This post not only marks 200 Things I Hate, but it’s also the 500th post on this blog. I WIN THE INTERNETS!

1. I hate staying at other people’s houses. I always feel like an imposition by using up all their hot water, drinking up all their coffee and generally being in the way. I am a huge fan of my own personal space so I don’t enjoy invading other people’s personal space.

2. I hate those little inspection tags that come on the inside of shirts. You buy a new shirt, and take off all the tags and the itchy labels. You wear your new shirt and discover something itchy on the inside around 3pm. You go into the bathroom and find an “Inspected by #30” tag. First, how did you not notice that until 3pm? Second, while it’s very nice that someone is inspecting our shirts, do they really need little stickers to prove it? Can’t #30 just give a tacit nod of approval or something?

3. I hate getting a terrible song stuck in my head. There seems to be a complicated mathematical algorithm that is beyond my meager understanding that goes something like this: the worse the song, the longer it will be stuck in your head and the more difficult it will be to get out. I’ve had Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head and The Love Shack stuck in my head for three days.

4. I hate it when you can’t remember how to spell a word, so you take your best guess at it hoping that spell-check or the internet will figure out what you’re trying to say and you’re not even close. This typically happens to me with French words. I’m terrible with French, yet English seems to have a lot of it in it. I’ll not remember how to spell denouement and start typing daynousmah or whatever. Google gets very confused by my attempts at French. Fucking French. Bah.

5. Unnecessarily overpriced restaurants. I went out to lunch in San Francisco at an Italian joint. I had a cup of coffee, a salad and a sandwich. It cost me $48. Let me repeat the pertinent details: lunch, sandwich, salad, coffee, $48. Now, if this was the rarest sandwich ever with bread that was hand-made by mute monks and greenery that was handpicked by children in the mountains of… wherever, then sure. But this was an ordinary sandwich served on ordinary Focaccia bread. Not only that, but the bread was toasted, so it was like eating Captain Crunch. It tore up the roof of my mouth, which was sore for days afterward.

6. I hate that public transportation costs as much as driving a car, if not more. My car was in the shop and I took the bus to work. It took me over an hour (by car, it’s half that) and it cost $6. Six dollars! I might be willing to part with an extra hour a day to take public transport because of the environmental benefits and yadda, yadda, but $6 a day? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s $1560 a year just to commute to work. It costs me about the same in gasoline, but driving takes half the time. If you want me to take public transportation and get there in twice the time, you’ve got to make it more cost-effective than that. It should be a cost savings.

7. I hate arguments based on emotion instead of fact. Emotion is fine and it has its place when it comes to opinion, but when arguing facts, you really kind of need facts. Arguing facts with emotion is a logical fallacy called appeal to emotion. Appeal to emotion attempts to manipulate an emotional response in place of a valid or compelling argument. It goes something like this: “So many puppies are homeless and have cancer. I met a homeless puppy with cancer who looked into my eyes and said, in his weak cancer-ridden puppy voice, “Please, Miss Goldfish, do whatever you can so that other puppies won’t have to go through what I am going through.” I urge you to tell your congressman to vote for the Anti-Cancer Homeless Puppy Bill and send me all of your moneys so I can give homes to puppies with cancer.”

8. I hate it when people I run into people I haven’t seen for a long time and they berate me for not seeing them in a long time. “I haven’t seen you since the Great 2008 Picnic Debacle. You never come out anymore.” “Well, I am standing in front of you now. Since we are not inside my home, by definition, that means I have come out. You are standing right in front of me at this very moment and are seeing me now.” “Pfft. Well, I probably won’t see you for another five years and this doesn’t really count since we ran into each other.” Sigh. Some people are never happy.

9. I hate it when people don’t clean up their own messes. Your dog took a crap on the street. Pick it up. You dropped that piece of litter. Pick it up. Flush the toilet when you’re done. Throw the paper towel you used to dry your hands into the trash, not on the floor. I know, you probably think there are people whose entire job is to clean up after you, and sometimes, that is true, but that doesn’t mean you have to make their job even harder. It’s common courtesy and it’s not hard.

10. I hate it when a friend calls under the guise of chit-chatting when I know full well that they’re really calling to ask me for something. “Hi, Goldfish! How are you? What have you been doing? How’s your job? How’s your dog?…” “What do you want?” “Can you help me move on Sunday?” See? That wasn’t hard, was it?

More Things I Hate.