Last week I had a very exciting trip to the Emergency Room, thanks to a rogue MRSA bug trying to colonize my neck. Â Within 24-hours of me first noticing it, I had a temperature of 105, and a VERY stressed out the.real.boy. Â Oh, and also? Â I started to hallucinate and talk nonsense.
As it happens, the only mind-altering drug I’ve ever used recreationally is alcohol. (Yes, I’m square. Â I’ve learned to embrace it.) After last Thursday’s trip during the ER trip, I know that was the right choice for me. Â Tripping for this girl= DO NOT WANT.
Anyhow, in my own roundabout way I hope you’ll consider endearing, it got me thinking about the things I don’t like even though lots of other people do. Â I don’t like chocolate much. Â I don’t like the way bacon feels so I don’t eat that either. Don’t like the way I felt during and after my ER Trip Trip (ERTT.)
So, how do you, dear readers, go against the grain? Â What mainstream “everybody loves it” (or at least tries it) sorts of things do you dislike?
– I don’t drink. At all. I’ve tried alcohol in the past, even been drunk once just to see what it was all about, and it just doesn’t interest me.
– I don’t do any drugs. Well, I mean, I take medication when I need it, that sort of thing. But I take no recreational drugs. I even FAILED at trying pot in high school, so never managed to get high and am sort of glad for it.
– I hate coffee. Never liked it, even though I occasionally think “Hmm, maybe THIS time…” But it never catches on.
There’s probably more, but that’s all that comes to mind. Maybe someone else’s ideas will jog my memory about additional against-the-grain stuff… not that this isn’t enough :-P
I don’t like bacon either. Or coffee. Just don’t like the taste!
I used to dislike ketchup… but now think it’s ok. Prefer brown or BBQ sauce though.
Or tea, which apparently is very odd, being English and all.
Hot chocolate 4tw!
Me too on the coffee. How can something that smells so good taste so foul?
I’d like to add yoghurt – even thinking about the smell makes me screw my face up and my stomach wants to heave at the remembered taste. Revolting!!
Beer – smells like piss and tastes exactly as I imagine piss would (if I ever tasted it to find out).
1. Pot.
2. Wearing pink. Maybe not mainstream for men. Unless you’re German.
3. Family Guy.
I don’t drink – I get no joy from the effects of alcohol, I just feel rather sick (and I don’t mean hangover, I mean that the first thing I feel when the alcohol hits me is sick). In my line of work (archaeology) being a teetotaler is especially rare.
I don’t care for dancing. I don’t mind it either, and I have been talked into it on occassion, but I get little pleasure from it and would rather spend my energy doing other things. Oh, and I get really annoyed when someone says “oh, but this form of dancing is different, YOU’LL like THIS!” I have heard that many, many times, and so far, everyone who has said it has been wrong.
I am a man who has pretty much zero interest in sports. In truth, we’re pretty common, but there is nonetheless a social expectation that we’ll be interested in football/ baseball/ basketball/whatever, and it gets annoying.
I am a nerd by taste who is only marginally interested in Star Trek (though I am a fan of the original series).
No doubt I’ll think of more.
Oh yes – I also have never used recreational drugs. It’s not a matter of a moral stance or a fighting of temptation, I’ve just never been even vaguely interested.
Sports: Don’t know; don’t care.
Recreational pharymacology, too. Never even curious. I drink because I like the taste of wine, beer and scotch but stop when I begin to “feel it”. The whole “altered states of conciousness” thing gives me the willies.
American Idol
Reality TV
Hip hop
rap
dressing like a bum
never tried illegal drugs so I don’t know if I would like them or not but I love the booze. Love, love, love, love it.
football
basketball
tennis
don’t like watching sports and really don’t enjoy playing team sports
world of warcraft
hookers
strip clubs
call girls
brothels
ribs
black eyed peas
twinkies
organic food
starbucks
krispy kreme doughnuts (have mouth feel of warm soft lard)
snowballing
barney
the mentalist
craigs list
brown rice
iced lattes
refering to small as medium
suffering fools gladly
@Gabrielbrawley: You really think snowballing is popular enough to be considered “mainstream?”
@Gabrielbrawley
Snowballing?!?! Everyone else is into snowballing? Man, I gotta start living under a bigger rock.
@Oskar Kennedy (LBB): No I just threw that in to see if anyone actually read the list.
Also, for myself, I don’t quite get why guys get so worked up about lesbians. In the real world, they’re not waiting for you to jump into their make out sessions, fellas.
Beer
Coffee
Most reality TV
CSI
Lost
Big Brother
Having children
Having pets
Apparently, snowballing.
Oh, and vampire fiction.
I hate avocados and guacamole.
I hate talking on the phone and only carry a cell for emergencies; I rarely answer it and never make calls.
Not interested in recreational drugs.
I hate high-heeled shoes and I don’t wear makeup.
That’s enough sharing for one day.
Oh, and text messaging, and talking on the phone in general.
@Oskar Kennedy (LBB): are too.
TV. I forgot about TV. Don’t have cable, dish, or an antenna. The TV is for DVD playback only.
Really don’t care for The Beatles
Tina Fey is not funny, not original, and not attractive.
Reality TV=crap
Don’t really like booze
No interest in drugs.
Lord of the Rings books and Movies BORING
Harry Potter see previous entry
Professional sports waste of time and money
Glenn Close
Many more but I’m just to angry after thinking about Glenn Close.
