When I wrote the first “How to Annoy Me on Facebook,” I should have known that the four things I listed were just the tip of the iceberg, and I suspected, that after I wrote the following, I had just only cracked the surface.

1. Upload every photo in a set despite the fact that some of them are blurry, others contain only limbs and most are just plain bad. So you went to your cousin’s wedding/had an amazing night with the girls/took a vacation - this does not mean I need to see EVERY single photo from your excursion, including the ones where your husband is holding your kid in the same pose for 15 consecutive photos or when your friend was drunk enough to not realize the camera was on when she took photos of the ceiling, floor and half of your face. Stop being so useless.
2. Take the “When Will You Get Married?” and “How Well Do You Know [Insert Name Here]?” quiz. I understand that you’re bored. I understand that you’re immature enough to take quizzes most probably written by 15-year-olds, but you know, after you’re finished, a handy screen pops up, asking if you’d like to “publish” the quiz, or “skip” it. Nine times out of 10, your inclination should be to skip. I don’t care, and despite what you may think, your friends don’t care either, so stop clogging up everyone’s news feed.
3. Use LOL/ROFL/LMAO excessively. These common internet acronyms used to convey emotion are fine I suppose, when used sparingly, but when a reply to your friend looks like this: LOL yaaaa I know, it was so funnnnyyy, I had such a great time, can’t wait to party it up together again LMAO! You made me ROFL! LOLOLOL - it’s time to reexamine things. If you talk this way online, God knows what you sound like in person. It’s not becoming.

photo by normanack

Going to the super market is  a favorite past time of mine.  Call me low brow, but there’s nothing better than browsing the isles where you can find face wash, strawberries, magazines, wine and a bin full of $5 so awesomely bad that they’re good DVDs all in the same space. Plus, they always have a fun little holiday section. What I can’t stand is what takes place in the parking lot of said super market, mainly that people have the audacity to leave their shopping carts in parking spaces and raised sections of plants and trees, when there are at least three CLEARLY designated areas to deposit your cart. Would it kill you to walk an extra few feet? Really? Would it kill you?

I’m convinced that the selfish people who can’t put away their own shopping carts are also the ones who wont ever give you way to switch your lane on the freeway or talk horribly to wait staff.

I don’t understand the disconnect between having enough decency to realize that you take responsibility of a cart when you decide to put your groceries in it and carry it out the door. The fact that someone would leave a cart in a parking spot, therefore rendering the spot unfit for another car to use is beyond selfish and careless. It’s a matter of etiquette at this point really and blatant laziness.

It’s one of the mysteries of life I ponder now and then. Have we become so inconsiderate of others and so self-absorbed that we can’t even put shopping carts back where they belong? I guess we have.

I wish there was a secret supermarket cart task force who would hide out in store parking lots across America and verbally assault anyone who couldn’t bare the 15 second walk to properly dispose of their carts. Preferably, it would be someone like Nene from Real Housewives of Atlanta yelling, “I’m just telling you like it is, honey. Put. Away. The. Cart. or you’re getting an ass whoopin.” If she needed back up, she’d call  New York from all the reality shows VH1 has to offer to deliver the punches. She’d be all ” I’m the HBIC up in here. Put that shit away or get socked.”

After one long tedious and never ending day, I found myself at the convenient ATM in the super market not even a block away from my house, depositing a couple checks I had in my possession, one of which was a bonus that had been ripped to shreds by way of taxation. After conducting business, I went to have a casual look around the market, to see if there was anything new or interesting to buy. If there’s one form of shopping I love, it’s market shopping. Whenever I’ve traveled, I’ve been more interested in going to shopping markets in Rome, Barcelona and London than I have been doing actual, you know, shopping that normal people without weird tendencies do.

As I strolled around the white tiled floors and passed the useless security guard who was more interested in looking in the liquor isle than keeping an eye on all the thieving, sneaky housewives and children who might have planned on stealing paper towels or candy, I decided there wasn’t anything here for me. Disappointed, I made my way across the market to leave when a site I hadn’t seen for a while caught my eye.

