Things That Irritate Me When I'm Crabby between the times of 6:30-6:45 a.m.

1. Not getting to pet the dog that I see approaching me on the sidewalk because the dog owner veers a different street.

2. The coffee lady filling my cup too full so there's not enough room for the proper amount of milk (even though on any other day, this would be a good thing. Not when I'm crabby though).

3. How windy and cold the wider, less populated streets of Philadelphia can be. For instance, 11th Street is fairly wide, and so this means there's less resistance to the wind. Today, I found myself internally debating with the building commissioners and asking them why they didn't build MORE buildings so that it wouldn't be so damn windy.

4. My itchy scarf.

5. Somewhat misleading publicity. There's a You Tube video I saw recently that is just a montage of 97 reasons to come to Philadelphia. It has this guy in front of all the cool things like these murals and the clothespin and the love statute and Ben Franklin and the Italian Market. I started thinking about how I could make the opposite video almost as easily: 97 reasons not to come to Philadelphia, starting with filming the trash strewn streets, the rats I sometimes see outside of the dumpster of the nearby Chinese restaurant, the diaper tree someone told me about (this is a tree filled with dirty diapers that the renters around have just thrown up into the air instead of keeping them in their house), the cockroaches, a little bit of footage of cops beating up some minority kid, a strung out Fishtown teen shooting up behind Rocket Cat, etc.

5. I got irritated with how irritated I was getting.

6. That someone was walking exactly next to me on the sidewalk instead of passing by or slowing down.

7. The nonrush of the people to get to the blue line, even though it was still waiting.

8. How SEPTA doesn't appear to make any effort whatsoever to coordinate the orange and the blue line. I would guess that about a third of the time, I just miss, by mere seconds, like three seconds on average, the connecting train I need. Could there not be a signal that one line gives to the other letting them know that they have pulled into the station and passengers will be arriving with seconds? I think other cities manage to pull this off.

9. Walking up three flights of stairs. I choose to do this today. I can always take the elevator but I'm trying to be more active. Still, I didn't like doing it.

10. Running into the coffee shop guy who gets under my skin for no particular reason. I had another imaginary conversation where I was trying to explain this to someone. In my version, we had just discovered that the guy was found to be a deviant and a killer. All I had to say to my friend was, See? I just had a feeling about him.