Airing of Grievances 2022

Shiver and shake. Hold aloft your arm to shade your eyes. Swallow impending vomit. Behold the 2022 Airing of Grievances.

-The Airing of Grievances
I grieve that these lists are getting shorter and shorter. While I'm as grieved and annoyed as I ever was, I'm discovering it's mostly because I'm a grievous person rather than a person with grief inflicted upon me. As I grow older it's more and more apparent that fortune, means, and success have little to do with mood. Happiness, sadness, and anger are closer to hair color than free will. Choose your mood everyone, if you can. Here's the thing though. You can't. You can't just decide your hair color is a different. It takes something physical and external. Same goes with eternal moods. While life isn't ideal, it's still pretty spectacular -- despite my eternal grief.

-office work
Something really good happened in the last couple of years. No, not more disease death. It's our sudden realization that if your work requires you to sort stuff out on a computer, you can -- nay -- you SHOULD do that work at home. We're slippin' back everyone. We're going back to loud people and fatal winter drives and uncomfortable chairs and lousy parking and inconvenient lunch. There's actually a lot of value to working within a breath's smell of each other (but it's offset by the usual bs we discuss in proximity -- I'd say it's about a 20/80 work/bs ratio).

-work
When can we just stop working completely? I mean on this earth there are a few of us that need to work to save lives and whatever, but most of us don't really do anything important. Most of us just get in the way. We have this crazy near-Star Trek sorta situation where we have the means and we have the automation, but we can't fully utilize the means and automation. Doing so would rob us of our precious careers. Let's all (most of us) just be lotus eaters and stop supplying the continual monstrosity of economy. The monster will eventually writhe and demolish us all.

-loneliness
It's unfortunate to be lonely. It's possibly unfortunate to be lonely in the way I'm lonely, which is only when I'm surrounded by people. Unsure exactly how common this is among the rest of the populace.

-Mom security
First let me say I'm so grateful for the wonderful facility and the wonderful people who help take care of my mom. My mom's biological hard drive filled up a couple of years ago so her memory has been a bit more, uh, fun lately. Somehow, probably because of the wonderful employees of her new residence, Mom's replaced her lost memory with a happy exuberance. So that's great. What's not great is when I get lost and trapped in her building whenever I visit. It's a confusing building. Also I keep finding myself behind locked doors and the nice people there need to help me out.

-being mistaken for a resident in my mom's new living facility
For most of my life, I've looked much younger than I actually am. I had a baby face. Then overnight I started looking older than I actually am. I went from 15 to 50. I've never appeared as a normal human man.

-normal sickness
I'm sick now. I took the test. I got the C line but not the T line. For the dozenth time I'm free of the disease du jour. Looks like I'm just saddled with the disease du millénaire, and it's no better than it's ever been. Well it's worse now because I got unused to it. While in these hazy pandemic-y times I've doubled in weight, but I've retained a sense of semi-health that involves normal breathing. Now I'm out of breath and every moment is frightening.

-shots
We're pretty good at getting those Covid boosters out. Very cool, they really helped contain the viral spread. I did need another shot though and all those health people just freaked out about it. No, scratch that, I wish they freaked out more. All of 'em were like, nah we don't have that -- how about another Covid booster? Hey no! Give me more medicine! Different medicine! Measles medicine!

-streaming
It's to the point now that I can't remember all the streaming services I've subscribed to. I was so happy to not have cable TV. The current system is still more preferable, but the cable anxiety is hitting me.

-New Girl
This Schmidt guy? Mehhh, he's not my kind of guy. Cece deserves better. No, this entry isn't an accidental repeat from the 2015 list. I'm just watching New Girl now.

-Star Wars
I've been a Star Wars fan my entire life, but I can no longer say I'm a fan. Not because I don't enjoy it, but because I think there's more Star Wars content that I haven't seen than I have seen. This was not my choice. I will call myself a Star Wars fan once I've seen 51% of Star Wars shows. If new stuff keeps coming out though, I will be forced to retain a non-fan status.

-Star Trek
Same, but I've pretty much seen all of Star Trek. It mostly just references itself all the time.

-"Christmas Wrapping"
I've only heard my favorite Christmas song, "Christmas "Wrapping" by The Waitresses, one and half times this year. The song is just a little too... off-kilter I guess for FM 100.3, so they don't play it next to the wall-to-wall Michael Bublé. I depend greatly on my favorite radio station, 103.1 The Wave, but from what I've (not) heard they've been surprisingly sparse on it. Annoyingly, two days ago The Wave played "I Know What Boys Like" when they could have made me happy. I'm sorry I don't Spotify everybody. Once I get with the times, I'll complain about it, I promise.

Well that's what I got today. Talk to me on another day and I'll hate something else. Apologies for the short list. Perhaps life is better these days. Or perhaps there are even more things repressed too deep in my soul for proper public retrieval.