a homeowner, I’ve seen how consumer electronics are now designed to fail, leading me to replace my oven three times in 13 years. As a linguistic pedant, every prescription drug commercial mentioning “moderate to severe” medical conditions – as though there were any other kind – slowly murders my soul with every ad break. As an American, I’d love to see Detroit make a decent car for a change.
But then, somewhere around the halfway mark of the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show, I had an epiphany. Well, I say “epiphany” like it was some spiritual thing, but there was a lot of beer involved.
Because that halftime show was pretty good. It did what a Super Bowl halftime show was supposed to do, which is to keep me entertained for 20 minutes while the steroid monsters catch their breath. But if it weren’t for the circumstances around it, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it today.
Because the world today revolves around rage-bait. It used to be contained to the internet, where being mad about things keeps you clicking, watching, reacting, commenting and consuming. This isn’t some wild theory on my part – it’s an open secret that the algorithms that run social media are designed to keep you just a little bit pissed off. Somewhere along the line, though, the algorithms bled out into the real world.
Sure, we’ve always had the Jerry Springers and Maury Poviches of the world dragging out human irritants to give us a daytime TV version of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. But lately, it’s on every channel and everywhere you look. It’s on the news channel of your choice, where stories are carefully curated specifically to trigger your simian anger reflex and keep you watching. It’s in the halls of government, where screwing over all the people you dislike keeps you voting.
And yes, it’s in the Super Bowl halftime show where an otherwise innocuous (but well done) show is designed to send the loudest voices screaming into the arms of Kid Rock and have us all flooding our social media safe spaces with either thumbs ups or angry face emojis.
It’s not necessarily that they want us divided. That’s just a happy side effect. The real point is to keep us just frothing at the mouth all day long. They want us angry. Because it’s easy to keep people’s attention when they’re angry. And in a world ruled by algorithms, your attention is the coin of the realm.
So rather than focus on my pet peeves, which would honestly just involve me waving my hands in the general direction of EVERYTHING, I’d like to focus on what we can do. I’m not suggesting we should all be apathetic to the chaos that the world has always been spiraling out into. I’m not advocating we bring back Gen X-style nihilism (for starters, none of my old flannels fit me).
I’m just saying maybe we should take a good hard look at what’s going on in the world and ask ourselves “Is it really worth getting this angry about?” Should you really care who’s playing the Super Bowl halftime show THIS MUCH? (Unless you’re a Bad Bunny fan, in which case that was probably awesome and I’m genuinely happy for you.) Should you be freshly angry every day when the politician who was elected specifically to bother you continues to do so? Should you get worked up when the news tells you that a state you don’t live in passed a law you disagree with?
It’s all anger – righteous anger, yes, but anger nonetheless, formulated to keep you plugged in. And there are other ways to be righteous. Maybe it means activism, maybe it means lending a helping hand to the people impacted by this real-world rage-bait. Maybe it just means deleting Facebook from your phone and talking to family members again. How that looks to you will vary.
To me, it means turning off the TV, silencing the phone, and treating my moderate to severe anger issues with a few beers.