I am allergic to caffeine and chocolate…. I HATE flip flops and all toe-traumatizing shoes, and I think avocados are gross.
Everything else is situational… I am the only non avid American Idol fan at my office but I am sure that I am not the only American Idol hater on this site.
Snowballing also , I will take a pass at that.
I didn’t realise you didn’t like chocolate til that email. Fascinating!
I’m not bothered about alcohol (keep meaning to blog about why) or most TV, I have no aerial and just catch up Doctor Who and Masterchef on iPlayer.
Heh, guess I am rather mainstream.
Coffee, alcohol, sports, nicotine, other drugs…
Churchgoing. Fine for no one.
Clothing-wearing. Fine for some folks, but never really worked for me.
I don’t drink alcohol or coffee, I’m a male who is not into sports at ALL, I don’t have television at all, and not only do I not text, I had the phone company remove the ability for texting on my account.
And I want my phone to be a phone, which makes me something of a throwback to caveman times, apparently.
YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!
You guys reminded me.
Beer, Lord of the Rings and The Beatles!
I don’t like listening to music. If it’s on that’s fine but I rarely turn it on myself. Most music sounds weird to me and really isn’t enjoyable. My husband insists I’m tone deaf which would explain inability to carry a tune or recognize most songs apart from their lyrics.
@Kaylia_Marie: So what do you do with it?
Definitely ketchup. I think it’s grossly sweet and makes anything you put it on worse, with the possible exception of certain kinds of fast food french fries.
Girly mixed drinks
Make up
TV
Drugs
Pork
California rolls
Tolkien
Gossip
Sports – On Super Bowl Sunday, I watched a Mythbusters marathon, followed by a movie on DVD.
Slasher movies – Never understood the appeal of those.
Getting extremely drunk or otherwise chemically incapacitated – Makes me ill without any associated euphoria
Adrenaline-inducing activities – Roller coasters, skiing, jumping out/off of things, going very fast – just leaves me feeling tired and jittery.
Gambling – Aside from occasionally buying a lottery ticket when I’ve got a dollar to throw away, I can’t be bothered.
Hmm, looking over that list, it seems like the common variable is novelty-seeking behavior. I think mine might be broken.
I hate professional baseball, Chevrolet and am not a big fan of apple pie. I guess that means I’m unamerican.
Several things other people have mentioned would be on my list: sports, guacamole, ketchup. I’ve seen the first, third, fourth and fifth Harry Potter movies, and I rather liked the third and fifth, but I’ve only read a few pages out of one of the books and I’ve never been motivated to do more than that.
I love everything, even when it causes contradictions.
Except for jazz, freakin’ hate jazz.
Coffee, drugs, American Idol (most reality shows, actually), mainstream social skills (i.e., I hate that I have to waste 5 minute of my day with small talk at work because it’s “rude” to just ask the question I want to ask and move on – because apparently efficiency during working hours that aren’t lunch is “rude” now).
Espresso, Cappuccino, olives, mayonaise, ketchup, salad dressings.
talk radio, talk tv (if it ever comes), reality tv, sports commentators, political journalists, pseudoscience posing as science (like x-files), occult flics of any kind.
I walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk, because I don’t buy into the social convention that you should walk on the ‘right’. I also, possibly related to this, tend to be in people’s way often.
I face the left (always) when in an elevator, instead of awkwardly facing the front. This one goes over well if there is only one or two people, and they tend to stay far away from me.
I intentionally hang pictures crooked, because it bothers other people and I find that amusing.
I use the ‘wrong hands’ when using cutlery, and I set the table backwards.
No, I just don’t understand that. No avocados. No guacamole. No God, either. What do you live for, writerdd?
Me? Never had a drink. (Not even a beer.) Never done drugs. Tired half a cigarette when I was a kid. That was more than enough. Dang, I’m righteous!
Well, okay, there have been a few other things (that shall go unrevealed) that might keep me out of heaven if I believed in such a place.
I live in Philadelphia and for the past month or so, my ears have pricked up at least a dozen times when I hear somebody in the background mention “Dawkins” and I think, “Seriously, a conversation about evolution?” Of course then I remember a half a second later that “Ah fuck, they’re talking about some douchey football player.”
@mikespeir: It’s just WAY too slimy for me. Sorry.
But there’s chocolate, caffeine, sex, the internet, sandy beaches, sunrises and sunsets, cats, and plenty of other things to live for.
pickles. fuck pickles.
a.real.girl, there IS a big difference between hallucinating because you’re sick, and hallucinating by choice (ie, you took a tab of acid). It’s just a different mindset completely, so to be honest, I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.
Not that I’m a big fan of hallucinating, myself. I tried it a few times (mushrooms, acid) and it just wasn’t my bag. But even benadryl will make me hallucinate sometimes. O_o
I HATE MUSHROOMS! (The food.)
The texture is NASTAY.
LSD has the same similarity to delirium that a blowjob has to a kick in the nuts. I’m against the grain on this, I don’t consider acid to be particularly dangerous or harmful.
I don’t get pickles. Why do some people love pickle?! It is disgusting!!
@teambanzai: Oh I am not the only one who can’t stand the Beatles Yay!
Oh and more:
Jane Austen.
I drink, but not often, and I WAY prefer pot. Pot doesn’t make me sick or give me a headache nor does it give me a hangover and the effects last a lot longer. Also, it doesn’t make you fat (tter) and I don’t tend to get the munchies.
