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I blame all the high-fructose corn syrup

Isn’t it amazing, sometimes, all of the petty things we can get annoyed by and worry about?

To limit it to kiosk foods alone, Dippin’ Dots’ mere existence annoys me. I go to the zoo, and there are Dippin’ Dots stands all over, and I think to myself, who the hell buys these? They taste like corn starch, and they’re $10. I quietly hate everyone I see with them. Not that I wasn’t quietly hating them before for wearing stupid football getup or banging on the glass of the gorilla enclosure or being loudly wrong about what sort of animal that is or taking up the entire sidewalk with their five fat children and delaying my arrival at the fisher cat kittens (fisher kittens?) by ten whole seconds. But then I see they have Dippin’ Dots, and I hate them for that too. In my head, I watch them take their Dippin’ Dots with them through the zoo, dropping the cup in the parking lot, and driving off to a quick snack at McDonald’s before going to Wal-Mart to buy gallon jugs of fruit drink for tomorrow’s all-day Sunday School session. Since I live in Columbus, Ohio, a statistically significant portion of the people I see at the zoo will actually be doing exactly this, especially if you include the people who stop at Bob Evans’ instead of McDonald’s as well.

Err. I seem to have gotten a bit sidetracked. What I meant to say was, what the hell do I care about Dippin’ Dots for? Is it really going to matter, while I’m at it, if I get to the fisher kittens slightly later?

Or let’s say I’m riding the bus home. This is a good example of a place I get stupidly annoyed, because it is a place I am often. For a long time (until a couple months, really, when I realized how stupid it was), when there would be some brief delay in the ride home due to, say, the door not shutting until the driver got out and kicked it or someone who seems to have lost their copy of Emily Post’s Proper Deportment for Bus Passengers, and I do mean brief–except for the two occasions the bus has simply stopped working mid-route, I have been late to my stop by a maximum of 10 minutes–it really bothered me. It’s not that I had anywhere to be: as I mentioned, I live in Columbus, Ohio, so there is nowhere to be, and I’m not really the sort of person who would need to be there even if there were. No, I was just bothered by the prospect of being on the bus for 32 minutes that evening instead of 30. That’s seriously fucked up. Those of you who drive mostly have this several thousand times worse.

I have better things to spend my ire on than the vaguely ice cream-like product of the future or a small extension of my commute. I bet you do too. Why do we get stressed out and drain ourselves with all these little things instead?

Filed by shaun at August 26th, 2008 under indifferenthonest