Most of the time I’m a pretty positive person but this past week, so many things have come up that just make me so, so annoyed (!) that I have to rant about them. And not like the good natured rant I ranted last month (Looking Good) but a real “you’ve got to be kidding me” rant.

It started with the story about 24 candidates for a nursing degree who failed to pass a final exam thus not meeting the qualifications for graduation. Oddly enough, the school refused to graduate them. It did, however, offer them tutoring and 2 additional attempts to pass the failed test. Not good enough for poor widdle students who wanted either the passing grade lowered, or better yet, the test thrown out. Somehow they actually were able to amass over 300 signatures on a petition to allow them to just graduate. It was noted that some of the parents stated that their children have lost jobs over this. Hmmm. The parents were the ones who noted that one, eh?

A blog post on Dictionary.com increased the level of my ire. It was questioning if we are increasing the size of the gender gap rather than encouraging the equality of all with new words we keep introducing the language. Mansplain, manbun, manspread, and man purse were among the examples. The author posited the use of the “man” descriptor as superfluous, inaccurate, or insulting and is just an unnecessary label. Let me correct myself. That article didn’t raise my ire. It only made me more livid than I would have been when I saw then the headline in the local paper, “Young LGBT artists add to local art scene.” Please, is that adding more so than young nonLnonGnonBnonT artists do or maybe more than old LGBT artists, or perhaps more than any other old plain unidentified artist? Can’t we revel in the addition to its scene by any artist? More unnecessary labels!

I turned on the morning news and heard about the suburban housewife who had her car stolen with all of her son’s baseball equipment in it along with the usual assortment of car dwelling stuff. The local police department would investigate it but can’t because they are spread too thin investigating the rash of overdose deaths in the community. I have an idea. The overdoses are already dead. Tell everyone else not to take drugs and go help the mom who just had the family SUV heisted. Probably so the future overdose could buy drugs! Oh but wait. They have a special drug task force working on the drug problem. And I remember when they used to be just plain cops.

Later that day I’m reading what came in on the Facebook feed and saw a post from one of the patient based support groups that I belong to. It was a graphic representation of all the ways people die. All manners that people depart were listed from heart disease to suicide to blood disorders to combat and terrorism. The point being to put what condition we share into some perspective. Among the many causes of death was “otherwise not specified.” I went to the original post to the original article to the original comments. For once I wished I hadn’t had that kind of time. Not one, not two, but a whole boatload of people made comments like “what about overdoses – are those supposed to be the otherwise?” “Climate change appears to be missing.” “Where’s old age?” “Broken hearts?” Yes, broken hearts Apparently quite a few hundreds of people didn’t feel there were enough labels.

Add these to two other stories from last week’s news, the gunman in Florida who kills five people then shoots himself, and a local mother who shoots her two children then sets herself on fire. They called these murder suicides. Probably an accurate label but please, if you should ever get the urge to do such a thing be creative about it and do the suicide part first.

There now. Next time I’ll try to be happier. And I’ll proofread that one too. Now that I have this out of my system I really don’t want to go back and check for typos. If you want I’ll be happy to refund your money for this one.

Have a day