5 Things That Shouldn't Make You Mad (But Will)

5 Hiccups

According to science, a hiccup is what occurs when I have no idea. What am I, an ornithologist? It's something to do with a flipped diaphragm or whatever. The point is, a hiccup is when someone goes "hyack" about 300 times in a row and you sit there and try not to murder them until it ends.

Nothing in the world has more bullshit home remedies than hiccups. You'd think people would spend more time trying to figure out if lemon and honey cures cancer, but they don't. Instead they let you know that breathing into a paper bag on your head while drinking water with a Hot Pocket in your ass will probably fix those hiccups right up. Also, it never works, so instead of just being annoyed by hiccups, you get annoyed by hiccups and the ridiculous ways people try to fix them. But the fact that there are so many ways to try to fix them speaks to just how much people hate them. They'll try 101 ridiculous things to make them go away because hiccups are the biological function equivalent of that guy who smears shit on the walls in a public restroom. They're just so awful.

You've done good work in here, Stinky.

No one has control over hiccups, which is why it's kind of shitty to be so frustrated by them. I get hiccups and I piss myself off; it makes no sense. I assume it's the repetitiveness of it that is so off-putting, like when you're a kid in school and that little fuck who sits next to you keeps poking you because his mom drinks a lot and his dad is never there and he thinks this kind of shit is kosher and it's not like it hurts, it's just that eventually you have to stab him with your pencil so he understands his place in the natural order of things.

I like to think that on some primal level we're offended by hiccups as a lack of control. We see some hiccuping chucklefuck and think, "What a weak-willed nancy," or something very similar to that. You can't even stop your body from making cartoon spasms. You eat shit and die. Is that fair? No. But life isn't fair.

4 Chewing

Is this one just me? I've tried to get over it for years, but there's nothing to be done for it. My choices are hypnotism, some kind of voodoo intervention, or living alone in the mountains, I think. I absolutely despise the sound of chewing. If another person has to eat near me and I can hear it, start a timer, because in under a minute blood will be dripping from my ears and hissing like alien blood on the ground when it lands.

I understand that my hatred of the sound of chewing is irrational, as my emotional response is on par with watching the slaughter of innocents, as though I'm being forced to endure cosmic injustice. It's just chewing. But fuck me ... I feel like we should all know how to chew at this point. I think everything on Earth masters chewing the day it is born except humans. There are single-celled organisms out there that just sort of sit on protein blobs or whatever the fuck they do and absorb those nutrients, and there's no slurpy sound, no chomping or weird fucking humming or yummy sounds that make me want to drown them in a toilet and leave them there with their pants around their ankles so that, when they're discovered, people assume something even worse than what really happened went down, as a kind of final insult.

There's obviously no good reason why this one sound enrages me so much, but there it is. I feel like it's a sign that you can't be bothered to separate yourself from a medicated ape. Like that extra bit of effort required to close your mouth is just too much, so shlappy shlompy squish squash, put more fucking pudding in my hole.

3 Different Points of View

Let me preface this by saying that it doesn't apply to everyone, or all the time. But some people, sometimes, just cannot and will not handle even the idea that someone thinks a different thing. And while we all want to live under the belief that we're all unique and beautiful little snowflakes and special and different in every way, fuck anyone who is different and unique in a way we don't like. And this doesn't mean I like freedom and you like subjugation and prison camps for redheads. This means I think Fight Club was a good movie and you don't, so now I have to carpet bomb your house and make your parents watch as I flay you alive, you dumbass opinion-haver, you.

The Internet has likely shown you that what you think about movies, music, religion, and politics really rubs someone else the wrong way. Just mention on a liberal website that you're a Republican and wait for someone to call you a fascist or right-wing nutjob. Do the opposite and see how long it takes for someone to condemn you for your position on abortion. And this could all have started in a conversation about cookie recipes.

