I hate Halloween.

I don't hate it so much as I don't get it. For kids, yes, Halloween makes sense. It's fun. But for adults? What's the appeal? Is it because after the age of 16, Halloween just becomes another drinking holiday? Is it the excuse to dress like you're a third of your actual age? An excuse to wear slutty clothing? I really don't get it.

I hate Pitchfork, still.

Today, Pitchfork posted a review of the two-disc soundtrack to Marie Antoinette, which is a soundtrack that I love to a movie that I also loved. They gave it a 7.6 (I'd love to understand, exactly, how they get such precise numbers. Why not just a 7? 7.5? How did it deserve a 7.6 instead of a 7.5?). The interesting thing about the review is that Stephen M. Deunser chose to write it in two parts: one is a review of the album before seeing the film, the second an attempt to review the way the music works in the movie. Unfortunately, Mr. Deunser fails at the second part of the review and, instead of analyzing the music in the film, he begins to share his disappointment in Coppola's treatment of the political aspect of the film.

It seems after reading the reviews of the film that critics are split down the middle on the political issues. Should it have been heavier on the negative aspects of Marie Antoinette's life? I don't think so. I think that since the subject matter has been covered extremely well in the past two-hundred years, it's not a big deal for an American writer / director to make a film simply because she related to the character she was writing about. Art doesn't have to be historic.

But that is not the point of my post. My point is this: PITCHFORK SHOULD NOT PUBLISH MOVIE REVIEWS DISGUISED AS MUSIC REVIEWS. And, not surprisingly, Deunser ended his article with a reference to the fake-quotation, "Let them eat cake." Lame!

I hate being sick: the refrain.

My throat still feels mediciney from yesterday and despite the shivery sweats, no temperature here. My appetite is good with the exception of a vague, sort of gaggy feeling I get once an hour or so. Despite the 13 glasses of water, one glass of Crystal Light and three cups of tea I had yesterday, my lips and mouth are dry.

Siiiiiigh.

I hate rats.

And they're everywhere!

I'm on the fourth floor but after watching a parade of rats on U Street last night, I'm convinced that every sound in my apartment is a rat clawing his or her way through the walls.

I hate being sick.

I hate when you wake up feeling like death, but you drag yourself to the computer and do work. And you have a little tea and okay, that's not so bad. Then you shower, and you're feeling good! You eat an English muffin, you turn up the heat, and two hours later you're plastered to the floor with shivery sweats and your throat is crying for mercy.

I hate when you forget daylight's savings time.

I hate when you try to go out to breakfast but every restaurant is closed and you can't figure out why. And then you realize it's actually 8 a.m. on a Sunday the weekend before Halloween and go to a 24-hour diner.

I hate coming home.

I hate coming home when all I have waiting for me are deadlines and projects.


I'm going to a concert tonight! I should be in a good mood! Happy! Excited! Instead I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to cram two day's worth of work into four hours.

I hate what my thesis makes me do.

Shots or not, my alarm went off at 9 a.m. this morning and I leapt out of bed to sit at my little laptop-holding, blue-spraypainted card table. In preparation of today, I had turned it toward the wall, so I couldn't be distracted by trees or birds or blinds or light switches or ironing boards. All of those objects have played a role in preventing me from writing my thesis this fall.

So I've been writing and staring at the wall for three hours straight.

I also checked the school Web site to check on my formatting requirements where lo! and behold, I discovered my left margin could be 1.25 inches! And on pages on which headers appear, I can have a 2-inch top margins. How awesome is that? Can I have a header on every page?

Anyway, after reformatting my paper to fit the school's requirements, I discovered that my formerly single-spaced, normally margined nine page paper was, in fact, a halfway-completed 22-page masterpiece. And that's without the two-page glossary and whatever appendices I may decide to pad everything with it.

I'll admit it though, I'm starting to get seriously concerned about finishing this damn thing.

I hate waking up and feeling like ass.

And finding that my pants are mysteriously very, very dirty. Also, why did I take a cab one block last night?

I hate my neighbors.

For banging on the wall when I play Regina Spektor too loud. It's Friday!

Time to do shots. In my kitchen. By myself. Well, with Regina. Hotel Song? Ah!

I hate hindsight.

I purposely didn't make plans tonight so that I could get up tomorrow, go for a run, work on the thesis, get stuff done before commencing two nights of drinking + one extra hour.

But I am bouncing off the walls and dancing and drinking by myself, and I'm about to call someone, anyone in my cell phone, who might be in a bar right now.

