Mood Balancer.

I'm feeling really spry today! Like a nice, new, crisp... peso bill, or something of equal or lesser value. And since I'm floating so high on life, I will temper it with.... Things I hate to do, in no specific order, with brief discussion. For you to read. Or not.

I hate to:

Call my health insurance provider. Whoa. Those are some UNhappy folks. They’re like DMV rejects, but with much, much more power over your life. Like:

Sir, that specialist is outside of the local network you established with your Primary Care Physician when you initiated coverage under your current plan.

Right, but no one knows what they’re doing when they start those things. Unless they’re fifty or have three kids. What about the majority of us who have other [shit] to do besides comb through the [fucking] reams of “plan material” I had to dolly to my car after first-day orientation? Huh?

Sorry sir, but your default plan only prescribes cash from your wallet. You’ll just have to make yourself a new kidney out of clay. Try Hobby Lobby for tips and materials, and stop crying about “the horrendous pain”. I’m not your mother. I’m not even human. Haven’t been since the Carter Administration.

Nail my right foot to a fishing pier. Not that I’ve ever had to do this, but I imagine it would really suck. I’m thinking of it being a sort of Pulp Fiction situation, like that involving the gimp in that pawn shop. Except that instead of a good ol’ fashioned forced-buggering, I would be coerced into nailing my foot to long-forgotten pier, decorated with scattered fish parts, rusted hooks, and other misc fishing shit. I don’t know where this vision comes from, but it is most unpleasant, and I would hate to do it.

Set up a wireless connection. Sure, it’s supposed to be easy. And if everything were set up the way it was supposed to be, and all the hardware was functioning properly, and the air density was just so, then it would be butter. But really, it’s more like the war in Viet Nam. You walk into it thinking it will be simple, quick, relatively inexpensive, and that the results will be righteously beneficial. One week into it and you realize that you just went full-force into a losing situation. A veritable rat’s nest of disjointed system\software\hardware issues which were only ‘designed’ for wireless after they were built. It proves to be extremely complex, time consuming, seemingly endlessly expensive (there’s ALWAYS more shit you need), and at the end of it all: you’re still just surfing the internet like back in ‘99. Oh well. Anything for My Lady.

Wipe my ass with leaves. Ouch. I’m a Charmin Ultra guy. I baby my ass. I want it thick and quilty, but not quilted. As Josh put it, “I don’t want to put my ass to sleep.” But leaves? Oh, shit no. I’ll hash-mark it, thank you.

Change a flat tire on the freeway. God… damn cars… just keep driving… Jesus Christ MAN, any closer and I’d be navigating that fucking Navigator! Now if I can just… get these nuts off… with the jack thing on the incline… and the tire… and the gas fumes all in my face… and oh that’s nasty. Oh, what the hell is that? It’s a fly infested mat of hair, blood, humors and teeth. I just had to catch a flat next to Yeti road kill.

Ask for help. That’s it. Nothing more to really add to that one. I’d almost prefer to drown (and almost did, at college age) rather than ask for aide. Call it pride. Call it stupidity. Call it inflated feelings of self sufficiency. But don’t ask me to call for help unless there’s blood, or an automatic transmission involved.

Pretend I understand advanced mathematics. You know when someone at the bar just busts out with some mathematic formula that actually has a human’s name assigned to it? As if that human invented the equation, vs. discovered it? Yeah, I hate pretending I have the slightest clue what they’re talking about. But anyone who is drunk enough to bring that bullshit up at a bar is too drunk to realize that no one else gives a shit. Man I hate pretending to listen, so I usually opt to take a ten minute piss while they clear their memory and forget what they were talking about.

Use a hand drill. My dad had one of these things. There are two varieties: the crank, and the geared pusher. The crank had to be, surprise-surprise, cranked. Very caveman-esque, and a real forearm builder. The geared pusher variety came out thousands (maybe billions) of years later and it worked much the same way as the old metal toy tops which you pump the stick on top, as if churning butter, and it would spin the top. A bit more complex than the cranking variety, but no less irritating to deal with when modern technology frolics all around you. If you’ve never seen any hand drills, then either you were born after 1990 or your dad didn’t get all pro-Amish on you whenever it came to your use of his power tools. “What? You want to borrow the drill? For what? To build a treehouse? Oh just use the hand drill.”

Drop surge-protected electronics into my bath water. My guess is that the submerged hair dryer would just pop real loud and send enough of a shock through my body to delete all known passwords from my memory, then bring me inches from the most powerful orgasm of my life before it burned my mojo and left me standing in steaming water with a new gift of nervous twitching.

Tell people what I do for a living. This is not because I necessarily hate what I do, but more that I hate trying to describe it. I don’t offer up my job description to anyone, and I stutter a bit when asked. You see, it is boring is hell. And hey, lookey there, the description is miraculously even MORE boring than the actual duties as assigned! Wow!

Besides, most people, when they casually ask one another “so, what do you do?” stop listening as soon as the other person opens their maw. Unless you say “Naked Trapeze Artist”, ”Fluffer”, “Twisted Firestarter”, or “Dimestore Pimp, bitch!” well, they just don’t give two shits.

I am a bit exhausted today. Otherwise, I’d list some things I LOVE to do…