True Misery

I really shouldn't let Ryan go to the bookstore by himself. Every time I do he gets sucked into the bargain book section, where he ends up buying one or forty of them "for use at school." The story was no different when he went to Barnes and Noble on Monday to pick up a gift for our friends Meghan and Andrew who watched Sally while we were in New York. Well, I guess it was a little different, because this time he found a bargain book just for me.

Yeah. Some women get books about romance or puppies from their husbands, but I get this. What can I say, he knows me. I started to thumb through it, ready for a laugh, or the discovery of something new to complain about, but instead, this book actually made me miserable, for five very good reasons.

1. Someone got paid for this shit Yes, someone actually got to claim income on their taxes for sitting around and making a list of random things that suck. And they get to call themselves authors! Authors! Most people who make lists like this are called stoners and the biggest reward they get is a bag of cheetos.

2. It is not organized well If these jackasses are going to make money off this, the least they could have done is number the complaints, and maybe put them in some kind of order. Yes, I know, my OCD is kicking in, but how do we know there are actually 11,002 things in the book? And that some aren't repeated? There aren't even page numbers! For all we know these jerks could only come up with 5501 things and repeated each of them twice. I told Ryan I was going to go through the book page by page to make sure that wasn't the case, and he said I was kind of missing the point.

3. Not all of these things are miserable I enjoy being miserable, and can turn pretty much any situation into a bad time. Today I was told the morning show is starting a segment called "Sunny Side Up" featuring good news and I said I wanted to counter program it with a segment in my show called "Kill 'em All." I'm just that way. However, not even I think many of the things in this book are really "miserable." Hallmark cards? Tourists in Florence? Velvet Elvis Paintings? Yes, all of these things are annoying, but do they really make people miserable? I mean, people who aren't pussies? I don't think so.

4. Ryan spent money on this book that he could have spent on a moderately priced bottle of wine This book retails for $10.95. Ryan says he bought it for $6.50. Either one of those amounts could have gotten him a not too shabby bottle of fume blanc, which would have done wonders in making me far from miserable.

5. I had to apologize to Ryan after I came up with #4 Yeah, because he reminded me he was stopping at the book store after going to the wine store to buy me a moderately priced bottle of fume blanc. Well, he could bought two.

I'm going to start on a book now: "500 Books That Shouldn't Have Been Written." I'm only going to come up with 125 though. No one will read past that anyway...