Eric Hates You

Like the majority of my male counterparts, I do not like to dawdle when I go shopping.  Recently I had been shopping at Target for a new Blu-Ray movie to watch.  I entered the store, walked immediately to the electronics section, scanned the selection of movies and saw The Rock on sale for 15 bucks.  I won’t bother writing a post about people who say they hate Michael Bay movies because deep down, they secretly enjoyed them.  This process took me all of 30 seconds.

I walked to the cash registers to find one person ringing people up.  This also infuriates me but that is a post for another day.  I parked myself behind an elderly woman who had apparently found the deal of a lifetime as she was buying roughly 20 sweaters in the beginning of June.  I waited patiently as she argued clearance prices with the cashier and once the dust settled, he read her the total price.  It was at this point that she unzipped her purse and my patience ran out.

Instead of an Amex or a Visa, she pulled out her checkbook.  I turned to the man buying socks behind me and he returned the same sunken expression I was wearing.  This was not just any checkbook.  This was the checkbook of a woman who refused to believe that you can actually pay for things with something other than a sequentially numbered piece of paper with a picture of a teddy bear holding balloons.  She even held up the matching checkbook holder with said teddy bear on it, hoping that the cashier would take part in the sheer exhilaration she was displaying at writing a check.  Instead, the cashier handed her a pen to speed up this process which this woman promptly refused.

Apparently, women of this caliber can’t write a check using any other pen but the special check writing one they have buried in their purse.  At one point I could have sworn she had put her entire head into her purse trying to find this special pen.  Once the treasure hunt was over, she began writing the check, verifying the total price which at this point she, along with myself, the cashier, and the 20 people behind me had forgotten.  Of course she couldn’t have filled the check out beforehand, at home or in the car, because when I walk into a store with a Target sign, I expect to end up in a Home Depot, or a Bed Bath & Beyond.  She must have expected the same.

Finally the check had been fully completed, triple checked, and handed to the cashier.  Of course the story doesn’t end there.  The receipt is printed and handed to the woman who at this point has realized that her check writing journey has angered the 20 people waiting behind her.  At this point the cashier has already scanned my movie and I am ready to run my debit card through the credit card machine which this woman is blocking with her purse.  She has decided that instead of parting ways with all of the angry people behind her, she is going to balance her checkbook before leaving the store.  The cashier shoots me a look which says, “I’m sorry, if I was allowed to punch her in the throat, I would.”  Only after she reburies her checkbook in her purse like a dog burying a bone does she look up and smile as if she’s done nothing wrong.

I understand that if you’ve been using checks for the last 80 years, you may have a hard time transitioning to using plastic but I assure you, if you aren’t able to understand how to use a debit card, you have bigger issues on your hands such as remembering how to feed yourself or making sure you don’t poop in your own pants.  Basically what I’m saying is that if you can’t understand how to use a credit card, you need to stay in your house and start sending out for your groceries.  Checks should only be used once a month, to pay off your credit cards.  You know that credit card commercial where everyone in the store is using their credit cards and then the one idiot pulls out his checkbook and everyone looks shocked?  That is pretty much the way it is in real life except that you don’t realize everyone is making fun of you and instead of looking shocked, they want to take the pique polo you are buying and asphyxiate you with it.  So for those of you still using checks, stop it.

Thursday evenings used to be one of my favorite times during the week.  Not anymore.  Now I have to turn the volume on my television way up to drown out the sound of badly played Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bon Jovi.  To the cover band that plays at the bar behind my house on Thursdays nights, you are awful.  I hate you.  I don’t even know the name of your band but I’m sure it’s something like, “Full Throttle” or “Maximum Overdrive” or “Under The Gun”.  I haven’t seen what you look like but I’m going to guess that the singer is bald, has a nicely trimmed goatee and wears a black t-shirt that is way too tight for him.  Your drummer wears a flannel with the sleeves cut off, weight lifting gloves, and cutoff jean shorts with a hole in the left thigh.  The bassist has long curly red hair, weighs 99 lbs and sweats more than I do when I hit the sauna.  The guitarist is wearing a faded Jimi Hendrix t-shirt that he was wearing when he met his wife in 1988 and is wearing matching faded black jeans with the same work boots in which he spent the earlier portion of his day.

Now I understand that your band is an escape from your 9-5 job, nagging wife and your rebellious kids who don’t respect their father because he spent their college fund on a Fender but I want you to realize the reality of this situation.  You play at a bar on Thursday nights.  A bar that doesn’t even have live music on the weekends.  They would rather play a jukebox than have your band play live for their weekend customers.  I would hope that the people heading out to the bar on a Thursday night are going there to get drunk out of their skulls because any sober person will despise your band for ruining “War Pigs”, “Livin’ On A Prayer”, and “Old Time Rock and Roll” forever.  On top of that, ending every Thursday night suck fest with your cover of “Drift Away” makes me want to move away and out of my apartment.  Some day I will make my way down to that bar on a Thursday night, earplugs in ear, so I can see if my suspicions are true.  Maybe I’ll even get my picture taken with you so I can post it here, or even better, maybe your band will have a Myspace page.

