Top 10 Things That Irk Me

NOTE: These are things I'm proud to say I can extrapolate from life. I wanna elaborate on some of these points, but here they are in all their first draft beauty.

1) Beating around the bush. Last night, I went to someone's house and hung around uncomfortably, trying to make good with my social graces. A couple of people kept on making references to things they'd only know by reading this blog, and maybe I'm being paranoid or I completely miss the point of blogging - but all I kept thinking was, "My instincts say that they're alluding to my blog, but I feel no need to cross the boundary between cyber reality and physical reality. If they have something to say/ask, they'll do it, and that's when I'll answer them."

I stand by my decision, but I wish they'd have either kept their thoughts to themselves or they'd have fully aired out their quandaries. I mean, seriously, I'm not the kind of chick who gets all upset if you call her out on shit. Just say the damn thing already and have some common friggin' courtesy! Don't bring voice to something if you don't have enough voice to have your statements heard.

2) Unnecessary(?) Violence. When I decided to redo my blog profile, I almost added one of my favorite quotes. It's something that someone - me? Carrie? Samantha? Charlotte? - came up with during one of our many drinking binges back in the day. It goes something like: "I'm a pacifist till you fuck with me; then I'll kick your ass."

I have friends who would waste no time in calling me a hypocrite, or say that such a statement is unfathomable and offensive in some way. (That's just how I roll: some of my people are politically-correct hippies.) But is it true? Yes. Most certainly.

So how does this work?

I am the sweetest person you'll ever meet - and in many ways, one of the "cutest" as Rob, Drummer Boy and Past Tense can attest. I am very much an advocate of postponing and/or eradicating all sorts of bodily and emotional injury. I will admit that violence, in all of its forms, serves little use outside of throwing around one's weight, and that that sort of politicking ain't for the day-to-day of habit and circumstance.

But get on my shit list and I will see red every time your name is mentioned. I will very likely put on the vaseline, the rings and/or the brass knuckles and beat you within a millimeter of your life if you so much as glance at me the wrong way. I will tell people that your kid is an ugly retard who's better off an orphan than remaining in your stead. I will not hesitate to cut you. I... well, you get the idea.

I'm not an overly sensitive person. In fact, if you tell me straight to my face your less-than stellar opinion of me and cite specific examples of why the earth and its inhabitants are better off without me, I won't be fazed. I have no shame and there are very few ways to coax an honest-to-goodness reaction from me. The fact that you're on my shit list, therefore, means that you've done something utterly disrespectful. Maybe you threatened my life or you insulted someone in my fam. Maybe you tried to play me for an idiot or were so ignorant as to let your bloated ego fall in my way. Either way, I'll very respectfully tell you to get the fuck out of my face. What happens after that? Well, either way, you asked for it.

3) Intentionally Rude and/or Disrespectful People. (Especially anyone under the age of 20.) The first time my brother really liked a girl, he was in high school; the girl he liked was also in high school. Now, I love my baby brother more than life itself, and I've kept him under my wing in the hope that he'd learn from my mistakes. More to the point: I was a high school student once, and more importantly, I was a high school girl. The worst kind of high school girl. I played guys for fools. Used and abused hearts. Toyed with emotions. Wielded my sexual prowess with utter disregard for humanity. Yada yada yada...

Inevitably, this girl that my dear brother fell for -

I bet you thought I was gonna say that she was just as bad as I was.

Unlikely! Not many bitches-in-the-making can reach the level of bitchdom that I'd conquered by the tender age of 14. I'm happy to announce that the girl my brother fell for was your run-of-the-mill, let's-see-what-I-can-get-away-with teenage girl. She stood him up, deliberately hurt his feelings with uncouth words, and relegated him to her circle of platonic male friends while teasing his libido.

Instead of hating on her, though, I related to her. I told my kid brother to chalk this girl's actions to those of a kid being a kid, and I reminded him that there are many lessons that he (and I) still had to learn. As someone who'd been on the flip side of where he found himself, I said that he should take advantage of my hindsight and accept that youth & ignorance are like peanut butter & jelly.

This is my typical standpoint on foolish actions. When people - especially young people - are rude and/or disrespectful toward me, I assume that they're just too young and/or ignorant to know what they're doing.

