Pet Peeves

(plus a really long drug related story)

Pet Peeve #1: I just want to say for the record that wordplay is NEVER funny, NEVER clever, and I fail to understand why it populates the world of children's movies and cartoons. Those puns have never once made my kid laugh. Big offenders include Scooby Doo who never misses a chance to say "Eggsellent" when there's a chicken in the story, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who, when there was a rampant mutant bull in the story, said the word "Moo-tagen". Word play is like clowns, a kind of depressing pathetic annoyance that I want to swat at with a rolling pin. Just shut up already, ok? Why do people love that kind of word play? I never make puns on purpose. (Though, embarrassingly, I have accidentally fallen into their easy trap occasionally and felt shame crawl all over my skin.)

I realize that it's possible I'm the only one who deeply hates these unclever plays on words. It wouldn't be the first time I've found myself in the minority opinion. I'm totally comfortable with that. People who use this kind of "humor" generally let them drop in conversation and then wait for you to "get it", as though only the smart people will catch on. They wait for you to indicate that the word play was thoroughly enjoyed. I can only half-heartedly pretend amusement while my real agenda is to duct tape their mouths.

Pet Peeve #2: Dirty jokes, or any joke you have to set up and that has a punch line. Dirty jokes just aren't funny to me. More often than not, I get the "joke" but find it depressing. Sometimes it's so depressing what people think is a great punch line, I want to put them in a room with Bukowski and Red Skelton and let them all battle it out in seclusion. Not finding dirty jokes funny is not an indication that you are a prude or naive. There's one "joke" a friend told me over fifteen years ago that is so gross and disturbing that it still bounces around in my head and gives me the shudders. It was supposed to be funny, but the fact that someone spent the time to think it up makes me feel hopeless for human kind. And, no, I will not repeat it here. I will only say it involved a dog, peanut butter, and private parts. Does that sound like a recipe for HUMOR?!!!

Crap, I've said too much. I apologize if you end up as haunted as I am. All those jokes that start with "So a cricket walked into a bar..." have failed to amuse me. EVER. It embarrasses me when people tell them. It embarrasses me that they think it's funny and that I never will and I'm not good at pretending so then we have this awkward moment where I use my nonexistent acting "skills" to feign amusement, offering it up as though it was a dog treat given for a trick. So, a word of advice? Since most people must think these jokes are funny (they must, because they continue to fester circulate) how about you all just tell them to each other and leave me out. Don't feel bad, remember that I'm the jerk who doesn't play board games either.

So, I'm thinking I should add another warning to my outer garments to accompany my other two ("not pregnant" and "don't know shit" get pride of place). How about "I hate all fun"? Or maybe "Clowns and jokes make me violent"? I like that last one best.

Pet Peeve #3: When people ask me how much I paid for my Vespa and then act as though I almost paid my soul to get it. Yes, it was expensive. But it was new, is a high quality vehicle, and costs less than any new car ever will. Furthermore, it costs less than most used cars. I think the reason people gasp is because they look at it and think of it as a stylish toy, rather than my main mode of transportation year round. It cost me $5,000. It's true that Philip and I have only bought one car for more than that, generally we buy pretty run down old cars that last about three years before completely falling apart on Waldo Grade*. But most of the people who stand there gasping at what I paid for my vehicle are leaning against cars that, even if used, would cost a minimum of $5,000. It makes my ears steam that they put me on the defensive like that.

Because even though it cost me $5,000, it only costs me $5.00 in gas to run every week. And even though I can't tote five children on it (because this isn't Taiwan and I suspect I might get a ticket for such unsafe practices here), I do almost all my shopping on it and can scoot my child around on it as well. The other thing people love to say is "Yeah, but you can only ride it three months out of the year here, right?" Apparently I'm one steely babe, because the only weather I don't ride that scooter in is fierce wind and ice. I ride in the rain all the time. Yes, I get wet sometimes. BIG FLIPPING DEAL. I'm not a delicate flower even though I've always secretly envied my tiny footed friends.

Pet Peeve #4: When people try to crack the Angelina-movie-code. You can't do it. People frequently take on the challenge of figuring out what movies I will like because it drives them crazy that so many movies they're sure I'll like I actually deeply hate. Like "The Fight Club". I can hear a description of a movie and know whether I will like it or not without seeing it. It drives a lot of people crazy that they can't do the same. I choose movies based on how they will leave me feeling after the screen goes blank. Unfortunately I am extremely sensitive to stimulation in my atmosphere and if I watch something disturbing, I can get nightmares and/or be left in an uncomfortable emotional state for days. Knowing what might disturb me is not as simple as people want it to be. I have learned to protect myself and the code for doing this is unbelievably complicated.

