Malice Most Delicious

A favourite author of mine once wrote that everyone should have about a dozen or so things they are allowed to find intolerable, without explanation or apology. I think that's a wonderful idea. How cathartic.  I'm generally a pretty positive person but I think we can all admit to having a secret list like this one. For this reason and without remorse, I absolutely hate the following...

1. Tights worn as pants.
2. Anyone who will smugly say "Spoilers!" without offering up a more interesting conversation topic, when what they really mean to say is "I haven't seen the movie yet but I'm too lazy and self interested to step away, so I'm going to stay here and force you to entertain me, just not about that one specific subject."
3. Beards.
4. Parents who give their children stupid names like "Mandolynne" or "Apoplexia". 
5. Rush.
6. Political correctness.
7. People who tell me every year that they love getting a Christmas card from me, who have never sent me one in return.
8. The phrase "No offense meant".
9. Plans on a Sunday afternoon.
10. Eowyn.
11. Literally every word ever written by E.L. James, from kindergarten through to the present day.
12. Having my beer or wine explained to me.

There. That felt wonderful. Many thanks to Bill Bryson for the inspiration.

Whisper Women

A woman has endless tools of communication at her disposal. To make her point, she might employ strength, guile, humour, wit, boobs...

I say tools of course but they can be weapons as well. Of these, none is more devastating than the whisper, especially when deployed against other women.

Whispering is the worst, most aggressively unfriendly thing women do to each other, and it's dangerous. Just ask the survivors in Carrie.

Forgive my ignorance, I'm certain men whisper. In fact, my secret crush has made a career of whispering on camera while gibbons procreate in the foreground. #davidattenborough #shinsofsteel 

It seems to me that women who whisper are choosing to do so because they want to draw a visible line between those whispered to and those whispered about. The act isn't subtle and the intention is for the excluded party to feel 14 years old again, sitting alone at the back of  Mr. Sherry's ENG OA4 class, hiding behind an ill-advised perm and over-sized glasses, trying to disappear into an Douglas Adams novel and not react to the twitters of the twits around her.

I've never liked whispering. I'm too loud, for one thing, so I'm acutally not very good at it. I also try my best never say something about a person that I wouldn't want them to hear.  Partly because that keeps life interesting but mostly because I have better manners than that and I am not a horrible human being. 

If you have whisper women around you, here is some advice: be kind to them. For two reasons. First, it's entirely possible that they haven't had many acts of kindness in their lives up until this point, so this is a good opportunity for you to show them what it looks like. In my experience, this alone will make a huge difference in their behaviour. 

The second reason to be kind is that in general, it also really pisses them off.