But being deliberately direspectful and rude is something altogether different. This assumes that a person knows that their actions are wrong. Furthermore, it assumes that these people know the extent of the damage they are about to cause and that they mean to cause this harm. Such people are not to be tolerated. They are the shady-ass tricks and dicks that attempt to get one over on people. They are the degenerates with low self esteem that hope to raise their sorry stations in life by stepping all over you. They are the enemy, and they irk me to no end.

4) Ignorance. n. The condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed.

In my mind, there are two kinds of ignorance: passive and aggressive. Passive ignorance is a state that everyone is in. Examples of passive ignorance include every time that you're in a conversation with someone and they say something about the world that they need to explain to you. It's not your fault that you didn't know that very particular and specific viewpoint or factoid; it's just something that you never came across.

I'm aware of my passive ignorance every time I go to Nuyorican on Saturdays. Joe, Amy and Roland, who are old enough to be my hippie commune parents, will wax on about a topic I very blatantly know nothing about. I assume the role of student, soaking up all the information surrounding me - which woul be fine if not for the fact that I tend to forget my own knowledge when I'm put in this position.

I fit so comfortably into the role of student that while in it, I no longer acknowledge my teaching abilities. Sure, there's a bunch that I've already learned and experienced, but faced with the daunting and impressive body of knowledge accumulated by one of my would-be parents, I feel empty. The four hours spent on the internet the morning before, collecting information about whatever abtuse and/or abstract idea caught my fancy, no longer mean anything. I might as well be mute.

(NOTE: I'm now learning to melt out of my voyeuristic role of student-sponge, so that I can join in the give-and-take and not just observe the goings-on of amazing people. YAY! me)

But passive ignorance isn't what really gets my goat. That distinction is given to aggressive ignorance.

Aggressive ignorance is the kind of thing that scared people actively participate in. Every time someone deliberately passes up an opportunity to learn - that's aggressive ignorance. Every time someone decides they don't want to hear something, know something, experience something, feel something - that's aggressive ignorance. People who are aggressively ignorant are paralyzed by the fear of possibly having to change their way of life. They hide behind excuses like "I'm stuck in my ways" or "_____ can't possibly have anything I can gain from" or "What's the use in knowing that?"

Aggressive ignorance is closely linked to "conservatism." If someone refuses to be emboldened to a situation, odds are that they're too close-minded to consider perspectives that are not their own. Their comfort zone extends only to the space that is within their immediate reach, and they do not want to learn or experience.

Aggressively ignorant people are those who refuse to challenge their way of thinking or actively expand their minds. They are militant, dogmatic and often dangerous. Very often, they are the cause of (unnecessary) violence.

5) Not Knowing. As much as I enjoy the ride that is Life, sometimes I'd like to be able to fast forward a couple of paragraphs, read up on how a chapter ends, and sit back with the comfort of knowing what's going to happen. The not knowing is sometimes too much for me to bare.

This is so because I believe in two contentions:

a) Every moment is saturated with unlimited possibilities.

b) Free will.

No matter how much I experience, I always feel like a blank slate. Nothing is etched on me, nothing has been imprinted on me, nothing has changed me so much that I feel like something else. For a time, I experienced whatever was in my way because I wanted to be changed, I wanted to become something. I assumed that I had been born an amorphous blob of potential and that there was a process I'd have to undergo before becoming defined.

But the more I do, the more I feel like I'm coming back home to a place I left before really knowing it. It's like I was born fully formed but not fully developed. I was a constellation of stars from the beginning; it's up to life to connect the dots and tell me what I am.

But the spaces between the stars, the distances between the dots, are all kinds of blankness in which anything can happen. Like plot points of a story, there are infinite ways to connect these two subjects. There are infinite roads which lead from one thought to the next. And the way in which one decides to connect the dots seems so definite and binding. The choice is mine to do as I wish, to be as I want to be, and yet in making that decision I am making a conscious and specific impact on my life and the world at large. The wave of activity which is created by my actions and my personality will ripple unceasingly and I will have to live with the ramifications of my actions forever.

Thankfully, free will includes the possibility of acting differently, of negating as much as possible previous actions and personalities, of change. One must take into account, however, the fact that "change" is a process and not a step. Changes - especially dramatic ones - take time to happen. This is why I feel the need to look ahead and see what I end up doing with my life.