(I do love a good whiskey or beer though, om nom nom, but I stopped getting drunk long ago.)
Oranges. I don’t like oranges. Other citrus fruit I like fine, just not oranges.
@sethmanapio: Pretty much! LSD is probably one of the safest drugs, actually, second maybe to pot. Alcohol is far more dangerous than LSD (can’t overdose from LSD!). Most people don’t realize this, however.
@marilove: “and the effects last a lot longer. ”
Meaning the effects of ALCOHOL lasts longer than pot. I hate that.
It’s interesting that all but of few of these comments are about things that we don’t do or don’t like against expectations, and not about things that we do or like against expectations.
So, who am I to break the trend?
I actually second the “not getting the male fascination with lesbina porn” thing. I know, there are many possible explanations, but all I can ever think is “well, there’s two women who realize that they really don’t need me.”
I also dislike coffee (though I do like some coffee-based drinks), but will sometimes drink it if I am very tired and need to not be.
I strongly dislike mayonaisse and ketchup. I do enjoy mustard, though – I like the sour flavor.
On the other hand, things that I like that are a bit odd include:
I enjoy listening to radio documentaries or podcasts (rather than music) while out walking.
I walk for pleasure and not for excercise (although the escercise is an excellent side benefit).
Okay, I got one:
Music.
Which is odd, what with me being a professional musician and what with the conservatory training and all. What I mean is that, while there is a shifting, tiny fraction of music out there that I become fascinated with and have to learn all about and analyze and study all of its intricacies, far and away the great mass of music out there that people seem to enjoy very much strikes me as incredibly boring.
It turns out that people think it’s really interesting and creative when you have some obscure musical interests in addition to more mainstream tastes, but it makes people very uncomfortable when they discover that your obscure tastes are to the exclusion of mainstream musical culture.
90’s–present American horror movies
24 & Lost
milk (or anything resembling milk in the slightest)
salad bars or buffets
Additionally I find games or activities in which amateurs perform music or dance (karaoke, Guitar Hero, DDR, talent shows etc.) make me incredibly uncomfortable. I get really embarrassed for people, to the point where I become nauseous — meanwhile everyone is so happy and having such a blast. Worst!
I don’t have an iPod, and I prefer to hang out at science museums than the mall, but I don’t get grief for that.
The mainstream thing that I really don’t like is… dare I say it?
TWILIGHT!
*listens to the echoes as the room falls silent and tweenage girls turn their angry, watery eyes to me*
I used to be amongst the anti-Harry Potter people… wrote a story about how I converted, most of which involved the third movie looking good and the fact that I knew I would have loved it as a kid.
I did think of another against-the-grain thing:
I have absolutely no interest in Guitar Hero, Rock Band, DDR, or any other rhythm-based video game. Just don’t see the fun in it!
Oh, and @sethmanapio and marilove:
Speaking for myself, safety has little to do with the whole not wanting to take drugs/hallucinate/whatever thing. In my experience, people who don’t like that sort of thing feel that way because they don’t like feeling out of control. The media hype may inflate the health risks, but most non-drug users I know just don’t want to be THAT far removed from the comfortable little illusion that we have some sort of control over our world :)
And, as an additional reason why I don’t like drugs: I hate the whole culture around them. Never understood people putting up posters/decorations of pot leaves, rarely find stoner movies or drug movies funny, etc.
And I also have a HUGE hate-on for people who treat hallucinogens as some sort of mystical shamanistic thing. I want to grab them by the lapels and shout: “It’s a drug, it fucks up your brain. You’re not finding deeper truths about life, the universe and everything. You’re doing a chemistry experiment on your head.”
ketchup
ranch dressing
white pepper
fusion cusine
slang
drive time radio
the morning zoo
watching stupid people on you tube be stupid
zombie movies
mumblecore
transformers
Forrest Gump
@FFFearlesss: Hah. I’m in Philly too, and I’ve had the same experience. Although I don’t have much of an opinion re: the football player’s resemblance to a feminine hygiene product.
Every time I think I hate something it turns out I find the exception. Now you guys have me scared about snowballing.
But I think Ridley Scott has no sense of pacing, Blade Runner is an insufferably slow film. In fairness I’ve yet to stay awake through it but I think that speaks volumes.
I never liked sports until someone pointed out that canoing, hiking and climbing are all sports.
Don’t like country music, then my wife gave me Lyle Lovette and his Texas Large Band’s “It Ain’t Big, it’s Large”. Great Album.
I drink a little but much prefer pot. That can be inclusive or exclusive depending on the crowd I’m in. But the fact that I don’t smoke regularly makes me an outsider among pot smokers who seem to all be chronic these days.
With a couple of particular exceptions, I had no interest in video games from the time I was 15 up until about a year ago (so, a span of 18 years). I am still not a huge video game fan, but I have a couple on my laptop that I enjoy, and I have found that cell phone games can be a good way to kill time when you weren’t prepared enough to bring a book.
Okay so there’s three of us that don’t like the Beatles, I think we’re okay three out of the number of commenters in this thread is still against the grain but I don’t think we can handle another.
I’m not sure what I’ll do if it suddenly becomes mainstream to dislike the Beatles. I already stopped wearing my checkered Vans when I started seeing celebrities wearing them.
Bloody trend whores!
