Peeves & Dreams: October 1

Firstly, Rabbit rabbit!

My current pet peeves:

1) Twitter as an Instant Messaging program. I follow a bunch of people on Twitter (I’m @ladygypsy, natch) and a small group of them use Twitter to chat with each other all day. That small group people comprise 80% of the Tweets I receieve. I’m very interested in the topics at hand but the other people I follow get lost among the replies and inside jokes. I reply to people and I don’t mind reading replies here and there but I do mind feeling like an outsider in my own Twitter stream. Yesterday I finally created three groups in TweetDeck: Twitterers, WoW Twitterers, and Chatters. I think that’ll make my Twitter experience better.

Bonus peeve: World of Warcraft roleplaying in Twitter. If you want to pretend you’re flirting with Orcs, please find a chat room. Or create a second RP persona.

2) Cyclists who break traffic laws. Hey, Mr. Bikeshorts…if there’s a stop sign or a red light, that means you, too. Yes, there is NOBODY at the 4-way stop intersection. But you still need to stop.

Bonus peeve: Those plastic trailers attached to bikes that people haul children in. We strap our kids in carseats until they’re 8 now, yet we put them in flimsy plastic trailers that are exhaust-pipe level and sometimes really hard to see from cars? What gives?

3) Pedestrians who don’t use crosswalks. On the main drag of my little town, there are many, many crosswalks. Yet people still hop out onto the street from in between cars and get pissy when the world doesn’t come to a screeching halt. I’ll stop for you when you do that because I really don’t want to maim you with my car. But if you feel you’re too important to walk 5 feet to the crosswalk, you deserve the stinkeye you get.

Bonus peeve: People who push strollers out into the street from between 2 cars while NOT at a crosswalk. That’s your kid, lady, not a mine shaft canary.

4) “Smile!” Yes, I am mostly pleasant. But if I look tired or perplexed or sad, please allow me to be look tired, perplexed or sad. I’m not your personal beacon of joy.

Bonus peeve: Asking me to smile when I’m at work and concentrating on something. If I’m looking for the missing semicolon that’s breaking my actionscript, I’m not going to be smiling.

5) Being interrupted. Seriously…if I’m at my desk and talking to someone about work, why is your work more important than mine or theirs? Send an email. Come back in 10 minutes. Unless the website’s redirecting to a p-0-r-n site, you can wait.

Bonus peeve: Being interrupted by someone who says, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but…” No, you aren’t!

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I think blogging is like playing the piano…you need to do it every day or else you’ll get rusty. I was really rusty all summer long, and on more than one occasion I thought of just pulling the plug on the ol’ LG.Net. Blogging about my dreams forces me to hop into Wordpress on an almost-daily basis to write something. Which is proving to be pretty good practice.

My blog is officially off of life support.

Dreams:

1) We are having a super-fancy holiday party at work. (Fact: we’ve never had a holiday party as long as I’ve been there. It was a bland in-office luncheon for 7 years, and a hot breakfast the last 2 years. I predict this year we’ll get a few Tastykakes and call it good.) I chose a gorgeous spaghetti-strap burgundy dress to wear. I’ve lost weight, so I’m excited to wear the dress. We are assigned dates, and mine is a guy named Red. Red’s nice enough. Someone at the party has the same exact dress as I do, but it’s no big deal, we laugh it off.

2) Work-related and very realistic. I can’t describe it, as it involves real-life people and although I embarrass myself here on a regular basis, I won’t blog about coworkers.