I went to fill up my full size, late 90’s sedan today and the person next to me had the gall to strike up a conversation about how high gas prices were reaching. Instead of punching this man in the throat to teach him a lesson about having conversations with strangers, I decided to let him continue. He went on to say that at this rate, we’d be paying $6 for a gallon of gas by the end of the year. Apparently this man has never taken a high school math course. Just for kicks, I told him that I lived in Denmark for a year and gas prices were already $6 a gallon and that I was happy gas was so cheap here in America. Like most people who rub me the wrong way, he gave me a dirty look, got back into his SUV, and went along his merry way.

Are you really going to gripe about a 5 cent increase in the price of gas? By the time you are done reading this article, you could have made enough money working to cover that 5 cent increase for a full tank of gas. Unless you are filling up a motorhome, you are complaining about an increase of between 60 cents and a dollar per fill up. I’m pretty sure I’d swallowed that much change by the time I turned 10 years old. I’ll also ignore the fact that if you are filling up a motorhome, a 5 cent increase in gas prices should be fairly low on your budgetary concerns. America is finally catching up to what the rest of the world has been paying for years and you are going to complain about it? You better hope that the next time you decide to talk to a stranger about high gas prices you don’t get a punch in your throat because it might just be me.

Who decided that these are considered acceptable to wear on your feet? Any time I see someone wearing these I want to take one of my real shoes off and beat them in the face with it just to remind them what true footwear looks like. Sure, I’ve worn shoes made completely out of rubber before; I was also 11 and they were called water shoes. Every time I wore them I would get athlete’s foot and when I walked it would sound like an old man eating soup at a deli.

People who wear Crocs also like to point out the numerous benefits of wearing these “shoes”. They are unique in that they have special “nubs” on the footbed that help blood circulation. I think I’ve heard of something that also helps blood circulation. It was called walking. At the same time the rubber Crocs are made of is odor resistant. If you have a problem with foot odor, you probably don’t want to be wearing a “shoe” that you don’t also wear socks with and has holes all over it. I suppose that the largest benefit of Crocs is that they reduce muscle fatigue up to 62.6% more than standing barefoot. I’d like to know how much standing barefoot reduces muscle fatigue. You’d think that sitting or laying down would reduce muscle fatigue 100%. Maybe I’ll invent a product that I can tout does just that. I think I’ll call it a bed. Then again, I can’t remember the last time I was standing barefoot long enough to worry about muscle fatigue and I can almost guarantee you that anything you put on your foot reduces muscle fatigue more than standing barefoot.

I truly have to congratulate the person who invented this gift to humankind. They’ve invented a product that looks like someone threw up on their foot and yet people call it fashionable. And by using creative marketing, they’ve convinced people that wearing plastic on your foot will somehow make your feet smell less, solve your blood circulation issues, and reduce muscle fatigue more than wearing socks and sneakers. Brilliant. I extend every invitation to Crocs, Inc. to send me a pair of their fine product so I can melt them in my oven and make a giant bouncy ball that will make my hands smell better and improve blood circulation while reducing muscle fatigue to my arms.

You people have some nerve. Flagrantly disobeying the numbers on the side of the road you choose to drive at your own casual pace. People don’t get into their cars and hit the road to kill time. This isn’t the 50’s. People no longer take the family out in the Oldsmobile for a Sunday drive. If you want to drive at your own pace instead of the standard set by the State and Federal governments, you can move to Montana, or Wyoming.

Have you never heard of living life in the fast lane? You can’t live life in the fast lane while simultaneously driving 45 in a 65. Now I understand that you believe driving more slowly with your kids in the car somehow makes you more of a responsible parent but it does not. What it does do is make me want to put a tire iron through your back windshield.

Do you not have places to be? Obviously you do otherwise you wouldn’t be wasting your $4 a gallon gasoline. Are you somehow unique from everyone else in that the laws of time don’t apply to you? Do you have that much extra time on your hands that you leave 10 minutes early so you can drive 20 miles under the speed limit? Somehow I think you get joy from seeing 10 cars lined up behind you; seeing the drivers throwing their hands up in anger; hearing the car horns blaring which can only mean one thing: If you don’t go the speed limit or higher, I’m going to ram your car off the road. The government determines the speed limit because that is a safe speed to drive. If you can’t drive the speed limit because you don’t feel safe doing so, you don’t deserve a drivers license. Get someone to drive you around that is willing to read the speed limit signs properly and not make people want to light your gas tank on fire.

In reality, I hate when anyone uses chat acronyms.  To me, acronyms equate to laziness.  I would much rather have someone type, “You are so funny Eric.  You are so funny in fact that I love to hate you.  I came this close –><–  to having a heart attack because I love MySpace and wear a fanny pack while I’m driving my minivan” instead of “lmao”.  What I hate more than kids using acronyms to talk to each other is when adults do it.  No grandpa, you are not “ROFL” because if you were, you would break your hip.  And mom, stop using “lol” when you forward those annoying chain letters to me.  It makes me want to “pmitt (punch myself in the throat)”.  Adults should have learned by now that it looks extremely uncouth to abbreviate your conversations.  But hey, if your intent is to have the appearance of an 11 year old girl while you talk to others on the internet, ignore my advice.