Well, most of mine seem to have been taken with a vengeance already. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs (I echo what Expatria said regarding feeling out of control). I like music, generally as background, but it rarely really moves me as it seems to do most people I know. I stopped playing video games sometime in high school. (Around the time I discovered girls. They didn’t discover me for another few years, but y’know. Still.) I do still fire up Super Mario Brothers every so often, but I stopped playing regularly or buying new games during the SNES era. I really, truly, deeply hate olives and bleu cheese, which taste like balls of undiluted nasty and cat vomit, respectively.
okay things I love that a lot of you seem to hate
avacados
guacamole
booze:
wine
whisky
beer
scotch
bourbon
irish
gin
rum
bubbly
being drunk
olives
pickels
blue cheese
mushrooms (food)
olives with little bits of bleu cheese in them in my gin martini
Harry Potter.
TV (other than Discovery Channel and SciFi).
LoTR
Star Trek (I’m losing nerd cred here…)
Not working on the weekends.
Wait, you guys consider guacamole mainstream? Usually at parties I hover near the guac bowl, but only one or two other people are interested in it, and I eat the whole thing. Except in New Mexico, it was mainstream there. You had to fight to get near the stuff…
@Gabrielbrawley: Alright! Let’s have an avocado-and-booze party, just for us.
Guacamole is both common and popular here, but I’m in California and we grow avocados ’round these parts.
Oh, and I love the stuff.
@Nicole: Sounds great you bring the chips and half the booze I’ll make the guac I have a couple of good recipies.
Yeah, okay. I guess you could get by on those. Not as well as with avocados and guacamole, but….
anthroslug:
And they’ve got to be California avocados, too. I lived in Florida for 14 years. They’ve got those big, wrinkleless, ersatz avocados. They just ain’t the same.
The whole career thing.
I can’t just pick one thing to do all day every day that wouldn’t bore me to tears in a year or two.
@Oskar Kennedy
It’s not so much an observation about this particular football player specifically as it is an observation about the league, sport and it’s followers in general.
Avocados are gross
As is parmesan cheese
And beer
I hate sitcoms… with a passion.
But I like commercials, go figure.
Oh! I got a “good†one… I am female, 28 years old, working in the corporate world of the Silicon Valley in the area of finance and HR… and I refuse to wear make up.
Not un-mainstream enough?
I also tend to not wear a bra unless absolutely necessary (or desired by that someone special) and I don’t have any piercing. At all.
Virgin ears.
I only watch TV online and there are some shows that I would rather read than watch (televisionwithoutpity.com rocks)
@mikespeir: is it worse that I hate avocados AND I too live in sunny CA?
/waits for the smacking.
@Kaylia_Marie: yes, yes it is
@Gabrielbrawley: Hmmmmm, Irish…
I prefer a good buzz to being drunk and bourbon’s tooo sweet, but everything else looks good! And when you stuff the live the cheese needs to be real French Roquefort not that hard sour Wisconsin crap.
Peanut butter is nasty vile stuff unless made into a good Thai chili infused dipping sauce.
Apparently I’m hard to displease. I like all the foods listed and dislikes, except bleu cheese. I like to drink, and really don’t care what, from bad beer to good beer to girlie drinks to fine scotch or wine from a box. Or my favorite obnoxious concoction, a dead nazi. Maybe I’ll have to give snowballing a shot.
I don’t like pot, though. I always feel like hell the next day.
I dislike the self description “spiritual person.” As in, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual,” or “Oh, I’m a very spiritual person.” I gather that some people say that and have no mystic intention behind it, but I can’t get over the word spiritual sounding to me like a reference to a ghost thingy you’re proud to be in touch with.
<– also a CA girl who isn’t blond, can’t swim (so no surfing) and even as a city girl I know how to milk a cow.
having never tasted cat vomit, I didn’t know that it tasted like bleu cheese. Learn something every day.
@James Fox: I like maytag bleu better than roquefort. Man I want a martini something fierce right now.
Beer
Coffee
Drugs( wonder if this is common with most skeptics)
Oh and lets not forget the big one:
Religion
@Gabrielbrawley: And a little lemon peel in the shaker adds a touch of brightness to counter point the rich taste of the cheese…, three more hours!
@James Fox: Oh, that sounds good, I’ll try that tonight.
@jabell2r: Doesn’t seem like it is.
@James Fox:
Are you telling me you enjoy BOTH lemon and olive, as well as bleu cheese in your gin martini at the same time?
I admire your ambition. Frankly, my palette would be overwhelmed by such diversity of ingredients in my martini.
In the words of Hawkeye: ” You pour six jiggers of gin, and you drink it while staring at a picture of Lorenzo Schwartz, the inventor of vermouth”
@evilspock: Six? wow.
@Gabrielbrawley:
My philosophy: If you are going to do it, you might as well go all in. No half-assing anything.
@Gabrielbrawley: All I have to say is don’t knock it till you try it. Having tried it, I can say it is the nastiest thing I have ever experienced*. But who knows? Maybe you’ll like it.
* My wife thinks she is hilarious, she had made me happy with her mouth, then about 2 minutes later she kissed me full on the lips and boy was I surprised, now I make her recite all fifty states and their capitols before she kisses me.
@Elyse:
Oh, I am with you on THAT one… don’t know how people manage.
Also: Echoing many other commenters, I also dislike guacamole. But if I’m gonna go and cover food items I don’t like, well, I could make an entire blog dedicated to that. :-D
Oh, ew, and ketchup. And most types of beans. And chili. And mushrooms. Oh, and Jane Austen. And Matthew Fox. And Guitar Hero/ Rock Band (though it’s more the people who play them and think that makes them real musicians, rather than the games themselves).
