Gosh, did today’s challenge, “A love letter to my pet hate (eg misplaced apostrophes, traffic…)” open up a can of worms for me.
This one was easy – or maybe it wasn’t – because I could just go on and on:
People who don’t keep left on stairs or escalators
People who step out of a train carriage at the station and don’t move, thus blocking others from alighting
Rude customer service staff
Sniffing (blow your damn nose!)
Shuffling (lift your damn feet!)
People who email you about a website but don’t include the URL
[Oh, Hell is Other People. Or should we say, Get Off My Lawn!]
… let me not go on!
Hates, peeves, either way, this opened up a whole morass of negativity that I was not keen to start my day with.
Writing about any of them, even if I tried to take the tone of a love letter, was giving them far more attention than I would ever want to give them.
I already love to tell people what I think (I was once introduced as “Con, she’s opinionated”), even if they may not want to hear about it. So if I am going to tell people what I think, surely I should at least choose a useful topic – rather than share how peevish I am with you (as you can already see, above).
And besides, peeves are just that, peeves. They’re not important in the scheme of things, and I try to let them go. I don’t want to give them the status of being hated. (I only hate important things.)
So when did this challenge become a self-reflective, almost psychoanalytic process? (Cf. “Closed“, where I steadfastly refused to open any doors or windows and look into them.)