Fits of Pique.

Herewith please find a day of bitchery, broken down into instances listed in no particular order.

"But, Christina," you say, "I already have plenty of things that I get annoyed about on a daily basis. Why should I care about your petty annoyances? And why do you have to bring the universe down with your negativity, man?"

Fair points. I say this to you, or my imagined you: first of all, maybe you share one of these peeves and we can commiserate and laugh about it all and shake our heads and then marvel at the miracles of life; secondly, maybe you would like to air your own grievances in the comments, which I welcome; thirdly, my negativity is but a wisp of smoke compared to the nuclear cloud here.

1. Sorry for the inconvenience. "You've stumbled upon a temporary problem we're having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing." When I encounter this message at least five times a day, it's more than a "temporary problem." It becomes a soul-searching journey about how I am so attached to my Yahoo! e-mail address of 10 years that I cannot cancel my service and open a different account elsewhere, because that would require me "doing a thing," and Yahoo! knows that I prefer to have problems resolve with complete inaction on my part. What strikes me especially about this Yahoo! message is how they say, "Sorry," with no pronoun attached. Not "We're sorry," just, "Sorry." With this language, they succinctly manage to convey the sentiment, "Shit happens, man. Oh well!"*

2. Did you find everything OK? I'm at Trader Joe's, waiting in line. The cashier, a white guy with ratty dreads and a pierced lower lip, says to the customer in front me, "Did you find everything OK today?" The guy says, "Eh, I was looking for some chile powder but didn't find any." The cashier says, "Yeah, wasn't meant to be." I always wondered why grocery cashiers ask this question about whether I found everything I was looking for. I assumed it was an effort to improve customer service and inventory in case the answer is, no, your establishment has failed me on a particular item (e.g. inner peace). However, it turns out that I was wrong about this, and that sometimes the question merely offers an opportunity for the cashier to comment on the cosmic probability of uniting with one's desired groceries. Maybe when the timing is right, and that man is in a better place in his life, he will find the chile powder he seeks.

3. Your remote car lock system. I cannot stand it when a car's key-based remote locking system is hooked up to the car horn, so that when the person locks up, the car emits a "bip bip" like it's honking at someone. Naturally, these cars are usually SUVs. My question to the public is, is this a setting that can be altered? In other words, should I be mad at the car owners, or at the manufacturer? Or both? Please do not say "neither." That does not jive with the misanthropic theme of this post.

4. Giggling at hip-hop. One of my (cool) coworkers hooked up her iPod Touch to Pandora on our sound system to change up the office music and tuned it in to the R&B and Hip-Hop station. Select members of the office took this as a cue to snicker at every song and comment on how funny they are. Now, I'm not saying songs such as "Lollipop" and "Grillz" aren't amusing on certain levels, but by the time we're on the fifth song and it's "Gin and Juice," you need to either get over it and put your head down (and bob it) or you need to say "Hey, this black music makes me uncomfortable and is kind of inappropriate for an office, can we turn it off?" Either one would be acceptable. Tittering the whole time like a kid looking at Playboy is not.

Music: "What If I Had a Gun"

* Please do not tell me to open a gmail account. I eschew gmail. I want discrete e-mails, not Conversations.