MONDOmagazine

MONDO’s writers reveal what sets their teeth on edge

It’s been a long, hard winter here in Toronto, and those aren’t exactly the conditions that get the soul a-singin’. It’s a hard, bitter frost that makes for some hard, bitter people. We at MONDO realize, however, that venting can be cathartic, and in that spirit, we share with you our gripes. Sometimes, anger just has to be let out, and it’s good to know that there are always a few good, deserving targets. In that spirit, five MONDO writers (one a first-timer) have gotten together to share their rage in a little segment we like to call “Gripes.”

Oh, cripes.

Guys Who Play their Guitars in Public
I find the “guy playing guitar in public” to be as annoying as other screams of low-self-confidence actions like custom car interiors/exteriors, or little-big-man workout fanatics who tear the arms off their t-shirts, or guys who actually start their own fight clubs. Anyway, when I was 14, and coming from an indie-rock crowd, I will admit — I was once the type of patsy these guys live for. I had romantic fantasies of him on stage singing to me, or about me, and I was actually not embarrassed or bored. As most girls (from whatever circle) realize once they actually start dating this insecure individual, your first priority becomes constantly stroking his fragile ego, which in this case means listening to a lot of half-baked songs, Bright Eyes covers, or — worst of all — songs about you, that you have to like, lest he totally fall to pieces if you don’t.

Even if you aren’t dating Public Guitar Guy it is still crushingly annoying. I am unfortunately friends with a few, and it sucks almost equally bad. Example: a few years ago a group of five of us took a day trip to the Niagara region for a walk along the escarpment. I drive a very small Yaris Hatchback, and we had filled the back with fun group things like food, booze, blankets, and clothes. Public Guitar Guy, being socially vulnerable without his musical crutch, insisted on bringing the guitar, despite there being no room at all in the car. This personality type will likely also play the guitar in the car, or on the bus, or while walking… I mean, COME ON! I have even known a guy that keeps a handful of guitar picks in his pocket so that even if his guitar is not with him, he can still reference the fact of his playing to cashiers, homeless people, and really anyone else that gives him cause to root through his pockets. It’s really quite sad.

In closing, if you are that guy who plays guitar in public, you aren’t fooling anyone — except possibly a slew of naïve teenage girls who have not yet learned that dating a musician = band-practice on Friday nights, lugging gear to shows at every shit box arena within a three-hour driving distance, and having their girlfriend status temporarily downgraded to “merch girl” every time you try to be supportive and go to his “gigs.” If you want to seem cool and indie-rock and attract girls, buy a Moldy Peaches T-shirt, and spare us all your ambient public finger-picking.
— Jenny Bundock

***
Climate-Change Denial
The snow swirls around me, moving up and down, left and right. The snow enjoys finding my eyeballs, and cleverly times itself to land in my retina right when I look up from my feet into the eyes of a young woman. This causes me to wink at her. She covers her face and keeps moving.

I’m not wearing a sweater because wearing a sweater would force me to do more laundry, and I’m an environmentalist. Okay, fine, I’m just poor and lazy. It’s cold as hell outside, and I just want to get to my room so I can warm my body with a bottle of scotch. Humanity is just another aspect of this torture. And here it comes.

The woman I had winked at is now across the street, walking towards a middle aged man who is shoveling in the storm. Unfortunately, I am close enough to the action to hear his words.

“Global warming, eh?” the man chuckles. “David Suzuki made a fortune on global warming.”

The woman thinks this man is as stupid as I do, but she has to humour him as he has confronted her and she just wants to go home. She lets out a false chuckle. The man is pleased with his joke. He is not going to be tricked by any g.d.’d scientists.

His joke makes me angry. First of all, it is not an original joke. I hear strangers tell it three or four times a winter. And secondly, of course, it’s completely ignorant. Global warming is now known as climate change, for exactly this kind of knee jerk reaction. I wonder if the man knows this, but tells the joke anyway. Either way, he is extremely ignorant, and trying to be smart. Bad Comedy Network-style humour has forced its way into my life, and I don’t have a gun or remote control.

