My computer is kaput. Windows XP has failed me again. It seems even the antagonist can be antagonized sometimes.

Valentine's Day

V-Day just passed, and with it a million opportunities. I hope you all took great advantage! Something as simple as giving a terrible gift, to breaking up with your significant other, or even forgetting the holiday altogether will all work wonders in infuriating that special someone. They'll think twice before sharing their life with you again!

Children in restaurants

Nothing spoils a good meal out with friends or a loved one like a noisy brat at the other table. Whether they're crying, running around, making a mess, or being ugly, they're a quick way to lose your appetite in a hurry. I fully intend to adopt the noisiest children possible, or perhaps borrow them from friends when they aren't looking, and proceed to order them the sloppiest meal imaginable, then ignore their pleas for attention. Hey, that's pissing off the kids, too! It's like killing two birds with one stone, one of them being an infant bird.

Doctor's Offices

Always a place of irritation, sitting in line at the doctor's office is a long-standing tradition amongst Americans and a prime location to add to others' agitation to relieve your own. Your phone is an important tool for this. Read off of it to yourself and laugh loudly and obnoxiously, leave the ringer on and take a long time to answer calls, or for maximum points, accept a call and just sit there loudly babbling on about nonsense. For a bonus, talk at length about disgusting or awkward things, like that weird rash you're in to see the doctor for.

Your morning commute is a great way to annoy people. Ever catch that guy going 40mph in the carpool lane? The guy who waits five seconds to react to every light? Ever think he's doing it on purpose? :D

Holding doors

Holding open the door for someone. An age old tradition. Gentlemen do it for their dates, boy scouts do it for old ladies, and if you're in public, people are generally expected to do it for each other.

Screw that.

I prefer to hold the door for someone far away, for an obscenely long time, making them nervous and often times causing them to sprint for the open door out of some sort of social obligation to keep you from holding it too long, only to slam it suddenly shut. Now they're out of breath from running over, and they still have to open their own door. Today I got some poor sucker so bad he literally stood there staring at the door for a good five seconds. That that, ya jerk.

Woke up late today. Got next to no sleep. Someone's going to pay for this, and damned if it's going to be me. Time to take my stress out on an unsuspecting world.

Kill 'em with Kindness

Being an Antagonist, I've amassed an admirable collection of people who don't like me. A collection I treasure and use as a meter for measuring my power over others. The problem becomes, however, once someone realizes you're trying to make them upset, the more mature of your subjects will pry control away from you, dismissing your every action, knowing its intended effect.

The solution? Kindness.

Being nice to people in these situations is great; they're half-unsure of what's going on, and entirely on edge looking for your alterior motives. Presented in front of a mutual friend, they look especially crazy! Watch with glee as you open doors or offer to buy them lunch, only to have them snap at you or constantly ask what you're up to. Before long, they look like the jerk! That'll teach those jerks!

Other people's girlfriends

Antagonizing other people's girlfriends is great. It pisses the girlfriend off, pisses the guy off, and adds a small bit to the engulfing emptiness that is the soul of a single person. So at any and all opportunities, I choose friends' girlfriends as a target.

The other day, a friend asked me to hold his phone. WHAT A GENIUS. I of course immediately waited until his back was turned and texted his girlfriend "I think we should break up". In my defense, I put a few lines of blank text, and, out of sight unless you scrolled down, put "just kidding this is <my name>". Not my fault if the girl can't maintain basic reading comprehension. Needless to say she freaked out and called him relentlessly, and guess who kept hanging up on her?

He didn't care much for my antics when he caught the backlash later, but as a great man once said, if he can't take a joke, fuck him.

The Art of Getting Someone Fired

If you know someone you don't get along with, why would you take advice from them? Especially in a time of crisis? I suppose people don't expect others to be expressly looking out for their worst interests. Sucks to be them.

I may have just gotten a co-worker, Arturo, fired. I work in a yet-undisclosed customer service field (imagine that, a jaded customer service professional!), and as anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows, the customer is always right (to his face). Arturo got into a disagreement with a customer, and it escalated to said customer yelling and demanding to speak with a manager. At this point you just let it go and move on, these morons aren't worth the stress. Well apparently Arty was having a bad day, because he just could not let this go. He was steaming over what this guy had said to management. He was considering catching the guy on his way out and discussing it with him. Well, I'm far from above manipulating the less fortunate for my own amusement, so of course I egged him on.

"Oh hell yeah man. You gotta say something. You can't let people just walk all over you like that."

