Petty Gripe Sunday

The end of Daylight Savings makes me incredibly cranky. Not only am I swindled out of an hour of sleep, it’s a harbinger of all the things I dread—the encroaching Spring and with it, my out-of-control hay fever, the impending heat and humidity of our ever-warming Seattle summers, tourists overrunning the place, and the light, gah, all the light. Since I’m already in a sour mood, here are some other petty annoyances that have been on my mind of late:

Unreliable Narrators in Fiction: Ever since “Gone Girl” came out, I swear that there has been a pervasive trend in fiction of the “unreliable narrator.” I have noticed it in at least four out of the last five novels I’ve read, and I don’t care for it. It’s beginning to feel like a lazy way out, rather than a clever literary device, and I find it distracting and slightly offensive. I think it’s rude of an author to jerk around their readers, especially if it’s done as a substitute for actually crafting an authentic character.

“What Every Woman Must Have in Her Wardrobe” Articles: These are as common as grass and just as dull and unimaginative. But what irks me the most about them is their invariable exhortation that all women must own a “crisp, white, button down shirt.” Firstly, I don’t want my clothing to be “crisp," and secondly, white looks good on about five people, and I am definitively not one of them. White drains my already pale face of whatever blush of color it may have and makes me look wan and tired. Why would anyone want to go around in a stiff shirt that drains them of color? Also, no one really needs a trench coat. That’s just Big Coat brainwashing.

Candy-Colored Cleaning Pods: Hopefully the Tide pod-eating trend has died down, but we are still burdened with a proliferation of satiny, candy-colored cleaning pods, and I think it’s completely infantile and ridiculous. It’s as though companies think we are so dumb and enamored of sparkly things that we can’t resist their stupid little bejeweled packets of chemicals. And just because I have a bag of beautiful blue and yellow Cascade dish washing pods in my kitchen does not mean that I fell for this silly trend. I bought them purely for convenience, not the pretty shiny.

In-Between Hair: I haven’t gotten my hair cut since before I went to Ireland in October, and now I have in-between hair—not long enough to sweep up elegantly in a bun or a pony tail, but too long to wear loose because it’s outgrown and looks scraggly. So I’m at that stage where I’m using a million bobby pins and hair ties to wrangle it into submission, and I still have rogue hairs popping out and tickling my cheeks and neck and driving me insane. Also, I can’t decide what to do with it. I am frozen with hair indecision. Maybe I’ll just shave it all off and get a head tattoo.

Ceiling Spiders: Now that it’s getting warmer out, I have to start being more vigilant about my bathtub spider checks, including checking the ceiling. I will never understand the Machiavellian tendency for spiders to hide on the ceiling and jump down next to my bare, vulnerable feet as I am just minding my own business trying to get clean. This happens at least once a year, and it’s all my own fault for not being careful enough. I plan to carve out a solid twenty minutes a night for thorough ceiling inspections before stepping into the shower. And if I need to bump that up to an hour, then so be it!

--Kristen McHenry