6) Never-Ending Arguments. I ended #5 on the screen, but in my head it keeps on going. If I looked into the future and saw something I didn't want to see, wouldn't I change it? Couldn't I change it? And for that matter, couldn't I form the future right now? Isn't that what I'm doing? With every key stroke, every phone call I take which interrupts my brain flow and causes me to impress my personality directly on someone else's personality, every purchase I make: aren't I changing the outcome of my life? So what's the use of knowing the future? What's the use of #5?

I can go on and on like this ad nauseum. It's a blessing and a curse, and in a very telling and self-fulfilling way I've been working up to the point where this is possible. But every action and every thought is a declaration of an idea, and the more one acts or thinks in this way, the more creedence they're lending to whatever they're doing. Simple thoughts and actions become viewpoints, opinions, credos; they are enmeshed into what we stand for, and therefore become weighty and important. Of course, the more important an idea is, the more it becomes a "statement," and the bigger the statement, the easier the target. This point - the one at which a statement becomes a target - is when the statement stops being a simple declaration and starts being an argument.

Argument. n. a statement, reason, or fact for or against a point.

Every lifestyle hence becomes an argument for certain things and against other things. The lives we lead become direct indicators of who we are as abstract ideas, influence, and thought processes.

Due to the contending nature of these statements, people - especially confident people - rub other people the wrong way. We go around living, being literal personifications of arguments, and we come into contact with people who are the literal personifications of opposing arguments - some of whom are so haughty and arrogant that we are personally affronted by their existences.

This is normal. We aren't supposed to be all the same; nor are we supposed to come to the same conclusions about this great mystery called Life. The reactions that are caused by the meeting of unlike minds is quite understandable as well; we are animals and as such become confused and aggravated when pressed with something we don't understand.

So now that we've come to the well-learned conclusion that it's fine to be different and to be perplexed by each other, the question must be raised: what's the point of asking all of these "eternal questions," anyway?

I mean, is the existence of an eternal question - "What is the meaning of life?", "What is love?", "Is truth attainable?", et al. - just a validation of skepticism? Or is it an excuse to be aggressively ignorant? Is there a point to asking questions that seem to have no humanly-obtainable answers?

I want answers. I want truth. I want knowledge. You can see how Cartesian circles and their ilke irk me.

7) Fakeness. The other night, I hung out with people that I have little in common with. Put us on paper and you'll see that our day-to-day routines and the bare bones of our personalities barely overlap - but we attended college together, and I felt the need to act social.

Now, I understand that social interaction demands a suspension of blatant hostility and polarizing opinions - at least, between folks who hardly know each other - but there is a level of fakeness that I find intolerable. It's that smile-in-your-face-lie-through-your-teeth fakeness. You know the kind. Layla Liar says something excrutiatingly suspect, and you know in your bones that she's attempting to fit a pre-conceived notion of what she thinks you want to hear. She's mired in insecurity and doesn't want to take the chance of your personalities not meshing. She "knows" very well that she isn't the kind of person you'd like to associate with - most likely because of pre-conceived opposing viewpoints - or maybe she is going through a transitional phase and doesn't know who she is.

I get that you don't know me and you're basing your actions on experiences of yesteryear, but can we not do this cocktail party song and dance? How about you say something completely out of context that reveals something about yourself, and I'll say something comletely out of context that reveals something about myself. We won't criticize each other off the bat, but instead revel in the experience of meeting someone new. Maybe we'll commiserate about the practice of meeting people at parties, or we'll learn about each others' sordid sides. Maybe our conversation will be macabre and we'll talk about devils and dangers and death. Maybe we'll realize we are too different to really like each other.

But at least we won't be bored witlessly. At least we'll have seen life through the eyes of a person we'd probably never get to know. At least we'll have something more than polite talk about the weather.

It's one thing to show off a facet of yourself which fits in better with a crowd; it's something entirely different to act like something you're not. Have some self-respect and be yourself.

8) The need to impress people. It just doesn't make sense to me. I mean, seriously, what is the point?

9) Poverty. No one should go through it.

10) Government. I don't even know where to start. Is it the American government that I have a problem with, or the abstract idea of "government"? Off the top of my head, I'd say both - and it's not just those two entities within the idea of "government" that irk me. It's the ostentatious superiority complex present in any body which assumes to know how I should live.

Hmm... Maybe it's not government that I have a problem with, but authority? Or maybe it's both? I need to marinate more in this topic.