If you can describe a movie as: haunting, sexy, arty, or French in origin, I will most likely not like it. People always assume that because I love costumes (true) I will love any movie that has great costumes, as though the beauty of the costumes could over-rule any disturbing plot line. "Titanic" was a movie that pretty much every friend of mine told me I would love, each one siting the costumes as spectacular...I left the theater (on my birthday) so angry and depressed to have watched a movie in which 1500 people drown in the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously, I knew better than to see it, but my friends kept telling me the costumes were worth it. They were not. The hopelessness of that film is spectacular.

I don't like movies with an abundance of violence, sex, or ones in which there are no sympathetic characters. However, I love "Lord Of The Rings", in spite of all the evil and the heads flying across battlefields, and I also loved "Braveheart" which can be argued as one of the most violent films I've ever seen. However, in both these movies, the good wins over the bad which leaves me in a hopeful state of mind. In both of them there is a triumph of what I would consider good values and it soothes my knowledge of how the real world is and how there is rarely a clear victory in it.

I really hate ambiguity. There is a plethora of ambiguity in real life, everywhere, it's just one of those things about life that can't be changed. So when I watch a movie, I want the fantasy of the clean finish. I want to know what happens. I want the bad guys to be bad and the good guys to be good. I want, if not a happy ending, a hopeful one. But I won't love a movie just because it has a hopeful message, the journey has to be worth taking. Which means I do expect good writing, good character development, and good acting.

You probably are getting a headache right now. See, I generally just tell people to stop trying to figure it out. Just tell me about the movies you loved, and why, and I will know if I can watch them. We all look for different things from our entertainment. I know exactly what I need from mine, which is an escape from reality.


One night in 1988 I was trying to stay up all night to get some homework done for some finals I was taking at FIDM and I knew coffee wasn't going to do it. I had occasionally done speed with friends of mine and knew one of their drug connections. Since my friend who generally procured speed was unavailable, I decided to trek down to ninth and Mission to get some for myself. This was the one and only time I ever bought drugs. I spent the necessary time hanging out with the desperate crowd that generally slithers around drug dens.

There's an intricate protocol to purchasing illegal substances, a fact I wish I never knew. A huge charade must ensue in which you are expected to pretend to be friends with the dealers and hang out for about an hour before purchasing anything. I believe this is so the dealer can maintain to law enforcers that all the people crouched in the dirty corners of their apartment are friends, not customers.

After the protocol was seen through, I had my dime bag and was going to leave, but there was a man right outside who was banging on the door. He looked homeless and had blood streaming down his forehead. I can't tell you how terrified I felt suddenly, how vulnerable I had made myself. I needed to leave so I could do my homework. I needed to leave so I could get out of the filthy (literally) hell hole, away from all these drug addicts, from all these lost souls. I needed to go clean myself. I had to walk home, at twelve am, through nothing but rough neighborhoods. And right there outside was the first indication that I had done something unimaginably stupid. I could stay and wait for him to go away, or I could dash. If I stayed though, I may as well have stayed all night because that man was going to be out there, somewhere.

So I opened the door with a pounding heart. The bum was right outside and he grabbed at me as I exited. I just powered past him and his bloody face. I ran all the way to Sutter Street where my apartment was. When I got in, I was breathless and scared. The whole night was darker and full of sinister potential. I was a dirty human being and had just procured drugs for myself, a fact that hit me in the chest like a punch. When you buy drugs for yourself you cross a line. I was never really into drugs, I had done speed occasionally, but this was different. I became one of those sad people. I curled up in a ball in my kitchen and cried for an hour.

The reason I'm telling this story is because there are a lot of people who like to watch movies about people doing drugs, or about drug rings, or about addicts, or about the lives of people tangled up with addicts. I hear them say that they want to see movies that are like real life, that are gritty, that take them somewhere they've never been. Well, I've been a lot of unpleasant places and I find that I have no desire to be brought back to them. If I watch a movie in which people are acting out what I actually experienced, I am brought back to some of the worst moments of my life. I don't need that dose of reality.

