The Great (Albeit Trivial) Lament

There's a difference between the things we hate and the things we Hate. From the latter camp, you might find untimely death, theft, or blatantly sinister activity, whereas the former camps tends to encompass our personal, albeit juvenile aversions toward plebeian and seemingly innocuous things like, say, spices, places or people -- like Amelia -- with annoying faces. What I have recently noticed is how much more vengefully visceral my reaction is to the stuff that hails from the first, much more trivial camp. Tell me an 85-year-old peace activist has been robbed of everything he or she is worth by a teenage scoundrel who attended private school on the Upper East Side and I will clench my teeth and fists in frustration. That shit is absurd! Absolutely atrocious! But the reaction stops there. Tell me, however, that I have to go to the Post Office to pick something up and you might find that I have metamorphosed into a fire eating dragon who speaks English but not that well. Make sense? To help illustrate this point, here are two gifs. Response to news of evil prevailing:

Response to finding parsley in my salad:

How about now? No? That's because it's preposterous! But it is true what they say, you know, that misery loves company. And I? I adore a pity party, so in the interest of softening the blow of the skin doctor appointment I must attend in an hour and the following visit to a bank I must pay (pun wholly intended) to request a new check book, let's rattle off personal top five lists of the trite-ass things we hate. I'll go first. 1. Parsley 2. Any bureaucratic office that requires substantial waiting and the promise of absolutely nothing in return 3. Traffic 4. Unpacking to find clothes wrinkled beyond the repair of an iron 5. The elliptical. Whew, that feels good. Take a load off. Image on the left courtesy of Vogue.com, photograph by Bruce Weber, Image on the right shot by Julia Kennedy for TANK -- Leandra Medine

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