you don’t look peevish

I’ve never catalogued all of my pet peeves, but I have quite a collection. Having pet peeves is great for killing time—sorta like having an actual pet, but with no cleanup, or having a hobby without having to buy glue and construction paper.

Most of my peeves relate to language. Now, I’m not saying you should follow the Chicago Manual of Style when you’re writing a casual email. And I understand that language evolves (see, I started that sentence with a preposition—I’m a rebel!). But let’s not give up the fight entirely and just slide lazily into some hundred-and-forty character morass of poorly chosen words and misused phrases.

A small step would be for people to stop using the word ‘literally’ when they mean ‘metaphorically.’ I swear to My Vague, Nebulous Concept Of What God Might Be If There Is A God that if I hear one more person say something like ‘My head literally exploded’ my head will figuratively explode.

I’ve been a nitpicker of words for years. I remember as a teenager being annoyed by Neil Diamond. Granted, there are many reasons to be annoyed by Neil Diamond, but specifically, how can an otherwise competent songwriter write the line ‘songs she BRANG to me.’ You know, I could be making love with a supermodel on a private beach with Neil Diamond THERE in his jumpsuited glory singing that song to us directly (hold on to that mental image), and at the word ‘brang,’ it would be game over.

With the internet, I haven’t used the print version of a dictionary or a thesaurus for years, and I’m fine with that, but I’m pretty sure Roget is turning over in his grave (see also: crypt, mausoleum, catacomb, sepulcher…)

It’s amazing to me how blasé we’ve become toward technology. Like being able to access most of the entire world’s history and collected knowledge in my apartment on something I bought for five hundred bucks at Best Buy. And yet how many of us just bitch about how long it takes for Facebook to load?

You kids today. I realize that’s what I sound like—the old guy who says ‘You kids today.’ I just think people take for granted the amount of mind-blowing shit we can do while sitting on our couches.

Although I’m hardly a Luddite, I’ll admit that some newer technology I just don’t get. Like the whole Wii thing. A friend invited me to play Wii (the Wii? on the Wii?) and after a spirited ten minutes of beach volleyball, it occurred to me that ‘playing sports’ by pointing a wand at the tv is wrong on two levels—it requires standing and waving your arm around, thus defeating the purpose of video games, and yet all it requires is standing and waving your arm around, defeating the purpose of exercise. I worry that a generation will grow up not knowing that tennis can also be played outside.

Some tech things I’m just a little late getting to. For instance, I recently got DVR (a DVR? the DVR?) and I gotta be honest–the first few times I used it, it felt like I was employing sorcery. I can rewind a show while it’s being broadcast? Why, this is preposterous! I’ll end up altering the space-time continuum!

I worry a lot about altering the space-time continuum, which is why I don’t go back in time. The main reason I haven’t gone back in time is that I’m a klutz. See, every science fiction story I know explains very clearly that if you DO go back in time and change anything, disastrous things will happen. Well, I’m such a klutz, I would inevitably trip over something or knock something off of a shelf that would cause some sort of butterfly-effect chain reaction and then we’re all living in bunkers as drones to our Martian overlords.

Also, if I were able to go back in time, I don’t exactly have the skill set to ‘blend in’ in another era. My pottery and cobbling skills are marginal at best, and ‘being funny’ just doesn’t seem to be something with which you can barter.

It makes me wonder what place there was in primitive society for the funny guy. Even in the era of cavemen, there had to be that one guy. You know, the guy who would change a cave drawing so that instead of reading ‘”Og killed a mastodon” it reads “Og had sex with a mastodon.”

I might have enjoyed being a funny guy in the Middle Ages. If you think about it, court jester was probably an easier gig than doing standup in a bar—you really only had to make one guy laugh. And, if the king wasn’t digging my act, I could always become the village idiot.

I wonder what comedy in the future might look like. With the right technology, maybe one day you’ll be able to download a comedy routine consisting entirely of jokes that only you understand into a chip in your brain, while nanobots deliver the equivalent of two drinks to your bloodstream and then you can virtually heckle yourself.