Time for a complaining session

Let's play a little game called "What's Bothering Liam Today?"

There are a litany of things, and together they have me awake 2 hours after having gone to bed.

There are just so many things. In no particular order:


Itching.

I have made no secrets of my depression or my apnea, so I suppose there's no shame in admitting to high cholesterol. I've had it for most of my life. Since being diagnosed with this condition in college (roughly 16 years ago now), I have kept it BARELY in check through diet and exercise. Recently, I read that high doses of niacin were said to help like the statin drugs do, but with fewer side effects. To me, this sounded like a good solution, in so far as Niacin is something my body needs anyway. There is no Recommended Daily Allowance for Lipitor. My breakfast cereal is not "Fortified with 7 Vitamins and Zocor".

So I discussed it with my doctor, and we decided to give it a try. You may or may not know, but niacin comes in three forms: Niacin (nicotinic acid), Niacinamide (Nicatinamid) and Inositol Hexanicotinate.

Of the three, the first causes flushing, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but spending 30 minutes a day beet red and feeling like your skin is on fire gets old really quickly. The second has not been shown to have any effect on cholesterol. So after some trial and error, we settled on the third, the so-called "Flush Free" niacin.

Only it turns out that while it may be free of the FLUSH, you trade that flush in for a non-stop all-over body itch that just won't go away. Certainly this is much less PAINFUL than the flush, but unlike the flush, you can't count on it to subside in 15-30 minutes. And so tonight, as with many recent nights, I'm lying awake thinking about how much I'd like to rake an industrial sized garden soil aerator across my whole body, repeatedly, until the last itchy patch of skin had been flayed from my body, leaving me bloody and disgusting, but wonderfully itch free.


It's vs Its.

I am as big a usage, spelling, pronunciation and punctuation snob as you'll find. It bugs me to no end when someone throws an apostrophe into a word which is merely plural ("Hey, we're having lunch with the Johnson's today!") and it makes me cringe when I see your and you're confused, or there, their and they're. The rule is simple, you use an apostrophe when dealing with a possessive (“John's book” and the like) or a contraction (“You Are” becoming “You're”, “Do Not” becoming “Don't”, etc).

But what in heaven's name is the justification for the exception in the case of the word “it”? I can apply both rules to a proper noun, as in these examples: “Sara's coming over” (contraction, short for “Sara is coming over”) and of course “Let's all play with Jessica's rabbit” (the rabbit belonging to Jessica). So why suddenly change the rules when dealing with the word “it”? Suddenly it's only applies to “it is”, while “belonging to it” is further compressed into “its”.

I know English as a language makes little sense and follows little rhyme or reason, but this one just galls me, and so as one commenter politely pointed out, I tend not to always follow it, in protest.


People Who Think They Are More Important Than Everyone Else.

Where do these people get off? Who raised them? We run into them every day, but what gives someone the god complex to think “Oh, following the rules is for little people?”

We've all seen them. Driving in traffic, taking a busy exit that's backed up for a quarter of a mile, watching a steady stream of drivers zipping past on the left, and then at the last moment “remembering” that they want this exit, and cutting into the line right at the head. People with upwards of 40 items in their grocery cart eschewing the longer lines and jumping into the “12 items or less” line, because there are less people in it.

I volunteer at a ski resort on weekends during the winter. It's a nice arrangement, I give them a couple of hours of checking tickets, they give me a free lift pass. It's not that I couldn't afford my own lift pass, of course, but my lethargic weekend tendencies would have me at home on the couch dozing and watching television, always saying “Well, I'll go skiing NEXT weekend” until the season was over. This way, I'm forced to get my lazy butt out of bed and over to the mountain, and once there, why, I might as well ski!

But while checking tickets on the lift lines, it's astounding the number of people who will attempt to avoid going 10 extra feet to enter the lift line from the end. These people would rather struggle to duck under or step over a rope that is clearly there to prevent exactly this behavior, often cutting in front of other people, who are making the arduous trek to the end of the line. The most common excuse is “But I'm with them” and gesturing towards a set of people about to get on the lift, people who have come through the line in the proper fashion. Oh you are, eh? Interesting how you couldn't be bothered to be “with them” when they were on line, but suddenly they're at the front, and NOW you're with them?

I get annoyed looks from people when they're held up because they didn't put their ski pass on the OUTSIDE of their clothing. Anyone who has EVER skied knows how it works, you take one of those little wire wicket things, thread it through a zipper pull or other loop on your clothing, and then put the lift ticket on there. That way it's available for everyone to see. But these geniuses put it in their pocket, or on their inner most layer of clothing, and somehow consider it MY fault that my job is to make sure they HAVE one.

In the parking lot, every day, we start the day out by putting out bright orange traffic cones to mark off the sections of the parking lot which are reserved for ambulances (this is a ski resort, after all), or for bus loading and unloading. And invariably by end of day, we'll find some kind soul has politely gotten out of their car and MOVED the cones so that they could park there. Yeah, genius, we put those cones there JUST because we knew you were coming, and wanted to save you a prime spot when every OTHER joker who showed up two hours after we opened is parked in the next county over.

The list goes on. Trust me, if you see yourself in this list, if you've ever justified this behavior to yourself with words like a former associate of mine used (“I don't DO lines”), if you somehow feel that rules aren't so much made to APPLY to you, but rather to apply to OTHERS to make YOUR life easier, the rest of us secretly hate you. And sadly, if you are one of these people, you probably don't even care.


CPAP & Lack of Sleep.

I can't even remember how long I've been trying to make this stupid CPAP contraption work for me, and still I can't get to sleep with it on. Combine this with the itching, and I haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks.


And finally, Writing.

I love writing. I do. And I set up this blog so that I'd have a place to showcase things as I write them. I would like nothing better than to post an essay a week up here, and have the blog slowly grow in popularity until people are checking it out on a regular basis, to see what I'll say next. As annoying as it will be, the first time someone forwards to me one of my own essays which was forwarded to THEM by someone else, and says “This is hysterical, my aunt's friend's cousin's hairdresser's sister sent it to everyone on her list, and I thought you'd like it”, I'll feel like I've made it. And, since my copyright line will almost definitely have long since been lost, I'll also enjoy the pain of knowing lots of people are enjoying my writing, but no one knows it came from me.

But the thing is, for this to happen, I have to post regularly. Once a week at a minimum. And I think in order to truly become popular, most of them are going to have to be of the humorous variety. But I'm finding that HAVING to be funny is a lot harder than being funny off-the-cuff. Writing on a deadline isn't fun, and I find myself dreading having to sit down and do the actual writing. I still have plenty of ideas for things I could flesh out into (hopefully) humorous essays, but I have to be in the right mood for the humor to flow, and the more I feel like I NEED to be writing, the less the humor flows.

Enough complaining for the day. Time to flay off another layer of skin, and then decide if this is a night for bed or couch or closet. Thanks for putting up with me to the end of this rant!

Copyright © February 21/22, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net