Things That Must Go 5

Since I don't have time for anything, but I had one of these entries laying around, I thought I'd slap it up here. Not sure when I'll get to the Russia entries, but Becks blogged about it here.

Anyway, here it is:
Girls who say they love Jane Austen but have never read any of her books. The movies are great, y’all, but they’re not Austen. They have the same plotlines and occasionally the same dialogue, but they’re someone else’s interpretation. Jane Austen would never in a million years have written the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett is not a tomboy, and Caroline Bingley knows to wear sleeves when she is in public! There is magic and humor in Austen’s writing that is impossible to translate to film. I think the most famous example is the letter-writing that goes on at the end of Pride and Prejudice. (I know that I’ve used two examples of the same book here, but trust me, I’ve read them all. Multiple times.) At least, thank heavens, there’s an adaptation of Northanger Abbey out there that doesn’t woefully miss the point (copies of the 1989 adaptation should be rounded up and burned), but even that one lacks much of the delight and intrigue of the book.

On a highly-related note, girls who say Mr. Darcy is their dream man. Mr. Darcy is a tool for 80% of the book. Colin Firth and Matthew MacFadyen are hot, but a lot of tools are devastatingly hot, too. What’s the draw? The social awkwardness? The band of mean girls that follow him around? The emotional manipulation?

If you work for a certain government agency and aren’t supposed to talk about your job, you probably shouldn’t tell people that you work for a certain government agency and aren’t supposed to talk about your job.

Also, Same Person, if you are involved in an elaborate marriage proposal plot, and sworn to secrecy by the would-be groom, you probably shouldn’t tell people you’re involved in an elaborate marriage proposal plot!

The water dispenser at work. It’s WARM. So not only has it driven me to actually put ice in my water bottle, but it’s so warm that the ice is almost always melted by the time I get back to my cubicle.

If you are trying to prove a point about something you are angry about (especially when the anger is directed at me), your point will lose all value when you compose your email in Comic Sans.

Buying an album only to have it go on sale on Amazon two weeks later. Or worse, become the NoiseTrade free download of the week.

Posting four-year-old photos on Facebook. I sure enjoyed looking at those recently-tagged photos of people I no longer hang out with or had turbulent “relations” with in the time between when that photo was taken and now. Especially when photos of a certain beach weekend are posted right after this year’s certain beach weekend and one of your friends asks you why you’re groping a married man. (He wasn’t married when that photo was taken!!)

Standing ovations. What do standing ovations mean when handed out like pretzels? They’re woefully overused. I used to be a staunch sit-in-a-seat-while-everybody-else-stood-up kinda gal, but I’ve been peer-pressured too much lately to continue that. So I now regularly “fake a standing O.”

“Happy Birthday.” Man, I hate that song. It’s so cliché. Why can’t there be another birthday song? Why does everyone have to sing that one? Please, people, for my next birthday, I want one of the two following things to happen: 1) Learn the words to They Might Be Giants’ “Older” or 2) do “Happy Birthday” Hogwarts-style and choose your own melody.



Mormon jerks who park illegally in the neighborhood surrounding Temple Square and the Conference Center in Salt Lake City. Because I have to hear about it on Facebook from my brother and sister-in-law. I thought Mormons wanted other people to like them. But when you park in front of my non-member relatives’ driveway during Conference Weekend and thinks it’s okay because you assume they are going to or watching Conference too, you look like a real jackass. And it happens every single Conference Weekend, so it’s not a fluke.

Ugly sweater parties. I went to my first ugly sweater party in 2005. It was clever then.