My husband would add: jelly, jello, mayonnaise, cream cheese, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, U2, Asian chicks (as a sexual fantasy -akin to the lesbian thing, but he does like the lesbian thing), tomatoes, macaroni and cheese, beer. Oh, and he doesn’t fly.
@skepticalhippie: If that was the required price I would pay it.
@evilspock:
Just a small bit of peel in the shaker. The extremely dry martini was hardly ever heard of before James Bond movies made it big. I prefer a 6 to 1 ratio and use Stock extra dry Vermouth. My gin choice may surprise you as I think Seagram’s has about the cleanest least flowery gin flavor not to mention the reasonable price. The New York Times did a blind taste test to pick a good martini gin and Seagram’s beat out many of the premium brands and finished 4th overall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/dining/02wine.html
I seem to be unusual in that I will smoke pot and I will like it okay, but I really don’t get what the big fuss is.
In my own geeky little subculture, I entirely fail to understand the appeal of either anime (some is good but I don’t get the mania for the genre as a whole) or the Wheel of Time books.
Hard alcohol. It always feels like it’s taking the roof off my mouth, especially scotch.
Shopping for shoes or clothes. Boring and exhausting.
Cheese of almost any variety except when melted. It’s a texture thing.
Gordon Ramsey. I watch the Food Network to see people do interesting things with food, not to watch some asshole yell at people in a kitchen.
I hate smoking and smoke. I even go so far that I don’t go to dance clubs because of the fake smoke they use.
Hate shopping, mushrooms, olives, beer, talking on the phone, recreational drugs, Twilight, horror movies, blue cheese.
That’s what comes to mind right now. I love coffee, I like a nice wine, enjoy a drink or two,
@Expatria: You’re not finding deeper truths about life, the universe and everything. You’re doing a chemistry experiment on your head.
——————–
So… what’s the contradiction, there?
Just as a side note, demographically speaking, saying you aren’t “mainstream” because you don’t do drugs is sort of like saying you aren’t mainstream because you don’t ride your bicycle to work.
@elianara: I hate smoking and smoke
——–
Are you an American? If you are, you live in a country where it’s illegal or forbidden to smoke in most restaurants or workplaces.
I hate to pick on you guys about this, but we live in a fairly puritanical nation. The only vice that you can possible not have and accomplish mainstream status would be if you don’t like beer and/or football.
I drink EtOH in other forms but I will neither purchase nor consume beer.
The marketing gestalt that has developed around beer is that it is the “elixir of manhood.”
I cannot support this.
@Elles:
I did have an iPod — a “nano” I got as a Christmas gift — but its interface irritated me in countless small ways, it was unable to play most of the music I had on my computer (live with an audiophile, get music in Ogg Vorbis), the earbuds fell apart, and eventually the thing stopped working altogether. But not before it developed the habit of turning itself on whenever I placed it on a solid surface. Now, my plan is to destroy it in the most videogenic fashion possible and post the footage on the Intertubes. That, I expect, will net me more entertainment than the device itself ever did.
@sethmanapio:
I only like effete beer. My all-time favourite is Young’s Double Chocolate Stout (if your beer is made with chocolate, I think that makes you gay). Oh, and I grew up in Alabama without ever learning the rules to football. Alls I know about it is that it involves athletic men in tight pants jumping atop one another (and is somehow not regarded as gay).
@Expatria:
Chemistry, and statistical physics.
A significant fraction of people who take hallucinogenic drugs seem to mistake the pipe for the painting of the pipe, as it were. Just as what you see during a drug trip is not necessarily real, the way you feel about yourself and your place in the Cosmos doesn’t have to correspond with reality, either. That feeling of “oneness”? It’s just your brain operating in a different mode than it was an hour before. Now, the fact that such things happen is valuable data to have about brains. As Carl Sagan said, there’s “scientific paydirt” in UFOs and alien abductions, but not because we have any indication aliens are really responsible. Instead, these phenomena tell us about the ways we function and, often, malfunction. As for optical illusions and sleep paralysis, so too for acid trips.
I am an Aussie “sheila” who hates the beach, beer and sport, has a brain and refuses to hide it and likes to do cultural things like visit art galleries and museums. I left because I was bored.
I live in London and start up conversations with strangers on the bus/tube. Amazing I haven’t been locked up yet!!
I was a banker but left because I thought that it should be about looking after customers and not just screwing them for their money. Now I have no money either.
When I go to McDonald’s I love dipping my fries into my chocolate sundae. Oh and I’ve never had a whopper. Ew!
At the risk of losing my geek status, despite spending most of my days driving my Mac I have never learnt any keyboard shortcuts.
Like a surprising number of people here, I don’t do drugs. Never touched them. I drink alcohol very occasionally (I don’t really like the taste, apart from Baileys and the odd RTD), and I’ve never been drunk. I just don’t feel the need to change myself like that. I’m weird enough after a glass of cola (another thing I really dislike that most others love). I don’t smoke. I’ve never even had a puff, apart from once when my brother (who was maybe 10 at the time) made one out of exercise book paper and toitoi (http://pharmacy.otago.ac.nz/rongoa/pages/toetoe.htm), which I don’t think really counts lol.
I hate most top 40 music.
I don’t watch Lost or 24, although they’re not as massive here as they seem to be elsewhere.
