Pet Peeves

And now, for no reason in particular, here are some of my personal pet peeves.

• I joined a Houseplant Swap and Sales group on Facebook and nobody swaps. Everybody just sells.
• There is a trend lately on Instagram and TikTok where people will be like, “Check out what I thrifted and how I styled it!” And then there will be a series of video clips where you see some very cute young woman taking a dusty vase off a shelf and then wiping it off, sticking a flower in it, and putting it on a different shelf. And then she picks up, like, a soap dish, puts soap on it, and sets it down. Or, my personal favorite, she picks up a knick knack, takes it home, and sets it on a shelf. Is that really styling?
• Speaking of social media trends, another is when someone finds an heirloom tablecloth and cuts it up and turns it into an extremely trendy sundress. I feel like I can hear our ancestors turning over in their graves. Even when the dresses are kind of cute, because I’m old, I always imagine the conversation twenty years from now, when they’re looking at family pictures, “Oh my gosh, mom! What are you wearing?!? It looks like some old ladies’ tablecloth!” and the mom will have to be like, “Well, actually. . . .”
• I absolutely hate it this time of year when people plant a whole bunch of little American flags in the ground. Because they almost always end up touching the ground, and the American flag is not supposed to touch the ground. I mean, there are official rules, and flags are not supposed to be used for decoration in general, but they’re absolutely not supposed to touch the ground, ever. Obviously, I’m not a jingoist gal, so I’m not sure, myself, why this is such a pet peeve of mine. Is it a leftover from learning to fold the flag as a Brownie? Putting out the flag each morning when I worked for the NYC Parks department? I don’t know. But the little flags on the ground, or a truck driving through the rain with a raggedy-ass flag hanging off the back of it, just makes my blood boil.
• Creation Stories where the woman is made from a man. Obviously, there’s Eve from Adam’s rib. But when I was at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, there was some other creation story in which the first woman was made basically from a man. And I can’t find the story again now, and shout out to Sky Woman, go Her, but why are there any creation stories in which women are made from men when childbirth exists? I mean, come on! You can observe the miracle of life.
• Cranky drivers on my street. I live on an exceptionally wide boulevard (space for two cars side by side in each lane, easily) that is also in a neighborhood, and there are some people who completely zoom past my house, which is bad enough, but the other day I was biking and a car came from behind me, and when I veered to the left to go around a parked car, the car behind me honked at me. And purely on instinct I put up my middle finger and shouted, “Well f&*K you!” and as I finished this phrase and gesture, I made eye contact with another driver, someone who was waiting to turn onto the street, and she grinned and nodded vigorously at me, so I felt somewhat vindicated.
• Ridiculous images that seemed designed to make us feel like a disappointment for being actual people who live in reality. In fact, I just wrote a silly article about this for KidsOutAndAbout.com, talking about stock photos of families camping and how they don’t in any way resemble actual family camping. Wanna read it?