Yippee-IA, Motherf***ers! IRRATIONALLY ANGRY PT. 2: Irrationally Angrier

I hate sealed jars and medicine bottles where the seal is glued down with superglue and there's either
a) a tiny little pull tab that comes off in your hand and is useless so you stab through the seal with whatever you can find
b) a tiny little pull tab that is too small to even grab onto so you stab through the seal with whatever you can find
c) no pull tab, no way to pry the seal off the jar/bottle so you stab through the seal with whatever you can find

ibuprofen and mayonnaise, I'm looking directly at you

well that's your problem, you should never buy the mayo/ibuprofen combo packs

they're packed with preservatives

lol

too much rain over the last few days. So I've gone around emptying the saucer/drip trays under plants on the balcony which are absolutely full. Has been pouring down all day it seems.
But it is at least race week so all the overmoneyed people in the area and the crooked politicians that notoriously make deals at the Galway races will have got wet. So there's some slight silver lining to these endless clouds.

amtrak and its rewards program are two separate websites requiring two separate accounts/logins that one can (only recently) 'link'

Your login information for both sites is the same as before. Feel free to change one account password to match the other. However, changing your first name, last name, email address or member number on either account will unlink your accounts.

what an utter embarrassment

I HATE shit like that.
Budget car rental has similar problems, which almost cost me $150-some when I returned a car and they checked me in on the wrong system.

My school has two separate portals w/ separate logins and separate records of a student's personal info - one for course registration, financials, degree progress, and grades, the other site is for changing major, extracurriculars, and checking admissions status. Why?!

I thought about setting it up so that my tweets would post to my Facebook feed, mostly because I'm never on Facebook anymore and I thought it could be a good way to connect with friends who aren't on Twitter. But I wouldn't want to be an asshole.

Yeah, don't do that. Plz.

A Young Professional of my acquaintance (who is a local celebrity blogger, ad/marketing pro, one of those "kind of a big deal" types who everyone knows) is about to get married. She currently owns a beautiful new-ish townhouse in the city in a very desirable area, just outside downtown; and she works downtown. (Total travel time, like 10 minutes.) She and her husband-to-be just mentioned on FB that in anticipation of the upcoming nuptials they're going to look at houses together . . . 20 miles outside the city, in a place where commuting requires an hour or so on the most congested freeway in the region. Why?!! You've got a perfectly good place to live for two people! You don't have to move to the fucking outer-ring suburbs just because you get married! GAAAAAAAAH!

Like the first time I hear her complain about traffic after she gets married it's going to be very hard not to tell her publicly to STFU.

Wow, yeah. The automatic path to the suburbs on marriage/reproducing makes me IA, too.

Yes, daycare in Chicago is o_O expensive but public schools are fine to great if you live in the right neighborhood. It just means you need to rent and/or inhabit a smaller space, which bfd.

Diff ppl have diff priorities so it's not like I get angry at people for wanting different things than I do, but I do get IA when ppl dont want to leave the city but move to the burbs bc they think they have to or when people smugly tell other ppl living in the city that they too will move to the suburbs one day, just you wait.

It especially makes me IA because her whole public persona is to be Ms. Cleveland Boosterism, it's what her whole blog is about, she's miss woman about town, then immediately plans a move to the suburbs the second she's married.

Ugh. I'm IA with you.

As someone who wants to stay in the city, I half agree with you on this, but there are many things that are harder about having kids in a city, and I assume most people who move to the suburbs after marriage have a family in mind.

I mean for example, I can't afford to live walking distance to any of the big city parks that actually have enough room to really run around, at least not in a neighborhood that checks the other boxes (decent schools, access to public transit, etc.). So when my kids are older, assuming I'm still where I am, they would have to walk 30 mins or ride bikes or take a train or drive just to get to a place where they can throw a ball back and forth. Of course NYC is not Cleveland and the financial considerations are pretty starkly different.

She lives in CLEVELAND, FFS. It feels almost like a suburb itself.

IDK what Cleveland is like. I don't imagine there are a lot of options for neighborhoods with good schools, and I don't know your friend's financial situation. I do know that once the baby came along I was shocked at how few places there were within city limits that were actually affordable and had decent schools.

I chatted w/ a 40-something guy on OKC who lived in a far-flung suburb of Chicago (Naperville, I think?) and he complained that so many single guys were "still" living in the city. He said he wished he'd had the experience of living in the city when he was young and asked me how long I planned to stay here. I said I was happy here and the only other place I'd really want to live would be New Orleans or New York. He was a little befuddled, and asked something like, "But don't you want to get out of the city? It just seems like someplace you live when you're young, but it's just so dirty and expensive!" And he said he never rides the El b/c the people are terrifying and dangerous.