I make a prayer to God. I pray that I remember this man’s face. I pray that I will run into him 20 years from now. He will have skin cancer from the lack of ozone. I will say to him, “Global warming, eh?”
— Ben Robinson

***
Calling “Scam” on Procedures You Don’t Understand
As I’m sitting on the subway I can hear a conversation going across from me (no, not eavesdropping, they were just pretty loud, though, yes, it’s still technically eavesdropping), and it went thusly:

“So I just got a new pet, and I took him to the vet to get checked out, right? Well, I pay $70 for the tests, get it done, and go home. Later I get a call from the vet’s office saying we want the pet in for more tests, and it’ll cost another $30. Why didn’t they just do them before, huh? I would have paid more to get them all done at once!”

This is where the other person nods, so as to appear engaged in the conversation, when really she’d rather do the crossword or something.

“And the receptionist tells me if I care about the pet I should go do it… I just feel like I’m being taken for a ride. Plus I don’t need a lecture from a receptionist…”

That’s the gist of the conversation and what I find to gripe about here is the lack of understanding this person had for the vet’s office (though this lack of understanding can be extrapolated to pretty much every area of life).

Even a cursory viewing of TV’s House teaches you that all these tests cost time and money, and if you stop to think about it, the vet probably did the common “all encompassing” tests, and subsequently found something that would suggest something else (like lupus — get it?), so the office has to call for another battery of tests. Makes sense to me, so stop complaining about it people, especially when they’re just doing their job, and doing it correctly.
— Isaac Mills

***
The Cancellation of jPod
Remember the best episodes of Malcolm in the Middle, when in the foreground you’d have some bizarre and really wacky plot, and then in the shadow, you could see the edges of the unhealthy relationships and corrosive attitudes that underpinned the loud, bright mess up front? Jpod gave us this as a starting point — entertaining, funny action with the underlying sense that things were rotten. But once the action got rolling in jPod, they’d pull those dark edges out in front of the bright mess and expose the nasty emptiness of this modern world and its selfish denizens.

On March 7th, CBC announced that jPod won’t be renewed for a second season due to poor ratings. In February, after only four episodes, the CBC swapped jPod from a Tuesday night slot to a dead-end Friday night slot. They also yanked virtually all promotions for the show. It’s hard to feel the CBC hadn’t already sealed the show’s fate by setting up the conditions for jPod’s cancellation.

Jpod, for its part, made a crucial error — of the ten episodes broadcasted at the time of my writing this, the latter five have been a lot stronger than the first five. This means that audiences who did see jPod saw a weaker version of it than the one that’s emerged. In the world of television it’s obvious the ugly duckling doesn’t get a fair shot — she just gets shot. Excuse me now; I have to go watch the riveting The Week the Women Went while slamming my forehead against the screen.
— Leo K. Moncel

***
Continental Drift
Hmmn, well this seems a bit off topic now, but I’ve been watching a lot of the BBC Walking With… series recently, so my mind’s in a somewhat different place. Oh well.

I’m annoyed by continental drift: I’ll just come out and say it. Sure, it doesn’t affect my day-to-day life that often (it’d be a different story if I lived on the Pacific Coast, though!), and it makes a lot of pretty mountains, but as an autodidactic student of prehistoric life, I’m against it, from both a geological and biological standpoint. Allow me to explain.

Take the Sahara desert: once a thriving, shallow mangrove sea, teeming with primitive Pleistocene life. That is, until ol’ Continental Drift decides to rear his ugly head. Suddenly (well, geological-scale suddenly, so it probably took a while), the swamp has dried up because it’s no longer being fed a steady current of water, and the whole area dies out and becomes the largest desert on Earth. How is that fair? Hey, Continental Drift — Screw You!

Even when it isn’t directly fucking with life by turning our lush wetlands into barren desert, continental drift still manages to screw with us (“us” in this case meaning “the living”). Take South America, for example, for ages it existed as an island-continent, independently evolving many species unique to the rest of the globe, including, if I recall correctly, many marsupial predators. Of course, that’s simply too cool for that jackass Continental Drift to take, so he sends South America on a course towards North America. Suddenly, there’s a land bridge between the two continents, and South America’s poor Marsupials are being out-competed by North America’s sabretoothed cats (who are, admittedly, awesome)! Another victory for Continental Drift, I guess.

I’m sure that there are plusses to old C.D., and I’m sure that I’ll be getting some email explaining to me that continental drift is probably what makes life itself possible, or something, but if you check the record (the fossil record), you know I’m right: continental drift is a jerk.
— Sam Linton