I'm itchy!

I hate American Apparel.

Dear American Apparel:

Shut the fuck up.

The first thing I think of when I see this girl wearing metallic silver leggings is: "date rape."

I can't explain why, but I do know it's bad.

Sincerely,
Tyler.

I hate waiting for phone calls.

Call call call!

I hate it when people ask me stupid questions.

Since I go by my middle name, I've faced a lot of trials and tribulations throughout my life. For example, my work email address features my first initial rather than my middle, and I imagine that if anyone ever needed to email me for important reasons, they might get confused. It's these types of scenarios that keep me on edge.

I've also had to deal with having others realize for the first time that my first name is actually John. The inevitable question is asked: "What made you decide to go by Tyler?"

I DIDN'T PICK MY NAME, PEOPLE. My parents chose to call me Tyler. I was too busy discovering my hand and trying to lift my own hand to come up with what I'd like to call myself. And is it really so odd to go by your middle name? I mean, what else are you going to do with it?

I hate it when people don't remember which foods I hate.

No one every remembers what foods I like. I know this may sound petty, but consider this anecdote:
For years, I have despised coconut. I hate the way it feels in my mouth (slimy and stringy), I hate the way that it tastes (like weird milk and babies), and I HATE HATE HATE answering questions on why I hate it. It's preference bitches, recognize.

Regardless, I feel like I express the fact that I dislike coconut on a fairly regular basis. Often enough that my family and close friends should probably know that I consider it a demon fruit. So what does my mom make me for my 18th birthday? A coconut cake. And what does she do when I don't eat any of the disgusting concoction? Force me to eat a big slice. Thanks Mommy. Love ya.

I hate being questioned when I know I'm right.

That's it. No story that I really feel like sharing. Just know that I'm right. All the time.

I hate teachers.

It's more complicated than the headline would lead one to believe.

I hate when I'm reading the blog of some random DC person, someone on my blogroll who doesn't know I read his blog, who has written a page-long ode to a favorite English teacher -- the same English teacher who once gave me a C for an entire semester based on my interpretation of some R.E.M. lyrics as poetry.

If he hadn't turned down all my other goddamn suggestions for lyrics based on the fact that he'd never heard of the bands maybe I could have analyzed the song lyrics -- an activity, by the way, I did every year of public school from eighth grade on -- more to his liking. We don't all marvel at the wonder of Dave Matthews Band lyrics. Pity, I know.

Okay, I was being pretentious and immature. I'm over it. Really.

I hate spiders.

I especially hate spiders when they're teeny tiny and in vast quantities climbing up the walls of my apartment. I'm not putting away the vacuum until the first frost.

I hate headband headaches.

Ouch!

I hate my lack of motivation.

I've had seven whole days to write the two short papers (two pages maximum! that's just four pages!) for class tomorrow night. What did I do instead?

I've watched a whole DVD of Gilmore Girls.

I've gone to a conservatory. (I don't even particularly enjoy plants!)

I bought two pairs of jeans (total spent: $23).

I also bought a bitchin' scarf (it was the same price as the more expensive pair of jeans).

I saw Marie Antoinette.

I spent several hours trying to download the soundtrack to Marie Antoinette.

I went to a concert.

I went to a party! (A real party! With strangers! And people I know in vague ways! And, unfortunately, a lack of appetizing alcoholic beverages which forced me to experiment.)

I drunk-dialed someone after two mixed drinks!

So now, twenty four hours before my papers are due, I'm finally getting around to writing them. I've finished one, which only took dragging my ass to a coffee shop a mile away from my apartment. Did I mention that (I think, at least) it's FREEZING outside? And that the girl working here tonight has played an old Green Day album and then the new Coldplay album?

Shouldn't I sit here for another hour and a half and write the stupid second paper?

Yeah. I'm going home and eating a slice of pizza instead.

I hate getting out late.

So I took a little detour after work today and went to the movies instead of home. I saw Little Children, which was fairly impressive, and I got to see my drag queen friend who is the movie theater ticket-taker and always wearing the same color as me. Today was salmon. He has better hair than I do though.

But the movie was way longer than I thought.

And it was really cold when I left. And windy. And my earrings kept hitting me in the face. And where did all the people come from!? I had no idea what rush hour was really like until tonight, when I didn't get home until 7:30. At night, people!

Now I can't stop dancing to The Blow, and it's seriously hindering my gym possibilities.

