Annoyances

For about a month now this blog has been dead as a dead frog. Why a dead frog? I don't know. I wish I could tell you that there was a good reason for it. You mean for a dead frog? No, but coming to think of it... yeah, I wish there was a good reason for the dead frog too. I think it is dead because it ceased to be alive. Ah, sorry I asked. What did you wish you had a good reason for then? I wish I could tell you that I was protesting against some government/corporate policy by refusing to write in my blog. I wish I could tell you that there had been remarks from certain quarters that a monkey, with one of its hand tied to its back, could type out this blog and no one could notice the difference, and I was waiting to see if it were true. Now you cannot stop picturing how funny it would be to watch a monkey hammering away at the keyboard with one of its hands tied to its back, can you? You cannot also but wonder if what it typed would be more worth your time and effort than reading what you are reading right now.

Anyway, coming back to the issue... the lack of updates at this site. I am going to blame it on my sun sign. As an Aries, I plunge headlong into any project that takes my fancy, be all enthusiastic about it for a very short while and in a very short period lose all interest and never think about it again. I find it comforting that one can always absolve oneself and place the blame for ones faults, shortcomings etc. on someone/something else.

Lately, I have developed a strong aversion to the word awesome. People just use the word as a standard response to any topic of conversation where they cannot, in my opinion, find anything interesting/suitable to say. For example,

I won a lottery yesterday! Awesome!
I think I got some extra beans in the burrito. Awesome!
I managed to stay awake through a boring lecture. Awesome!
How are you? Awesome!

The last one really drives me nuts. Why, a "fine, thank you" isn't good enough for you? It seems to me that they find the world a wonderful place and anything and everything in it seems to fill them with a sense of awe and wonder. I, on the other hand, am a pessimist. I think the world is a dull, dreary place. It is not awesome as some people think it is. I don't have anything against the word awesome. I just feel that the word is being overused. Now what is really going to get my goat is that one fine day I graduate (stop sniggering, it is going to happen one day) and I tell someone I finally got my PhD and the response is going to be awesome. In effect, the incredibleness of getting a PhD degree and that of getting extra beans in a burrito are about the same!

Talking about things that tick me off, timers on electronic gadgets. I hate the flashing 12:00 LEDs on VCRs. I like all my electronic appliances configured to show the right time if they have that feature. What annoys me more than anything else (at least more than anything else that I can think of right now) is how people mess up my microwave oven's time display. I use it when I am in the kitchen to keep track of time. Once in a while, someone will put a dish inside the microwave oven and set it to heat for a minute. And exactly 57 seconds into the countdown he/she opens the oven and takes whatever it was that he/she was heating and walks away without resetting the timer. The stupid microwave is no longer showing the time, instead the LED displays 0:03. I wonder, is it that difficult to hit the reset button and cancel the countdown? Will the extra 3 seconds of heating radically alter the taste and quality of the dish you were heating? If you did know that 57 seconds is how long you wanted your dish heated, why didn't you set the timer to 57 seconds in the first place? Is it that you cancel countdown three seconds early so that the microwave doesn't beep annoyingly? Or is it just that impatience got the better of you?

Don't even get me started on how to squeeze the toothpaste tube.