There was a woman using the self-checkout counter (best idea EVER) with a one-year-old sitting in the cart. I didn’t notice at first, but when she turned around, it was more than obvious that she was heavily pregnant. She looked like she was probably only three to five years older than me. While I whizzed passed the counters I saw another woman, again, no more than five years older than me, with three kids, ranging in age from seven to three with another one on the way.
At first my mind went into some sort of epilectic shock. When I recovered there was only one question I had:

WHY.

Why God why have you subjected yourself to an eternity of hell at such an early age? And also, I’d like to introduce you to someone. Woman-that’s-almost-my-age-and-has-four-mouths-to-feed, meet birth control. Birth control is going to help you not ruin your life and lose your mind so that you start acting out like a 20 something  when you’ve turned 40 and have had enough of hell you’ve put yourself in.

At this point, I might seem like I’m a child-hater. On the contrary, this writer, who once took a child development course that made her smitten with kids and her ovaries cry, does not hate children. In fact, what she hates is when young  20 somethings decide that the best thing they can do with their lives is spawn, despite all the opportunities they have under their nose, despite the fact that they don’t know what they are getting themselves into, despite that they don’t even know who they are yea and despite the fact that they might look back in 20 years time and think, why didn’t I wait.

Don’t get me wrong, as this is not a generalization, but just a difference of opinion. At 24-years-old, I have just begun to understand what vision I want for my life. Some details have always been there from an early age, like the fact that I would love nothing more than to be a bona fide journalist who makes at least a bit of a dent in the world, but I am just beginning to understand who I am and what I want. There are times when I can’t even fathom the idea of calling myself an “adult.” Because I’m not an adult. Sure, I have a full-time job, I have car payments, credit card debt, but until I can master how to cut fruit seamslessly and smoothly without the aide of a peeler but with a knife, like my Armenian mother or feel entirely comfortable in my own skin, in my mind, I’m not an adult, I’m just the ghost of an adult.

But maybe it’s just me. Spawn away.

1. Post incessant and unnecessary status updates. Case in point: Alice is going home! Lucy is waiting for her hubby to get home so they can have dinner! Bob is so bored. No really. Bob is completely bored. John is watching t.v. after having lunch. Newsflash: I don’t care. I don’t care what that you’re going home or that you are so bored that you have to take the time to log onto Facebook to tell your friends that you are, infact, bored. Also, although I’m a huge foodie, I’m not particularly interested that you had a sandwich today or made yourself a healthy omelette in the morning. NO ONE cares.

2. Constantly confess your love to your significant other/best friend/sister/nephew/lover. This is like virtual PDA, and if you didn’t know, PDA’s are generally considered to be bad taste. The same rules apply for the internet. I do not want to hear about how much you love your “hubby” or that you miss your sister so much that you’re going to spontaneously combust and cry or that  you love your wife so much that you insist on leaving messages on her  page professing your affections, even though she is probably in the next room.

3. Connecting your Twitter account to your Facebook account and updating your status about 20 to 30 times a day. Repeat after me: Twitter is not Facebook, and Facebook is not Twitter. They are not interchangeable. Please do not take over my feed with your unnecessary updates and @replies.

4. Application requests. I’m not really interested in knowing which character I am from Twilight or how eco-friendly I am or what Sex and the City profile I fit best. Believe me, if I wanted to know, I would have taken the quiz or installed the app without any incentive from you.

5. Baby photos. This is perhaps one of the most annoying things you can do in LIFE.  Baby photos are  seriously the bane of my existence. And I’m not talking about the occasional upload or one album dedicated to your child. I am talking about endless uploads and endless albums documenting every waking, sleeping, burping, farting, tumbling moment of your toddler’s life. It gets worse when parents start discovering that they can upload mobile photos and then next thing you know, you log onto Facebook to discover your entire feed populated with useless photos of a child from 20 different angles. Oh, what’s that you say? There are fuzzy photos in the bunch? Why OF COURSE you should upload them, why deprive the world of a photo of your little angel, even though it’s blurry. What could be worse than baby photos? Oh I know, how about the comments people leave on them. “He’s growing up so fast!” “OMGOMGOMG can be be ANY cuter?” “I can’t wait to have one of my own!” Please - for the love of God, CAN IT.