Arturo took the advice, caught the guy on his way out, and started screaming at him. The two were literally yelling in each other's faces, two feet away from other customers! It didn't take long for a manager to come out, apologize so profusely I thought he was going to go down on the guy right there, and calmly escort Arturo into the back, where a legendary firing occurred. Art was in shock. He just walked out the front like a shell-shocked war veteran in the midst of a PTSD flashback.

Needless to say, I was inconsolable.

Testing mobile blogging!

Back from Hawaii!

I just got back from spending a month in Hawaii! It's a beautiful place, here's just some of the amazing pictures I took!

Just kidding! These were all taken from Google images! Had you going for a minute, didn't I?

Dane Cook is not funny

I know this is said a lot, but fuck

Dane Cook is certifiably awful and anybody who likes him has poor taste in comedy.

American holidays and food

Has anybody ever noticed the American obsession with food? No wonder we're all obese. Let's take a look at the one thing everybody does, and it's supposed to be bringing us together: holidays.

• Valentine's Day. Celebration of love. Find your significant other and cram chocolate and candy down their throat.
• Easter. Used to be about Christ, now about more chocolate and candy.
• Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for friends, family, and this twenty pound bird we're all going to split.
• Fourth of July. Nothing says "independance from the British" like a giant barbeque.
• Let's not forget the old classic - no birthday has ever been successful without a giant sugary cake.
• Christmas. You'd think the big C would be about gifts and togetherness, but of course, candy canes, gingerbread houses, cookies, and sweets make their appearance. Just wouldn't be Christmas without them, now would it?

If America wants to raise awareness of a now obvious national epidemic, it needs to look a little closer to home.

What's next, Martin Luther King Day celebrated with pie-eating contests?

Using checks in the supermarket

So I was in line behind this sweet old grandma today in the checkout line, and it was bad enough that she had a thousand people behind her, but then she busts out this old gem:

People still use checkbooks? At the grocery store? Really? Her purchase was like twenty dollars, has nobody told her about check cards? That seems cruel.

Now this alone would only have been mildly annoying yet tolerable, but she had to:

• Get out her purse
• Remove her checkbook
• Open it
• Get a pen
• Flip to a blank check
• Begin writing it
• Double-check the amount
• Sign and complete
• Tear it out
• Have it processed by the cashier who clearly had never seen a check before in her life

Are you kidding me? 

Okay, I understand, you're an old woman, you live alone, nobody helps you, life is hard. But can you really not make out a check with a blank amount signed to the store before you leave the house? You have to spend two minutes holding up ten other people?

Old age is no excuse for inconsideration.

Larry King 25 years in the business

Congrats to LK for 25 years in show business!

Ramen

The greatest invention on god's green earth

This stuff goes with everything. $0.20 a bag, my god how do they do it? I don't even care what's inside, whatever sub-food matter they're passing off as edible. It's delicious, cheap, and delicious.

Amen.

Druglord uses religion to gain followers

Just read about this on CNN, apparently this dead drug lord, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, was considered a spiritual leader and convinced all the members of his huge cartel to participate in violence and drug dealing under the notion that their actions were divine and the will of the allmighty.

Just another example of how religion can be used to twist the public opinion in literally any way imaginable. Some weak-willed people did some very horrible things thinking they were doing God's work. It's frightening.

Wikileaks

So there's this new website called WikiLeaks run by an organization called Sunshine Press that's leaking important sensitive documents previously kept top-secret by their respective governments. News outlets are in an uproar about the materials provided.

Is this really a good idea?

Some things are kept out of the public eye for a reason. They could be misinterpreted, exaggerated, or outright lies, casting whichever government into an undeserved poor light.

The simple fact of the matter is; people assume their government is hiding all these things they somehow have the right to know, but that's not what elected officials are for.

You like your new car?

Your cushy job?

Your piping hot internet porn?

Someone's doing something right, and finding out that someone is suffering for it isn't going to make you burn all your worldly possessions and embrace a life of priesthood any sooner.

Get over it.

The high cost of eating healthy

Recently I've tried to become more aware of what I put in my body.

I mean, nobody's supposed to be eating fast food at all, let alone as often as some of us do. There are much healthier things available to us.

The problem is, these things are much more expensive than their McCounterparts. For a dollar, a freaking DOLLAR, I can get a good sized cheeseburger or chicken sandwich or any of a dozen things at my local fast food joint, whereas I'll easily spend 5-7 dollars eating more healthily. What sort of tricks do you guys use?