I don’t really like fast food.
Hate coffee (ditto the smells-great-tastes-crap comment).
And I don’t like the Beatles much either, apart from one or two songs. Also the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.
@Expatria: “You’re not finding deeper truths about life, the universe and everything. You’re doing a chemistry experiment on your head.”
I’ll add to what Blake Stacey said, in that there are actually therapeutic benefits for feeling “oneness” with the universe and all that stuff, no matter how much of an illusion it might be. People who are depressed or have other mental illnesses sometimes feel more at peace with things after a “trip” – and the effects last much longer than the trip itself. I’m not saying that there’s not bad trips out there, but there are a few examples of people benefiting from these drugs. People with PTSD who take MDMA can make incredible amounts of progress in a short session, and I’ve even heard that people who are hooked on other drugs (i.e. cocaine) who try MDMA or acid (or other hallucinogen) find their need for the other drug has diminished, and they dont’ become hooked on the new drug.
Ween.
Hope you are feeling better, a. I work with MRSA patients on a regular basis. So not fun.
I don’t like…
Nine Inch Nails
Onion Rings
Cable TV
@VioletSerene: Like a surprising number of people here, I don’t do drugs.
========
This is only surprising if you assume that a skeptical population ought to be outliers in this area compared to the general population. Again: MOST PEOPLE DO NOT USE ILLEGAL DRUGS.
Oy.
@Blake Stacey: Just as what you see during a drug trip is not necessarily real, the way you feel about yourself and your place in the Cosmos doesn’t have to correspond with reality, either.
——————–
I don’t see how that is any different from your normal operating state. What you see in your NOS isn’t neccesarily real, and how you feel about yourself and your place in the cosmos in your NOS might be completely offset from reality as well. My experience with people suggests that the NOS of most people is significantly offset from reality in some way or another. Skepticism is, to some extent, an attempt to rectify that situation in ourselves.
I’ve learned a lot of things on Acid, such as how a cockroach looks sitting on a branch in the rain. That isn’t particle physics, but it IS data, and being in a state to appreciate that sort of data can be a profound experience. You might, for example, realize how ridiculous you can be.
I got my first cell phone two days ago and am already regretting it.
Twitter. I’m sorry, no one needs a running commentary on the mundanities of my life. That’s what Facebook is for.
In addition, I’m going to preemptively eschew the Snuggie in case it goes mainstream.
I stopped drinking caffeinated drinks a couple of months ago. It doesn’t look like it has affected my productivity, but it’s hard to be sure. I also think I’m now officially the only person in my social circle who doesn’t play disk golf.
Mainstream-ish things I don’t like:
Beer
Ketchup
Cell phones
Sweet non-dessert foods (sweet and savory should never, ever be combined)
Basketball/football/baseball/etc.
@Blake Stacey:
Yeah, I hear you. I agree that it’s valuable to know about that sort of stuff. Where I STOP agreeing is when you start to tell me that the self-transforming machine elves you encounter when you are on DMT are a fundamental part of the universe rather than a side effect of playing with the chemistry in your head.
@darwinfan:
Sure, I agree to an extent about the therapeutic value of that feeling. But the feeling wasn’t what I was mocking. I mock the culture of the shaman, the culture of fetishizing drugs for whatever reason. It’s a very different thing to say “I use a drug therapeutically because the sense of well being I get helps with my depression” than it is to say “Drugs are the pathway to a higher consciousness for us all!” Especially when (as happens so often) it’s tied to this sense of “Tribal cultures had better ways of knowing the universe than modern science.”
Also, I don’t know if this is unusual or not but I hate it when people make a big deal out of my birthday. If I’m going to be the center of attention for a few minutes, I’d like it to be because I did something reasonably impressive, not for failing to die for another 365 days straight. But I’m totally fine with celebrating other people’s birthdays.
Hmm… I swear I’m not as depressing as that paragraph makes me sound.
I just wanted to say how much it warms my heart to see so many other people who don’t like coffee/tea. I’ve always felt like such a freak because I WANT to like it, but I just can’t. It’s bitter and yucky, people! bleh!
Anyway, I’m not mainstream also in that I hate Twilight, don’t like country music or jazz, and I hate reality TV shows.
All those things might only be ‘mainstream’ among the yahoos I call friends, though, and my vision of the world may be slightly skewed as a result.
I’ve skimmed over this entire thread and have come to this conclusion:
I love everything.
WTF is wrong with me? Beer! Coffee! Avocados! Ketchup! Pickles! Sports! Drugs! Watching stupid people on YouTube!
Man. Let me think . . .
. . .
Oh! Got it!
Mall Cop. I think that’s what it was called, that movie that was #1 for multiple weeks in the US starring the fat guy from that sitcom about the fat guy and the hot wife.
@Expatria: Where I STOP agreeing is when you start to tell me that the self-transforming machine elves you encounter when you are on DMT are a fundamental part of the universe rather than a side effect of playing with the chemistry in your head.
————
90% of everything is crap. Most of the “revelations”, secular and religious, that people have are bullshit regardless of chemistry.
I would say that, for a given definition of “higher consciousness”, hallucinogenic drugs can in fact be a pathway to it, and for a given definition of “total bullshit” hallucinogenic drugs can also be a pathway to it.
Again, I fail to see any difference between altered and normal states in that regard.
@Rebecca: WTF is wrong with me? Beer! Coffee! Avocados! Ketchup! Pickles! Sports! Drugs! Watching stupid people on YouTube!