Graffiti is an art. It is a growing art in fact and there are plenty of graffiti artists whose work has been the showcase of exhibits and worldwide praise. You however, are not a graffiti artist. Yes, you may have sat at your desk in high school drawing your name on your desk with 3 different color pens but you have not made an artist out of yourself. Congratulations, you took a can of spray paint and painted an unrecognizable symbol on the side of your parents’ neighbor’s house. You must be an artist now, right? Wrong. Any idiot can spray paint the name of their favorite band on the side of a building. The act of this is not called graffiti, it is called idiocy.

What motivation did you have to paint “Sonic Youth” on the back of your local grocery store? Did you think that people would be impressed every time they drove by, squinting to try and read what you wrote? It’s a good thing you only used one color of spray paint, otherwise people might be confused and think that the McDonald’s you spray painted the side of has a new urban logo. Here is a word of advice, you are not Banksy. When you spray paint the side of a building people do not think, “That guy must be a really cool guy”, they think, “I would like to meet the person who did that so I can punch them in the throat for being so creative”. Anyone can spray paint “Metallica” on the side of a bridge. The next time you think it’s a good idea to “tag” a building, try spray painting your name in perfect Helvetica. Then I might be impressed.

No, I am not referring to the crappy Adam Sandler movie. I’m referring to people injecting Spanish words into English sentences. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the Latin American people. They are good, hard working men and women but if you plan on learning English as a second language, follow through. I thoroughly enjoy hearing people of other ethnicities speak fluent English with a sexy accent, but when you start ending your sentences with Spanish words, it is the equivalent of that guy from Wendy’s who forgets to put your fries in the bag. He knows he’s being lazy, but he just doesn’t care.

When I’m trying to listen in on the angry conversation you are having with your boyfriend on your cell phone from across the food court in the mall, nothing irritates me more than when you throw a change up and start yelling in Spanish. No longer do I know if you are spouting profanities or telling him you love him with that Latin fire you are so well known for. Yes, I realize you are “chicano for life” but here in the suburbs you say “Mexican American”. If I wanted to learn Spanish I would have done so in Junior High. And trust me, I wouldn’t move to Mexico without either hiring my friend’s little brother who can speak Spanish at a ninth grade level as a translator or pirating the Spanish version of Rosetta Stone.  There is a reason that not everyone in America speaks Spanish; because if everyone did, we wouldn’t be America any longer, we would be Latin America.

Social networking is a load of crap.  If people really wanted to know what was going on in your life they would give you  a call or meet you for lunch.  To use MySpace, you first have to forget the English language and start turning nouns like “friend” into verbs.  When someone wants to “friend” you, you had better accept.  You don’t want to offend someone and then have them make all of their “friends” write nasty things on your MySpace page.  It’s either that or an invitation to a house to have them and 7 of their real friends beat the crap out of you, videotape it, and post it on MySpace to show all of their MySpace “friends” they mean business.  You have 10,000 “friends”?  I bet you do.  I bet you also invite them all to Thanksgiving dinner and buy all 10,000 of them Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza gifts as well.

“But it’s a great place for up and coming bands to get their music out there” you say?  I have a better suggestion for all of the bands out there who think that MySpace is the way to get a record label to notice you: go play your music for real live people in a bistro or in someone’s backyard for a birthday party instead of expecting us all to go to your MySpace page to check out your edgy new “single”.  Guess what?  You don’t have a “single” because you aren’t a real band; you are a MySpace sideshow.  You know that picture of your “band” that you have as a tiled background on your MySpace page?  You know, the one where you are all turned slightly to the left with the thumbs of every member of your “band” stuck in their pockets?  You aren’t original for coming up with that, you saw it on the MySpace page of the “band” who “friended” your “band” yesterday.

The fact that people would rather ask you for your MySpace page than engage you in a real life conversation is appalling.  I don’t want to be your MySpace “friend” and I don’t give a crap who your “band” is.  What angers me the most about MySpace is that a Google search of “EricHatesYou” returns the number one result of a guy whose MySpace name also happens to be “EricHatesYou”.  I don’t have MySpace, but until my site is the number one “EricHatesYou” Google search result, there is an open invitation to the owner of this MySpace page to a beating at my house from me and 7 of my real life friends.

Do you want to know when America’s obesity epidemic started? It started with the invention of the fanny pack. No longer were people forced to carry items with their hands; they could carry them with their fannies. Now I do realize that the fanny pack has gotten its fair share of verbal abuse already but apparently it hasn’t been enough. I continue to see people wearing fanny packs as if it is a normal, okay thing to do. I have news for these people, it is not an okay thing to do. Luckily for us the majority of people who still wear fanny packs are grown men who drive minivans. This allows the rest of us to make fun of them until they retreat to their Town & Country only to pull a wad of tissues from their fanny pack so they can cry about how no one realizes how “functional” their fanny pack is. I don’t care if it has a cell phone holder. My pants have a cell phone holder too; it’s called a pocket. Learn to use your pockets like the rest of us. Maybe then you’ll graduate to normality.