It can be very cathartic to write about things you hate–and even gratifying for others to read, provided your bitching is funny, righteous and inspiring. Complaining has a bad rep in this Canadian, mainly Protestant society, (even they protested once) but it’s a fact that nothing in the world ever improved because people kept their mouths shut.

There is even a literary precedent for bitching at length, in the wonderful Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a 10th Century Japanese courtesan who kept lists of her likes and dislikes in her journal. Some contemporary bloggers (a word I hate) have pointed to Shonagon as the world’s first blogger, as The Pillow Book is the kind of seemingly random collection of musings and jottings on different topics that characterizes many of today’s blogs.

The particular list that inspired me here is called “Hateful Things,” and–as well as being in The Pillow Book–is also included in the definitive creative nonfiction anthology I tell all my students to read, The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate.
Almost none of them bother to read it though.
I hate that.

So, having established a literary precedent, a few Hateful Things:

Toilet paper dispensers that do not give up their bounty easily.  Isn’t life already hard enough without having to fight for a few precious scraps of one-ply?  I’m referring to the kind of dispenser one typically sees in cheap restaurants, hospitals, and low end public pissoirs.  Gently now, you have to tug at the tiny bit of tissue so delicately (like a surgeon, really) lest it break off and leave you with just one measly square, not enough to wipe a fly’s behind.  If you are really talented you may just get four squares out of its greedy maw–always serrated with those shark-like microscopic teeth–before the inevitable breakage.  And yes, they are serrated for tearing the TP, but also, I am convinced, to discourage volume-deprived users like myself from attempting to insert their fingers into the dispenser to get the tissue they need and deserve.

* * *

I notice, particularly when making small purchases, that “perfect” is replacing “awesome.”  Really, it’s less than perfect–but marginally preferable to awesome, which was the worst ever, and a word I waged a tireless and mainly futile campaign against.  Some of my students got called on it.  Some got cured, but others retaliated by saying it even more.

I have to confess that my hatred of the ubiquitous “awesome” was so great that I once walked out of a shoe store because I was hearing it too much. (They also had no shoes I wanted.) For me, the world was now divided into two halves: people who said “awesome” and people who did not.  This binary system eventually broke down when a friend who did not say “awesome” turned out to be an ass, and someone else who did say “awesome” proved to be a loyal friend.  

So now it’s “perfect.” “Perfect” may be slightly better than “awesome” but why not just “thanks!” or “fine!” or “yes, let’s do that” or–if you absolutely have to exaggerate your enthusiasm over the most mundane transactions or plans–then “great!” when someone pays for an apple, or suggests going to lunch. Maybe you are genuinely thrilled by something, in which case “amazing” will do.  If you want to try something really retro, say “super.”  Either it will impress as some new strain of hipster irony or you’ll get laughed at.

But why this need to exhibit such an excess of enthusiasm over nothing?  It is not “awesome” that I just handed you a debit card to pay for my latest purchase; it is not “perfect” that we are going to lunch on the 12th–unless we are going to fall in love over tacos and move to your hacienda in Mexico together.

Likewise, truly “awesome” would be flying over the Arctic at sunrise, or watching the aurora borealis on your back in a fiord in Norway, lying next to Joanna Lumley. Afterwards, your vodka martini in the ice hotel might be perfect.

And it’s not like I hate or resist every new expression that enters the language.  I was fine with “Oh. My. God.” and actually liked “How sad is that?”

* * *

Needing gas urgently–the need gas bad light has been on for many kilometers now, and one never knows exactly how far one can go on fumes, and pulling into the only station for miles (“kilometers” won’t work in this context, and while I’m digressing–what the hell happened to all the gas stations in the city?) and seeing there’s a huge mosh pit of giant unwieldy SUVs scattered helter skelter around the pumps; no-one clear on what line they’re in or even what direction they’re not moving in; some parked in order to amble in to the inappropriately named hasty market to get coffee; another vehicle coming in tight behind you, effectively locking you into this confused maze of gas-hungry behemoth vehicles for hours, maybe days; you running out of gas before you even reach the pumps, you might even die here.

* * *

The price of parsley at my local, independent, previously immigrant based and affordable, now yuppie pandering supermarket: $3.
As John McEnroe once famously said :  “You cannot be serious!”
Last year they tried out $8 cauliflower on us, as in Care to buy this, suckers?  We did not, and now cauliflower is back to $4 a cerebral head.  (I have always found its resemblance to a brain kind of freaky.)  So crank up the parsley.  See what we’ll pay.  The parking lot is full of Benzs, so who knows …

* * *

The Really Ugly Malignant Pimple.  You know who.

* * *

For revenge
To set the record straight
There’s a story that wants to be told
Because you love seeing words form into sentences, and sentences form into paragraphs…
Because you get actual pleasure from describing just one thing perfectly
To understand who you are and everything (or one thing) that happened to you
Because there’s nothing on TV
To purge your demons
To befriend your demons
Because you enjoy punctuation
To find out what you think
Because it’s fun to do
Because once it stopped being fun to do it became torment and you like torment
Because it’s a challenge

For years many people told me that I should write a blog, and I always answered that I couldn’t be blothered.

There was just so much flotsam and jetsam already online–so many many words written by so many, many people that no-one had the time or interest to read, that I felt it almost my duty not to contribute to the excess.
And how many of them were interesting?
Mine would be, of course, but the idea of getting buried in that heap …

So why now? (I feel I have to justify myself.)
Well, for one thing, people have finally stopped telling me to write a blog. So maybe I just will!
But also, I just found out that a blog can do great things for your SEO–the holy grail for anyone whose livelihood depends on being found on the net. And then you can put twitter next to your blog and they’ll make beautiful SEO music together, and you’ll be just like the cashier at the pricey organic grocery store in my yuppie overrun neighbourhood who intoned with great zeal to the person in front of me in line, “You can follow our sausage on Twitter!”

Anyway, the blog. Hopefully it will give prospective students still more info on what yours truly and her workshops are about; and for repeat students, more talk about books and writing to keep you inspired and reading and writing.

And for myself, a place to unload my ongoing thoughts on writing, literature, and whatever else is delighting or infuriating or baffling me at the moment.
Because that’s why most of us write, really.
To get it out of ourselves, and into someone else, via the screen, the page, whatever.