If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, first, you have my thanks and, second, you have my pity. But you also have the knowledge that I have no love for small children in restaurants, unless they’re actually being offered on the menu. Normally, it’s the screaming, the wailing, the shrieking, the constant drilling cicada-like screeching small children seem to be legally required to create when surrounded by food. But last night, the SBM and I went out for a quick dinner and I found something that might almost be worse: giggling.

The table next to us had three children, ranging in age from maybe four to eight. I’m no good at guessing children’s ages, generally just lumping them all in the “too stupid to know any better” age group. Well, these three were definitely that stupid and all had apparently just ingested about fourteen Cokes apiece, because they spent the next forty minutes giggling non-stop. They’d knock a coat on the floor and giggle. They’d tell each other jokes and giggle. They’d sing off-key Christmas carols and giggle. They’d play hide and seek around the table and giggle. Giggle giggle giggle giggle giggle.

The parents, of course, were blissfully unaware of any of this, tuning it out with their built-in parental defenses and calmly enjoying their dinners and chatting quietly. In fact, the only time they acknowledged the over-excited and hyperactive trio was when they ordered each one an ice-cream dessert, thereby ensuring their sugar levels would reach stratospheric heights and the giggling would reach Biblical proportions. We paid the bill in a hurry and fled for the safety of the night.

 I know some people say that the laughter of children is like music, but that’s only because they’ve never sat next to it for the better part of an hour.

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I recently got a new cell phone, as the old one couldn’t hold a battery charge for more than about five minutes. Every time I turned it on, the display would read “Please kill me.” Not being rich enough for an iPhone, I settled on just another standard cell, nothing fancy, make and receive phone calls, send a text message if I have a lot of extra time and money to waste.

Of course, any time you get a new phone number, you invariably get quite a few wrong numbers from people trying to call whoever had that number before you. It happens. I’ve gotten over a dozen now, people who admittedly don’t know any better but are nevertheless wasting my pay-as-you-go minutes and getting on my nerves. The weird thing is, every call has been for a different person. I’ve gotten calls for Sarah, Debbie, Steven, Mark, and several others. And I’m left to wonder: Is my new number just that close to a lot of other numbers and very easy to misdial? Or worse yet, is it like The Ring and the number is cursed and anyone who has it dies within a month, killed by a tiny little wet girl who crawls out of the screen and stabs you in the ear?

Shoulda got the iPhone…

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If you ever find yourself cleaning countertops with Clorox brand pre-moistened disinfectant wipes with bleach, don’t immediately use the same hand, without thinking, to rub your nose. Unless you want to play that timeless party game, Faint or Puke.

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Driving to work the other day and pulled up behind a car at a red light. It was a new Toyota Corolla, red, still had the temporary tag in the back window. Shiny, clean, this thing had been off the dealer lot for maybe two weeks, three tops.

The back was covered with bumper stickers.

Harley Davidson logo in the back window, Happy Bunny showing me his butt, Support our Troops ribbon magnet, my [breed of dog] is smarter than your honor student, local radio station call letters, on and on. And I couldn’t help but wonder, what would possess you to do that to a brand new car? Are you so desperate to show your individuality that your first act as owner of a new vehicle is to destroy the paint job by covering it with corporate logos and snappy sayings that everyone else is already displaying? Do you need that badly for anonymous motorists behind you to know where you stand on the thorny issues of motorcycle brand and radio station selection?

Congratulations on making a personal statement with your vehicle, although I’m not sure “I just totally trashed a new car” was the best choice.

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At work the other day, and the local news had a story on about cheap gas prices in the area. My coworker saw the piece and I heard him exclaim, “Man! Gas for $2.35? Awesome!”

No, it isn’t.

Think back a year. $2.35 a gallon was high. Ridiculously high. People were bitching left and right about this, demanding the government step in and regulate this somehow. The fact that gas has since gone almost a dollar higher doesn’t change this fact. And now that we’ve seen gas selling in excess of three dollars, people see this as some sort of bargain. It’s not. It’s still high, just not as high as it has been.

C’mon, people, try to remember a little more history than “last week.”

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Why are things “old-fashioned” yet “newfangled?” You never hear about “new-fashioned” stuff or “oldfangled” items. What is “fangled,” anyway? “Yeah, we’ve been fangling stuff like this for years, but this is the newfangled way of doing it. Lotta progress in this here fangle procedure, that’s for sure.”

I’m just looking for a little consistency, that’s all.

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Now that October is over, can we please stop with all the Breast Cancer Awareness? Don’t get me wrong, I’m against cancer in all its forms, as it’s rather prevalent in my family and I’ve lost several relatives to The Big C. And as a heterosexual guy, I’m against anything that harms breasts. But I really do not need to be assaulted with the color pink non-stop everywhere I go. Case in point: Went grocery shopping the other day and counted eighty-four items either with the pink ribbon on the label, a pink label, or the item itself was now pink. And that’s not fourteen different flavors of Campbell’s soup, that’s eighty-four separate items from different companies: Soup, yogurt, crackers, cereal, muffins, bread, pasta, ice cream, the list goes on and on. There’s pink Brita pitchers, pink cookware, pink kitchen utensils, hell, there’s even a pink Dyson vacuum cleaner. And you gotta really be against breast cancer to buy a $500 dirt-sucker to show your support.

One of the oddest pink items? Madden 2009 for the Xbox 360. Forgive me for engaging in gender stereotypes, but I think most of the young adult male Madden fans will likely shy away from buying a pink video game, especially one so testosterone-laden to begin with.

Again, great cause, but can we tone it down a little? I’m about as aware as I’m going to be at this point.

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