Frustrating Things

1. When someone makes specific plans with specific dates that are agreed upon in writing, and then claims that it was a different plan with different dates and gets really annoyed with you and acts like you’re the mistaken one, as you sit there with a written text record. I’m gonna call these people Plan Gaslighters.
2. When someone who is a grown ass adult and should be able to control themselves instead drinks most nights and decides to send nasty texts.
3. When you have to deal with Kindness Sharks. You know them. They’re like loan sharks, but with kindness and/or gifts. They do something nice for you. They give you something. You say, “Thank you!” and then they act like you owe them immense paybacks and try to guilt you into doing everything they want. A gift’s not a gift when it comes with strings! Don’t act like you think you’re so generous, you Kind Shark! You just want people to feel obligated to you!
4. When you randomly start to feel bad for demeaning actual sharks in a list of frustrating things. Like, poor sharks. They’re just being themselves, just being authentic sharks swimming in the ocean and eating stuff and why do we have to be terrified of them and then use them to label jerky people?
5. When you have to sit and be socially pleasant and cordial to someone that grates on your every last nerve. At a doctor’s office or in a work environment. Somewhere you can’t be rude and Every Nerve is screaming with irritation. Like…how could this person ever have been someone you chose to spend time with?
6. When you drop a coin and it rolls waaaaaaay back under the vending machine and you can’t reach it and therefore can’t get the drink you really wanted to settle an irritated stomach. A stomach that is probably irritated from all of the above.
7. When your Outlook mail intermittently doesn’t work correctly, but it’s always working when IT looks, and then it breaks for good and won’t even open and you’re waiting on IT. And waiting. And waiting.
8. When you’re so aggravated you can’t focus on your Really Exciting Writing Project, because of all of the above. And then you wonder: why am I bothering with Exciting Project, when it’s about all sorts of liberal things like gender equity and apparently no one in this country gives a shit?
9. When your country seems headed for complete fascism and all the work you’ve done in your life to increase social justice seems to be meaningless and without purpose, because awful people possess too much political and judicial power.

Helpful Things:

1. Writing a list of frustrating things. Thanks for putting up with my public therapy.

(hahahahaha, I mis-typed that at first and wrote “pubic therapy,” which actually made me laugh and feel somewhat less frustrated.)