perfidy

The fact that no person or news agency other than PBS' Frontline has been honest about the very simple reasons for going to war with Iraq, and that removing a dictator with things that go boom wasn't one of them. There are reasons, and then there are excuses.

Being told that it's a-okay to have me teaching part-time, but that I might be overqualified to work as a full-time instructor during the course of the interview for said full-time position. The fact that I won't get the full-time position because they'll probably give it to a jug-head who has no business being in a class-room as a student, much less a prof.

Realizing that other, similar colleges might consider me overqualified while knowing that the next step up will most likely consider me underqualified.

Referring to Hispanics (a term that the U.S. government invented) as though they were a single ethnic group. If that's the case, then the whole of the European continent, Britain, Ireland, the near east, and north Africa are all peopled by members of the same ethnic group.

Speaking of Africa as though it were a country and not a continent.

The scratch in my eye that keeps reopening to leave me in blinding pain every morning, including the one I had the aforementioned interview.

Not to sound like a populist demagogue, but banks have my goat at the moment.

The sad lack of free alcoholic beverages distributed by the government to people who work part-time and have difficulty acquiring full-time employment, or unemployed people with no employment, in a poor economy with a national unemployment rate over 6%.

Just the unemployment rate by itself, and that people are having difficulty paying rent and buying food, much less a luxury like booze.

Dealing directly and extensively with people I dislike, especially pain in the ass co-workers.

Women who turn their noses up at men who make less than $100,000 a year. That's roughly 98% of them in this town. The other 2% are already married to guys who make less than $100,000 a year, leaving me pretty much out in the cold.

That the odds of being shot, stabbed, or bounced repeatedly off the front windshield of a speeding taxi attempting to swerve through traffic with its passenger side wheels on the sidewalk are better than experiencing even moderately good fortune.

That by next year, the only good show on HBO will be Six Feet Under. An excellent series, but my life has so little. How 'bout just one more season of The Sopranos after this next one, Gandolfini? What do you say?

Finally, the very last thing that's annoyed me lately, television commercials where one character pretends to accept the meaning of a word or phrase spoken by another character except the second character deals in reality and the first character has his own language and lives in his own little world. Like the one where that rich asshole who made his money the old-fashioned way he inherited it and never worked a goddam day in his privileged life in the pickup with his gold-digging wife and whiny children with a sense of entitlement, hauling a fucking boat, the total monetary value of both vehicles being more than most people will see in their entire lives represents himself as a trucker to an actual trucker and the rich jag-off thinks he's a trucker because he has a fucking pick-up!

I almost feel better. Except something else will piss me off tomorrow, and I'll be back where I started.