1. Do other people get a momentary panic when sliding a credit card through the machine at a self-service gas pump, because it says “Slide your card quickly”? I’m always just a little paranoid that I won’t get it through fast enough. I’ve never yet received a message telling me, “You blew it, slowpoke. Call a cab,” but still I feel rushed every time.

2. I loathe when Keith Olbermann pretends to talk like the people he hates. It’s just nails-on-a-chalkboard cringeworthy. It’s unbecoming the way he humiliates himself. Does he not have advisers who watch the show for him?

3. Who makes cake-like brownies? I want names. I cannot be friends with people who add three eggs instead of two to their store-bought brownie mixes.

4. Does it show up on the OS feed every time I lower somebody’s rating, thinking I haven’t thumbed yet, only to be dismayed to see the little number go down, after which I quickly, with a furtive look over my shoulder, bring it back up? Are people watching all this nonsense, thinking that Lainey’s bipolar? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

5. I did not check the following box on my 7^th-grade son’s back-to-school form for the school’s records:

      This box and the alternative—the one authorizing medical treatment—were backups in the event that the parent could not be reached. So…let’s get this straight: If Little Billy, whose dad checked the foregoing box, is bleeding to death from a hockey stick laceration across his temple and his parents can’t be reached, what exactly does the gym teacher do? The kid’s head is leaking buckets of crimson, his brains are sticking out, he’s gasping for breath, his classmates are shrieking and/or vomiting from terror and/or gross-out factor--and the school does…..nothing? “Move along kids!” *clap, clap* “Let’s give Billy some room to die in peace. Margaret, here’s your opportunity to win that spelling bee now that our ace speller is out of the picture!” Weird. Who checks those boxes anyway? Are they the same people who make cake-like brownies?

6. About the red-hat ladies. Sigh. When first I saw these feisty white-hairs sitting around a table having lunch at a restaurant, I was cheered. “Oh, look,” I said to whomever I was with, “Those ladies are acting out that poem! You know, the one about getting old and not giving a whit about what people think of you! Something about wearing purple?” It was ..…adorable. They had gumption! What zest for life!

    Five years later, seeing these interchangeable groups of cherry-topped, amethyst-adorned women lunching at Olive Garden makes me think of the word pathetic. And I don’t mean 1.) Arousing or capable of arousing sympathetic sadness and compassion. I mean 2.) Arousing or capable of arousing scornful pity. Here’s what their Web site says (Yes, there is a Red Hat Society Web site; I’ll give them that for all it implies about their technological savvy):

The Red Hat Society began as a result of a few women deciding to greet middle age with verve, humor and elan. We believe silliness is the comedy relief of life, and since we are all in it together, we might as well join red-gloved hands and go for the gusto together. Underneath the frivolity, we share a bond of affection, forged by common life experiences and a genuine enthusiasm for wherever life takes us next."

    Elan? Verve? Methinks they doth protest too much. This is precisely the contrived women’s friendship fetish that plagued Mama Mia and the Ya Ya Sisterhood. It reeks of inauthenticity. And did anybody else notice they’ve lowered the age requirement to “middle age”? I thought that poem specifically referred to “when I’m old.”

    Please, God, don’t let me be adorable when I’m old. Let me be tequilaanddonuts's mom.

7. My friend Margie Liggett didn’t know until we took our toddlers to the zoo ten years ago that seahorses weren’t mythical creatures. She was shocked to see one swimming in a tank. That would be like you or me seeing a unicorn one day, just hanging around a farm or stable, all the hands mucking out straw like nothing’s out of the ordinary. (Do we still call those people “hands”? It feels vaguely insulting. Or is it just an example of “synecdoche,” one of my all-time favorite words?)

8. I eat ice cream every single day of my life. If I don’t have it in the morning in the form of a homemade frappuccino, I end up eating a bowl of it before bed. It is unquestionably categorized as a staple in our home, as in eggs, bread, milk, ice cream.

9. Things I don’t ever buy: fabric softener (Who needs soft clothes?), gum (I swallowed some when I was little and it scared me), pop and juice (Water is better), belts (Apple shape here), ironing starch (We don’t iron), movie DVDs (Life is too short to watch the same stuff over and over), Kleenex (We use toilet paper), toothpaste and dental floss (We get those “free samples” from the dentist - Yeah, I know).

10. Why does the right hate America so?

    I have long resented the little game right-wingers play when it comes to patriotism. When reasonable people wondered, with a reflexive, genuine curiosity, why someone would fly planes into our buildings on that glorious September morning eight years ago—“Why do they hate us?” asked those of us who hadn’t been paying much attention to foreign policy, complacent in our bubbles of (false, as it turns out) financial security and busy domestic living. “What have we done to make someone want to do this to us?” we cried in our innocence—we were reviled for sympathizing with terrorists. The enraged right called us “Blame America Firsts.” That we thought it fair to treat the rest of the world as partners rather than children in matters of war and justice only added to their conviction that the left “hates America.”

 Does anybody remember the Moral Majority? And the Clinton-years handwringing over our shot-to-hell values and our wicked ways? What was to become of us American heathens, who were promoting homosexuality and baby killing, and—gasp!—the whole language reading method? I ask you: How was this not “hating America”?

Oh, I see, that was hating the American people, not the President or his policies. You want somma that, do ya?