I Dislike…

I got this idea from Mezzo and I was going to just make a list of things I dislike but then I remembered the banner in my classroom–the one that said, “Use the magic word!” In my classroom the magic word was not “please”, but “because.” This was a ploy to help those student writers who were unable to expand their ideas. If a seventh grader chose the prompt “Today I feel ___” and then added the word “because,” he or she was prompted to expand the basic idea with details.

I dislike:

• most television. I dislike most of all so-called television “news ” reporters with their lacquered hair and painted faces. {And, yes, I mean the men too!} I think this may be because I was brought up in England in an era when the people who reported the news were not media “stars” and when what was reported was done in a way that didn’t blatantly favor one point of view more than another.
• untrustworthy people. There was a little lecture I used to give my students at the beginning of every school year. I would tell them that they came to me with clean records. Every one of them started as being a  trustworthy person. But they should be aware that once my trust in them was broken, I would never ever feel the same way about them again. If I ever found out that they cheated or lied to me, all the apologies in the world , all the promises that they would never do that again could never alter the fact that now, I felt differently about them. They had become untrustworthy. The example I used was a broken tea cup. Once it was broken, it would never hold tea again. Yes, it could be glued back together, and it might even look as good as new, but it was now not suitable for its original purpose. Maybe it would go on to be used as, say, a container to grow flowers in and become a useful object again, but it was never going to be the useful object it was intended to be. it could never be totally trusted again to hold tea.
• colds. This really should be at the top of my list right now because I have one. Last night I took a 12 hour decongestant and slept well, but this morning as the pill wore off, I can feel my head getting stuffed up and my nose running again. Oddly enough, I don’t feel ill, just stuffed up. BTW, do you know the old saying about a cold? If you go to the doctor with a cold, the cold will be better in a week. If you treat it yourself, it will be over in seven days. Ha!
• jazz. This is because I really don’t understand it. I cannot see a pattern in it. I don’t know where it is going and I get really irritated when I listen to it. This probably has to do with the fact that I know very little about its structure. When I was very much younger, I used to feel this way about Baroque music but once I learned a little about it {and I credit the British Broadcasting Company’s wonderful “Music for Schools” wireless programs for the beginning of the knowledge I do have} it became one of my favorite periods of music.
• some foods quite irrationally because I have never tried them. I used to feel this way about cottage cheese which just looked nasty to me, but while I was losing the weight last year, Fred, who likes it, persuaded me to try it. And I found that although I will never love it and eat it every day the way I do with Marmite. I quite enjoyed it. So, on my irrational-dislike-of -food list are a couple of others I will one day try: olives and sushi.  Raw oysters used to be on that list but many years ago when I was in my early 40’s, I tried a raw oyster, and now I KNOW I will never eat one again! 
• clutter. It is odd that I feel this way because I am not a super-tidy person. What I dislike about clutter is when I can’t find what I need to find in it.  In this tiny apartment, there is a lot of clutter {But, it is gradually -very gradually–diminishing} But the difference between my clutter and Fred’s is that he cannot find anything in his because he doesn’t know what is in it. Mine, on the otherhand, is organized clutter. If you ask me where, for example, a CD is, I have three boxes of computer programs on CDs. I have a large zipped up folder of music CDs. I cannt tell you in which of the three boxes the computer program is, but I know it is in one of them.

Hmmm, this has been fun. I may continue it later…