Oh, and spiders in my apartment? I hate you. I see you too, when you scuttle under the dishwasher. I have a vacuum. And I'm going to get you.

I hate blogger.

Blogger, I've been trying to post for four hours. But you just spun and spun and froze. Now I've forgotten what I hate. But it's cool because I can't think of anything I hate more right now than you. Cheers.

I hate LIARS.

I had to read The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry for my Southern Literature class, which kind of confused me because it's not a Southern novel, nor is it particularly literary. And since my professor likes to waste our valuable tuition ("our," of course, means the people in my class who don't work for the university as I do and therefore are paying about two-hundred dollars for each class session) by watching movies, he naturally began and ended class with scenes from the very good film version released in 1971.

(Side note: My professor has a thing about sex (he LOVES it) and so I'm not surprised that the first scene he showed us was the nude swimming party sequence where Cybil Shepard strips.)

Anyway, my professor likes to think that he knows as much about movies as he does about literature. Maybe he does, since it's become pretty obvious to me that he knows nothing about literature. One of the scenes we saw last night was the funeral for Sam the Lion, the Ben Johnson character. At the end of the scene, Lois, played by Ellen Burstyn, starts to cry and runs away from the funeral. My professor told us that the tears were genuine - "Ben Johnson had just discovered he was dying; he died four months later."

So this morning at work I was looking at the IMDB listing for the film, and I clicked over to the Ben Johnson page to see what other movies he was in. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that I recognized him from another film based on a Larry McMurtry novel: The Evening Star. Which was the sequel to Terms of Endearment. Which was made about twenty five years after Ben Johnson "died.".

I hate decisions.

Do I start drinking and do the one thing I've been dreading all week? Or do I drink Crystal Light, turn on a movie and straighten up the apartment?

Decisions!

I hate traffic.

I think I spent two-thirds of the last five hours with one fist in the air, yelling "You are the shittiest driver. Ever. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Goddammit. Goddammit."

I left DC to go to an appointment in Fairfax at 1:50 p.m. Middle of the afternoon! Why would there be traffic? It's a distance of 20 miles. I got to my appointment at 3:20 in the afternoon. Twenty minutes late.

Then lots of stuff happened, mostly involving my going to Wal-mart, getting utterly confused, and leaving Wal-mart without a single one of the items I was looking for. I dropped by the parents' house to pick up some fruit and an extension cord, because they had extras of both, and left Virginia at 5:15.

I got back to DC at 6:45. Now this is more understandable. It's the worst time of the day, traffic-wise, even if I am going the opposite direction from everyone else.

So let's count. That's three hours in the car. That's more time than I've spent in my car in total since I moved here two months ago. That's obscene.

I hate dead mice.

I hate when I walk out into my apartment building's hallway and find a dead mouse, frozen in gallop mode, in front of the elevators.

What I really hate is when I go tell the front desk person that there's a dead mouse in my hallway and she laughs at me.

Rodents are oh so hilarious, folks, didn't you know?




How did it drop dead while running?! Was it poisoned? Did it have a heart condition? How did it get into the hallway of the fourth floor?

I hate my thesis.

More to the point, I hate that I can't seem to make myself write my thesis. This thesis I am allegedly writing is about blogging. Yes, I read blogs. Yes, I write in a blog. But do I write about blogs for the long paper I have paid for the privilege to write? No, no, I don't.

I hate that I have no chance today.

Come on, everyone has to admit it, how can I compete with Tyler's passing out at a show? It's classic. Tragic, but classic. And my faux meat addiction just can't compete. Kudos, Tyler. And I'm sorry I didn't pick up my phone last night. I was asleep and disoriented. Although maybe not as disoriented as you were.

I hate that I love processed faux meats.

I had one for every meal yesterday. Vegetarian sausage, vegetarian hamburger, vegetarian pepperoni. So good. So not healthy. Healthier than meat, but still not healthy. I think I get more protein than the average omnivore.

I hate my poor judgment.

It's one thing to embarrass yourself in front of friends.

It's quite another thing to go to a show by yourself after forgetting to eat dinner, drink three beers, smoke several cigarettes and then get dizzy and dehydrated and pass out in the middle of the headliner's set.

Not my finest moment. That's for damn sure.

I hate my chin.

Because it's red and it hurts and there's nothing I can do about it.

I hate making mistakes.

Especially when they're mistakes that other people can see.

I hate that HTML doesn't work in real life.