————-
Pickles?
You’re sick, Watson. Sick.
The hot wife used to be a fat chick. And now she is a scientologist.
I don’t like Television. I detest violence in all its forms. I’ve never understood people’s enjoyment of it. So boxing is out. Internet videos that feature people falling or getting maimed or dying are completely out.
I don’t like watching people be humiliated. Between that and violence, there went television.
Fizzy Yellow Alcohol Water is out. That’s Bud and Fosters and all that other tasteless non-beer b.s.
Pet parrots. Oh man, my parents had a parrot when I was a teenager. It had a 180 IQ and hated me. That bird knew – it KNEW – when I was trying to sleep off some long night of drug use. It would wait until my parents left and then SCREECH. Happy, a joyful, it lived to torture me.
@Ezekiel: The parents of a friend of mine kept a pet parrot. The parrot’s incessant squawking was a pain, but my real problem is I can’t fathom why anyone would want to own a pet bird just to keep it in a cage.
I love the smell of cigarette smoke.
Oh, but I don’t smoke.
@sethmanapio:
You are missing my point. I don’t care about the experiences of normal or altered states in and of themselves. What I hate is people flapping their gums about it and/or trying to act like it’s something everyone should do.
As I’ve said, it’s the culture of bullshit surrounding that stuff that annoys me, and the preachy attitude of the people who are into it. Makes me want to say: You like drugs? GOOD. Leave me alone and go do ’em. :-P
Coffee. I can’t stand the smell of it.
Also, cigarettes, but that’s not so uncommon to hate.
I can’t stand seafood.
And even though i love all types of cheese i think Cheetos are vile.
@Brian’s A Wild Downer: Hah, I kinda like cheetos but find most cheeses pretty gross.
@Expatria: “Sure, I agree to an extent about the therapeutic value of that feeling. But the feeling wasn’t what I was mocking. I mock the culture of the shaman, the culture of fetishizing drugs for whatever reason.”
I gotcha. That I understand.
And… I hate popsicles.
@Brian’s A Wild Downer: Yah Cheetos are nasty, but I’m with Rebecca, most every thing others have mentioned sounds fine with me and I actually feel sorry for people who don’t enjoy good coffee, nice wine wonderfully moldy cheeses. Not to mention all the great documentaries and educational stuff on TV.
For those who dislike coffee, I suggest trying coffee ice cream. It has just the right amount of cream and sugar to make coffee taste good.
I don’t like Italian food – specifically pizza and pasta. I admit some of it is reasonably sort-of edible. I’m more likely to eat fresh pasta than dried, and baked and/or stuffed pasta I find less offensive than boiled pasta with sauce. But generally speaking, given a choice between Italian food and any other cuisine on Earth, I’m in the “non grazie” group.
I used to worry that I was a closet racist because I didn’t care for soul music, reggae, blues or jazz but prefered metal, folk and classical. However, from what I hear in passing on the radio/TV, I now think I could actually get into some rap/hip-hop if I had time to research it a bit more, so that’s a relief.
I’m also fairly geeky in the fantasy & science-fictiony way but I’ve never “got” superhero fiction.
Finally for the person/people who have no interest in dancing, do yourself a favour and check out Stephen Fry’s podcast episode
http://www.stephenfry.com/media/audio/2/episode-2–bored-of-the-dance/ . You are not alone.
@ Seth Manapio:
“@VioletSerene: Like a surprising number of people here, I don’t do drugs.
========
This is only surprising if you assume that a skeptical population ought to be outliers in this area compared to the general population. Again: MOST PEOPLE DO NOT USE ILLEGAL DRUGS.”
Just so I’m clear, I didn’t mean to imply that the sceptical population ought to be outliers and that I think that sceptical folk are more likely to use drugs/whatever (in fact I know far more unsceptical people who use drugs than I know sceptical people full stop). By ‘a surprising number of people here’, I was just meaning ‘people in general who happen to comment here’. As a 21 year old who’s just been at uni for three years, I often feel like I’m the only person in the world who’s never tried drugs/been drunk, or doesn’t want to do either (even thought I know empirically that what you say is true, that drug use is not mainstream). It’s nice to feel that I’m not! And that’s what I meant by surprising :-)
(Sorry about my useless quoting, for some reason the trackback thing doesn’t work for me, and I really can’t do html)
@Rebecca: I don’t know that I love everything, but I appreciate the sentiment. I love guacamole, coffee, tea, good beer (not a fan of getting too drunk, but I can appreciate a good buzz), pot, acid, milk, bleu cheese, olives (green and black), broccoli, …. Never tried snowballing, but I like the smell and could probably get used to the taste and texture. I can’t even say I hate sports, even though I’m not into watching or doing them, as I have been known to watch a baseball game.
But the mainstream thing I don’t get is horror: movies and books. I don’t like being frightened, even in a fake way. I much prefer laughing happy sex comedies.
And by ‘I know empirically’ I mean ‘I really know’. I can’t think of the word I actually mean. English major FAIL.
I don’t particularly like drinking beer, but I love to cook with it.
I HATE, to the bottom of my soul or whatever passes for one, modern “country”. In part because I really like old-style country, where adults whine and moan about how their spouses left them for whining and moaning all the time, and partly because it ISN’T COUNTRY DAMMIT. It’s repackaged pop with twangy guitars and terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad vocals.
