ANNOYED TO DEATH

Why are all the shows I love on TV on vacation? I’m not. Why should they be?

Take Bored to Death. It took me two or three episodes to get hooked on the improbably loveable characters and to find myself humming the theme song even though I don’t quite get the words  — and then, just like that, the season was over. Sure, I can watch it on HBO On Demand, but I want a new episode!

Then there’s Mad Men. And Entourage. Don’t even talk about In Treatment. Reruns do not cut it. Yo, Gabriel. I need a session! Badly. You ARE coming back, aren’t you? Do we even have an appointment? You can’t just go and cancel therapy like that: we’re all neurotic enough as it is. 

Life is SOOO annoying.

We’re not being Bored to Death — just  Annoyed to Death.

In the post, Earth To Willard Scott, about trying to get my parent’s 75th anniversary on the Today Show (talk about annoying!), I said that although people are now living to 100 on a regular basis, I seriously doubt that WE will. Why? You have to ask?

Life is just so much more complicated for us these days  — beyond annoying, if you want to know the truth. And it won’t get any better as some of us we inch our way towards a century of living.

Here are a just a few of the things  — besides not being able to see a new episode of Gossip Girl — that could annoy a person to death. Any one of them alone can make you want to tear you hair out, but taken as a whole, the results could be, well, fatal . . .

•Telephone trees. Need I say more?

•Listening to someone being politically correct. Listening to yourself being politically correct.

•Finding out that you’re paying more than the person next to you on the plane did. Way more.

•Finding out, after spending far more than the alleged 15 minutes on the phone, that Geico CAN NOT save you 15% (or anything at all) on your car insurance. Elmer Fudd is wite to be inwaged!

•Getting a dirty look from the person taking up 1 ½ seats on the bus when you try to sit down into the ½ seat that remains, even though there’s no other place to sit and it gets dangerous when the bus makes sudden movements. (You’ve seen the movie Frida?)

•The long, boring, inane conversations of people on cell phones. If they’re going to talk that much and that loudly, it should be about something really juicy.

•Long lines. Everywhere. Even to check into the Queen Mary. Really.

•The TV ads warning of possible side effects of medications: basically, your ears will “fall off like figs, your toes will grow big and black as balloons, and steam will come screaming out of your navel.” (Did Dylan Thomas write these commercials?)

•The techie stuff that keeps coming at you, so that just when you think you got it, you ain’t got it. And your 12-year-old nephew does. How many times a day do you find yourself shouting at some digital device, “Why is it doing that???”

•Packaging: It’s all designed by sadists, and you can’t open anything without a sharp object, which you’d rather use on the idiot who made the package. If only.

•Spending a small fortune to get your toenails done, only to discover when you get home that they’re already chipped, smudged, or dinged. I really hate dinged.

Okay, so that last one is pretty petty, or “pedi,” as the case may be, but all these things are in the scheme of things. The problem is that little annoyances add up. Every minute. Every day, Every year. They lead to frustration. Anger. Road rage. And, probably, to an early death. Even if it comes at age 99.

Forgot about the real heartaches of life, like Monk having its final episode a few weeks ago. But we knew that had to end — and what a great ending it was!

Bye, Tony! We’ll really miss you.

Anyway, I can get over heartaches. There are books and support groups to help. There’s probably something out there right now for dealing with Obssessive-compulsive Withdrawal  (OW). I’ll go check on Amazon.

But will anyone publish The Twelve Stages of Annoyance? Not bloody likely. Even though it’s the annoyances of life that will drive us all to drink.

And guess what, I just ran out of eggnog.

Annoying, isn’t it?