If you dislike the Godfather movies, someone will probably insist you're either insane or retarded at some point in time. This will hold true for any opinion that is not the popular opinion. You dislike X, or you think Y is better than X, where X is literally anything regarded favorably by a majority of people, and you will be called out. And it will be mean. It will be so fucking mean. You whole bloodline will be called to task if you allow the conversation to fester.

2 Farts

Farts are probably one of the greatest defining characteristics of humanity as a whole. We will never appreciate that as a species, but the way a fart can bring us together in laughter and discomfort is truly unique. But where one fart is potentially great comedy, there is a limit that must never be crossed. Once it is crossed, we get pissed right off. I will suggest that five farts is this limit. Five farts is where it goes from being funny but gross to out of control and fucking terrible. This is where you begin to feel like somehow the other person is doing it on purpose; they have somehow mastered the art of forced farts and are doing their best to crop dust you out of straight-up malice. This malicious farting will not be allowed.

You and I both know that the idea of malicious farting is pretty far-fetched. Sure, you can time them in a malicious manner every so often, drop one at the perfect moment in a conversation or walking by someone to really sell the point that you want that person to smell the atmosphere of your colon because you dislike them that much, but it's a one-time gig, and it's still pretty funny. Really funny, in fact. Once you up the gas count, though, all bets are off.

"I'm crop dusting! Kind of literally!"

Multiple farts are, 99 percent of the time, a sign of a poor culinary decision. You could have eaten a Greek salad but instead thought that all those discount taquitos that the guy at 7-Eleven was just going to throw in the trash were a better idea. So, 25 16-hours-old taquitos later, the inside of your body is as squalid and damaged as a Third World war zone, and the only relief you can get comes from the repeated and constant release of devilry from your ass. Good for you; bad for family, friends, and co-workers. At some point (fart Number 5), everyone will decide you're doing it on purpose to make everyone else feel bad and the laughter will turn to vitriolic hate as people cover their faces with shirts like ghetto ninjas and insist that you go to the bathroom because apparently you're sitting on an undisposed-of shit and just airing it out in the room.

Any of us in the same position would be silently crying out for sympathy. No one wants to be the fart guy in any situation. Once they stop being funny, that shit's embarrassing. You become the person who literally smells like shit. Because the smell of shit keeps wafting out of the same hole shit comes out of. No one would do that on purpose, and getting angry at that person just makes them feel worse. Don't be mad at a serial farter the next time it happens, because there but for the grace of rotten taquitos farts go your own ass.

1 Repeating Yourself

For a while I thought this was a thing that only exasperated me, until I discovered that, literally every time in my life someone was unable to hear me more than once, they acted as though I had just removed their shoes, pissed in them, put them back on, and then firmly squeezed their genitals, after being assured that they did not want a firm genital squeeze.

I can't account for why, but as a species, we've decided that the world around us is entitled to one extra chance to hear what we said, and one chance only. We say something like "Hey look, pierogies!" and someone says "What?" and we happily point to the sign: "Look, a pierogi restaurant!" But God forbid the person we're talking to didn't hear us that time, because another repetition is apparently as painful as a colonoscopy from an epileptic Edward Scissorhands. We just can't do it.

The truly polite among us will opt for a "Never mind," which you'll notice your deaf friend always hears just fine, but other people will explode in exasperated grunts and signs and "Forget it!" proclamations, as though being asked to repeat ourselves was on par with being asked to explain all the political and financial ramifications of North America adopting the Amero as a standard currency.

As annoying as it is to have to repeat the same thing again and again, is there any rational basis for the anger it invokes? Someone didn't hear you; why do you get so pissy about it? This must give the deaf a terrible complex. You don't throw down on blind people for not commenting on the hilarious joke on your shirt. Or maybe you do; you could be really terrible. Stop reading this and go be a better person, you monster. For the rest of us, the next time you need to repeat yourself, just make sure you're getting the person's full attention and actually speaking a little louder. Then, if that doesn't work, throw rotten fruit at them, for they are just the worst.