The truth is, my whole life has been filled with the kind of reality that people seek for their entertainment. I've already been there, in real life. Suicide, panhandling, poverty, crazy, erotic asphyxiation, tragic love, drugs, nightclubs, people treating each other like shit, abuse, hippie communes, dysfunctional family, violence, fights, divorce, cutting, hopelessness, betrayal, eviction, insanity, molestation, rape, and really cheap bad coffee.

It's not that I have experienced each of those things personally, though many of them I have, but if I didn't experience it myself, the people around me did. That's the world I know. So, when I watch a movie, I want to be taken away from all that. I want hope, laughter, lightness, healthy people, resolution, love that works out. I want beauty, change, triumph, and only an allusion to sex so that it can live in my mind without Bukowski style seediness. I want to be taken to where we can fix things and even when people die, we can make something good out of it. I don't want simplistic stories of predictable outcome, but I want the other side of the dark "realistic" coin. People can find healthy relationships, that doesn't mean they are less challenging than the lousy ones, just better.

You see why I tell people to just give up? It drives people nuts for some reason. Here is a small list of some of my favorite things to watch (television shows included): Braveheart, Frasier, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, A Mighty Wind, Saving Grace, Prime Suspect (see, you didn't expect to see that one, did you?), Poirot, Love Actually, The Women, ER, Friends, Green Fingers, Arrested Development, Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Pillow Talk, Bridget Jone's Diary, North By Northwest, The Shop Around The Corner, When Harry Met Sally, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brody, How To Marry A Millionaire, To Have And Have Not, Blade Runner, The Thin Man, Gosford Park, Ridicule, Pride And Prejudice, Scrubs, Monk, and Chocolat.

There you have it.


I have one last thing I want to mention before I go walk the dog who is developing a sudden taste for all my shoes, which Philip thinks is because she's not getting enough exercise. Yesterday at the farmer's market I saw some wonderful looking potatoes. Since my own supply has now run out I thought I'd get some. However, I have vowed (as I mentioned before) never to buy conventionally grown ones again. So I asked if they knew if they had been grown with pesticides. An old guy behind me in line said "You know, the chemicals they use won't make you grow a third arm. They're perfectly safe." Then the very young lady whom I asked piped in with "Even if they do spray, the pesticides are out of the plants within days, so there aren't any in the produce." Then she adds "If they're doing it right." Very comforting.

I can't list this as a pet peeve because it doesn't happen to me personally all the time. But I was very annoyed by this patronizing discussion. I kept my mouth shut for once. It was very busy and to answer their claims would have required getting way more engaged than I cared to and also pissing off all the other people in line. I thought we had gone beyond fears of becoming mutated from pesticides. Research has progressed so far, we have found so many reasons beyond our own immediate health, to stop using dangerous pesticides.

What will it take to make people realize that they are EVIL? The fact that the use of them kills off insects that we need in our ecosystem isn't enough? The fact that the use of them contaminates our water supply isn't convincing? The fact that the use of pesticides kills off all micro-organisms in our soil doesn't scare everyone? Our produce is only as good as the soil it's grown in. If all the living organisms in the soil are killed off, then the soil is a dead medium. Without those organisms the soil loses all it's nutrients. The poorer the soil, the less nutrients in the food we eat.

I think that is pretty simple. How do people think nutrients develop in food? Do they truly believe that God reaches down to each tomato, regardless of the ground it's growing in, and fills them with vitamin C? God (for those of you who believe, which I don't) or nature built in a system by which we all feed on the nutrients of the planet. When we feed on nutrients, they enter our system and give us what we need to be healthy and if anyone eats us, they also benefit from the nutrients we have ingested. Or at least the ones we haven't peed out. This is true of the plants we cultivate for food. Fertilizing artificially is INFERIOR to growing food in healthy soils teaming with insects, worms, invisible soil eaters, and nutrients. Just like it's not ideal to get all your nutrients from multivitamins. It is proven to be healthier to get most of your nutrients directly from your food sources.

Simple. No one has to choose to eat all organic. Or organic at all. So no one should feel threatened by my personal desire to seek out produce that is grown without pesticides. That's still a choice we all have. But the next time someone trivializes my concerns about the quality of the produce I'm buying, I'm going to let them have it.




*For those unfamiliar with it, it's a steep grade on the freeway between Mill Valley and San Francisco which caused our hearse to permanently blow it's engine.