Anyway, this fucker had that same idea that kids sow their oats in the city and but when they grow up, they move to a "normal" "clean" spacious suburb.

My dad's wife will occasionally make anxious comments that make it clear that she sees living in the city as constantly rife with the potential for danger. Asking whether I feel safe in my neighborhood, etc.

it's just so dirty and expensive

i imagine this is a guy who would always be laying down pristine white handkerchiefs on everything before he sat down except that the laundry service on them would be too costly

my stepfather's only complaint about cities is that greater density = higher likelihood of his car getting dinged. he actually rented a car rather than drive his own to visit me in dc

my real father routinely expresses amazement that companies headquarter themselves in nyc when it's 'so expensive'. he would find it more logical to situate people in the same way fedex situates its superhub at the memphis airport

people aren't packages!

yes, it's very easy to come up with reasons to feel smug about the fact that anyone would actually want to live in the suburbs

My dad's wife will occasionally make anxious comments that make it clear that she sees living in the city as constantly rife with the potential for danger. Asking whether I feel safe in my neighborhood, etc.

― Geoffrey Schweppes (jaymc), Friday, August 2, 2013 5:13 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But there are places in the city you wouldn't live, right?

people are packages, my friend

The only thing I'm smug about is certain people's assumption that they have to move to the burbs as a necessary life step, like Jesse's ok cupid guy, and that failing to do so is bad for your children or heralds some kind of fundamental immaturity. Also get annoyed at people who have never loved in a city getting all pearl clutchingly scared about them, see ie my entire family.

i want to puke when people give me that "oh you don't have kids" thing about living in the city. there are hundreds of thousands of actual human children there.

OTmfingM

But there are places in the city you wouldn't live, right?

Sure, but there are places in the suburbs where I wouldn't live, either.

Also get annoyed at people who have never loved in a city getting all pearl clutchingly scared about them, see ie my entire family.

yes. my family does this too and it is terrible.

that said, I really like living in the suburbs again.

many cities were a lot less safe in our parents' lifetimes, so I'm not surprised older people perceive them that way. When my parents lived in Hell's Kitchen in the 70's it was inevitable that several people you knew had been mugged at least once (my dad and mom never were but my aunt was several times). Shit was a lot more desolate-looking, subway crime was a much more regular occurrence, etc. My mom still has a kind of devil-may-care attitude about the whole thing but I don't blame someone for not having that.

want to puke when people give me that "oh you don't have kids" thing about living in the city. there are hundreds of thousands of actual human children there.

― veryupsetmom (harbl), Friday, August 2, 2013 6:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um, including my own. I live in New York City. And I am telling you that I 100% understand why someone, particularly someone not RICH, would want to leave once they had kids, assuming they could (my guess is that most of the kids in the city are either rich and can have a nice life in the city or are poor and their families don't have much choice).

don't um me. it's not that i don't understand why people would leave when they have kids. we have terrible public schools. these are just always small-minded people.

Anyway, I just feel like my stepmom has this preconceived notion of the THE BIG BAD CITY that somehow gets in the way of her being able to look around my tree-lined neighborhood full of strollers and boutiques and brunch places and realize, "OK, this is probably not a dangerous area." I mean, sure, crime is a possibility! But it's a possibility anywhere.

xp
Hurting OTM about cities being less safe when our parents were our age, so I do understand where the perspective comes from. The city's dangerous and dirty and cramped, and the suburbs are safe and clean and spacious. What gets lost in that dichotomy is not just that it's reductive or facile but that someone might have other considerations besides those: culture, transportation, diversity, etc.

we feel safer in inner city apartment blocks because the flats are harder to break into

the only time we were burgled was in a big spacious house on the fringe

^ i think about this all the time. the number of burglaries in the suburban county where i work is insane. i'm sure it's bad here too but it feels easy to not be burgled.

although my coworker who had a rowhouse was burgled, then she had kids and moved to a house on a golf course

I feel safer in the city bc if something happens I can yell and my neighbors will hear me. And presumably send for help, though they may still hold those couple of noise complaints against me and let me die.

Anyone else notice that more and more people make their voices go up in tone at the end of every sentence as if they were asking a question? Seems like I hear it mostly from people in their 20s-30s....someone please tell me they're noticing this too!!

isn't that something that people in Maine do?

question intonation, or high rise terminal

imo it's an indication that the speaker is lacking confidence

(unless you are idk welsh maybe)

xpost ugh I heard a political reporter on NPR do this the other day, rising inflections and a weird kind of lazy casual delivery. She sounded like a 25 year old talking about her weekend. It made me v annoyed.

also known as 'moronic interrogative', according to wikipedia

yesss

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=568

yeah getting grouchy about uptalk is nagl imo

telling me what not to get IA about is nagl either so THERE