I had to write a rhetorical analysis on an essay called "Hateful Things" by Sei Shonagon. Now, I've never written a rhetorical analysis. And, honestly, I went to the type of college where professors said, "Rhetoric rhetoric rhetoric!" at me, expecting me to know what the hell they were talking about. (I wanted to respond, "I read And Then There Were None in my twelfth-grade HONORS English class. Don't expect me to know anything except that Agatha Christie wrote the great masterpiece of the British canon.") Anyway, I don't know how to write a rhetorical analysis, which showed in my shitty, shitty paper, but there was nothing I could do because no one will show me how to do things.

But the most frustrating part was the irony of the reading assignment. I wrote a sentence this sentence: "Shonagon's list of hateful tings includes actions and behaviors that are almost universally disliked." The professor underlined "are almost universally," and above the first paragraph he wrote in red ink, "Do you dislike everything she mentions?"

I wish I could have responded, "Yes."

I hate my addiction to google.

Will the stalking never end?

I hate my neighbor.

I hate my neighbor for the usual reasons, as well as some more superficial ones. But the thing I hate the most is how I can tell when there's a Redskins football game on because he plays his TV so goddamn loudly I can hear the commentary.

Dude, you live three doors away from me. I know it's you in the baseball cap. I can hear you and your friends yelling at the TV and ripping open bags of chips.

Today is going to be different. Today I'm going to drown you out with Sonic Youth. Because it's the only band I own music by who has the potential to drown out the goddamn drums.

I hate it when drunk girls are smarter than me.

Q: "Hey, where did you apply to college?"

A: "Umm... Berkley, University of Chicago, Brown, Yale, Harvard. I ended up at Penn. How about you?"

FUCK YOU. IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION.

I hate getting that drunk.

Ever get so drunk that you go into the bathroom and stare at yourself in the mirror for so long that you realize that you're that drunk that you're staring at your reflection, not even in a narcissistic way, but just in the way that you say to yourself, "I can't believe I'm so drunk LOL ROTFLMAO"?

I hate that.

I hate when hangovers get in the way of life.

I hate when you're so hungover, you can't walk until 3:30 p.m.

I hate getting too drunk.

As in so drunk a cop stops you on the subway to ask if you're okay because you're "staggering." Hot!

I hate not having options.

The only things in all of the vending machines in the entire building are Red Vines and Chili Cheese Fritos.

I hate flickr fetish.

I hate when I start looking at some random blogger's flickr site and I just can't stop. Inevitably, there are 87 pages of pictures and one-third of those pictures are of the flickr user's cat, who is unwilling to pose.

But I can't stop looking.

I hate Patse.

Veto!

I hate getting up earlier only to be thwarted.

I hate getting up to run at 5 a.m. and finding that my key suddenly isn't opening the gym door. But there's somebody already in there, you can hear their beeping treadmill, so you stand outside the door, hoping that he or she catches a glimpse of your beady 5 a.m. eyes in the mirror, takes mercy, and opens the door. That doesn't happen. So then you march yourself down to the desk and announce your key is broken and the lady goes, "Well, baby, we ain't got no engineer 'til 7."

Is the engineer really going to fix my key? Really? Something tells me no.

So now it's 6 a.m. And what I'm really mad about is that today marks my third trip to the DMV. Hello, fun.

I hate my body clock.

I hate getting really really tired super early in the night. It makes me feel like an old lady. I can normally stay up until all hours of the night and get up decently early and not feel like crap(it's a gift, I'm well aware), but there are occasions when I feel like death warmed over at say, 10:30 at night.

I hate nursing homes.

Just use your imagination: the smell, the food, the incessant 1920's hits playing the background, the poorly applied wallpaper, the nurses, the dirty floors, the yelling, the wheelchair jams in the hallways.

I hated Brick.

When I was in high school I used to wish for movies to come out and portray people my age having adult situations and dealing with them the way adults do. I think this is because I hated watching teenage movies and would have rather seen an all-teen cast in L.A. Confidential.

I would have probably loved Brick then, but now it just makes me angry. It’s got so much style, great film noir-inspired dialogue, a terrific, jazzy score. But it takes place in high school.

There’s a reason why high school-aged actors don’t play high school-aged characters in films. Young actors are rarely mature enough to grasp the emotional range. The same can be said for any high school student, which is why dramatic movies featuring seventeen-year-old detectives should not be made. Or maybe I just shouldn’t watch them, because seeing serious lines delivered by teenagers makes me want to die.

Also, Lukas Haas's face kinda makes me want to throw up.