Life is a Bowl of Cherries…

It’s the pits I hate.

Image by Gerhard Gellinger from Pixabay

For me, life is generally beautiful. Of course, there are some drawbacks that we all suffer from, such as ill-health, money or job problems, or unavoidable accidents, and those other roadblocks that are in the path along our journey of life. We all learn to accept these stumbling blocks as a part of life. But there are little things that in life that I hate, and I am sure others hate, as well. I refer to them as the pits in my bowl of cherries.

Like many people my age, I suffer from the pain of arthritis and my back is the most painful victim of that condition. I have noticed that on those days when my back is especially aching, I drop everything I touch. If I stand over the waste paper basket and drop a piece of paper into it, the paper doesn’t fall directly into the basket. It magically floats away and falls onto the floor, behind the basket, This forces me to bend over and pick it up, causing excruciating pain. When my back is feeling good, this never happens.

When I am sitting at the kitchen table finishing my breakfast I usually take my medications for the day. Why is it when my muscles and joints are stiff after a nights sleep that I inevitably drop one of my pills on the floor? Of course, it doesn’t just land within my arm’s reach. It has to bounce around and land a few feet away under a cabinet, where I have to get on my hands and knees and retrieve it.

I can’t even do laundry without annoyances. I have asthma and going up and down the stairs causes shortness of breath, so I try to limit the times I have to use the stairs. I try to combine my trips to conserve energy and air. But this doesn’t always work. It never fails that shortly after I have arrived in the basement to do my laundry, I realize that I left my phone upstairs. And sure enough, it starts to ring. I run upstairs to answer the phone and hear that damn annoying person trying to sell me an extended car warranty or some other service I don’t need or want. And that’s not the end of it. While I am transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, of course, I proceed to drop one or two socks, which I have to pick up, further irritating my sore back.

My all-time favorite things to hate are those damn plastic tags that are used to keep several pairs of socks together or to attach tags to a newly purchased shirt. Every time I cut those tags off, one piece of the tags always flies off onto the floor, lost until I step on it late at night going to the bathroom. If that doesn’t happen I usually discover it in my underwear, after being irritated by recurrent itch for hours. Speaking of new clothes. How about those pins that are used in packaging dress shirts? The other day I removed over 24 pins from a new dress shirt, as well as 5 pieces of cardboard stuffed in the collar and cuffs! Is all that crap really necessary?

Clothing isn’t the only product that is packaged to annoy me. Items such as energy-saving light bulbs, in particular, tick me off. When you buy something like this you have to make elaborate plans on how to open the package. First, you try your bare hands. That doesn’t work. Then you pick up a sharp knife to cut the plastic covering so you can remove the bulb. It still doesn’t come out. Finally, with a couple of bloody fingers, suffered by using the knife, you find your scissors and successfully extricate the bulb. Then you realize that it’s the wrong size!

Even while writing this article I was attacked by one of life’s tiny annoyances. I took a break to drive to the grocery store to pick up a couple of items for dinner. I wanted to make a quick trip to avoid the lunchtime traffic on the roads and in the store. I easily gathered my groceries and proceeded to the checkout counter. I chose the shortest line with only three people qued up and began what I thought was my short wait. The first person in the line sailed through quickly. The cashier rang up the items for the two people in front of me, then everything came to a complete halt. They didn’t have enough money. They were $25 short and they didn’t have any credit cards with them. One of them had to go out to the parking lot to their car and ask relatives for a credit card. So I waited. Why does this always happen when I’m in a hurry?

Last, but not least by no means, are those infamous bubble packs that house OTC medications such as pills for allergy and diarrhea. Have you ever tried to get one of those tiny pills out of the plastic in the middle of the night, under dim light, or in an emergency? Sure, it says “tear here”, but no way in hell does it tear. You have to fumble around for a pair of scissors to cut them out and then hope you don’t drop them on the floor!

There are probably a great deal more annoyances in life that I hate, but I can’t remember them at this time. Oh yeah, it’s annoying that as I get older I don’t remember as well as I used to, but that’s another story for another day. I guess we all have little things we hate, as we get along with our daily lives, but thank God they are minor and few and don’t affect the quality of our lives. I just have to realize how sweet the cherries are, as I remember to spit out the pits. How about you? What annoys you?