Also, although I take no real issue with the Beatles’ music, I hate all of the band members except Ringo, who by all accounts is a pretty cool guy.
Living here in New Orleans, I think these qualify as anti-grain: seafood, alcohol, and the feel of sunshine on my skin. Oh, and red beans and rice.
And I don’t see any need to get married. My girlfriend and I have been living together for 13 years. It’s ostensibly the same as marriage but without the paperwork.
No children, either.
Olives
Football (soccer)! I can’t get the least bit worked up about how well 22 over-paid, over-trained children move a bag of wind.
network TV (except Big Bang Theory)
Fast food
Monster truck shows
UFC/MMA
Horror movies since the first Elm Street
Disney
Olives
Ranch _____
Mayo
Soda/Pop (depending on your location)
@sethmanapio:
No, I’m not an American, but I live in an European country where it is forbidden to smoke in most pubs, bars and restaurants. The point was, it was not only the smoke from cigarettes and cigars I hate, I also hate the fake smoke from smoke cannons. And those are legal and popular in dance clubs (over here at least). I love dancing and partying with my friends, but I can’t go dancing, because I can’t stand the fake smoke.
But I agree with you on the point that drugs should not be on these lists.
I detest coffee. I detest it steaming in cups; I detest it in ice cream; I detest it in cakes; I detest it in candy….
Iced tea is okay. Not hot tea.
Never did an illegal drug in my life.
Cigars are my drug of choice – and method to relax. Pipes also do this for me. Cigarettes are not something I like.
Chocolate is ok on ice cream (my real drug) but not by itself.
Coffee is my ritual.
I prefer books to television by a wide margin
I don’t like water in bottles (environmental thing, but living in Arizona sometimes thats what you get).
I have about one beer a year, sometimes two.
i can’t stand guacamole and can’t remember if i’ve tried a raw avocado.
illicit drugs.
i used to hate coffee. since my wife loves starbucks i’ve been sucked into the flavored stuff, but now have kinda migrated to straight cappucinos w/o any flavoring and sometimes espresso. odd. love tea; though it must be neat.
with as much tv that i watch you’d think i’d love it, but i’d be just as happy to use it only for watching movies on dvds. my wife apparently requires watching it.
i know there’s more, but it ain’t surfacing at the moment.
Milk – it’s for baby cows, not humans!
Ranch Dressing – who decided about 10-15 years ago that you could Ranch on anything?
But, I loves me some guacamole, and when I make it myelf it’s freakin’ awesome. I made some for the Super Bowl and ate enough for 5 people. Oddly enough – I’m not big on plain avacados.
sports
reality TV
I have to be in the mood for chocolate
Not a big fan of drug use. I smoke, and support its legalization
marriage
children
liquor-I drink rarely, but when I do, its to get drunk, on mixed drinks. Mostly vodka
I don’t like the TASTE of coffee. When I drink it-often, I take a desent-size cup like a shot. Sadly, though my disdain, I could still drink most people under the table. Or would that be over the table, you’re so hyped up?
And finally-
Modern comedy. Its all become the same. over-reactions, overacting, and grossout. When did that become funny?
Everyone who says they don’t like bacon is insane. INSANE!
Also, I hate vodka. Vodka always tastes like rubbing alcohol to me, even the expensive stuff, and it’s just nasty and blegh. Give me a good whiskey any day.
Also RED BULL and all other energy are effin’ nasty. I have had all of one red bull in my entire life and have sworn off the nastiness of energy drinks for life. GROSS and uselss.
@Nicole: I live in Arizona. Everyone eats guac and I know a lot of people who eat avacados outright. I love to cut them up and put mayo and salt and pepper. Got that from my dad. Om nom. Now I’m hungry.
@skepticalhippie: LOL, what? ‘Cuz it’s okay for your woman to eat your spunk, but it’s the grossest thing ever for you. That seems kind of effed up and typical of men, tbh. “Give me a blow job and SWALLOW! But don’t kiss me eeww eww ew brush your teeth!” Really?!
@VioletSerene: As a skeptic, I actually prefer pot to alcohol and I kind of wonder why more skeptics don’t, considering how bad alcohol can be for you. Pot can also be bad for you of course, but no where near as bad. Indeed, I can think of three people outside of my family who are DYING –literally — from alcoholism. And let’s not even start with my family. I know no one dying from pot, nor anyone having any issues with it.
Thankfully most skeptical people probably don’t smoke it because it is illegal and therefore not easy to get. Most skeptics seem to agree with me that, as a whole, pot is not any worse than alcohol and likely better (considering both are drugs, anyway, since neither is necessarily “good” for you either).
Anyway, I’m gonna stop spammin’ the comments now k.
@Imrryr:
Lot’s of people make that mistake. A parrot is kept in its cage so it can be kept safe while you are not around. When you are around, the parrot comes out. People who treat their parrots like fish in an aquarium are missing out on the best parts of owning a parrot.
@Expatria: As I’ve said, it’s the culture of bullshit surrounding that stuff that annoys me, and the preachy attitude of the people who are into it.
———–
And you miss my point: my point is that it isn’t the drugs or even the culture of drugs that bugs you, it’s religion and the culture of religion. You just happen to be interacting with people who evangelize a religion that has hallucinogens as a sacrament.
@infinitemonkey:
@Frankiemouse:
@TerrySimpson:
———————–
Do I have to cite sources now? People:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/dcf/du.htm
Most people. Most people. The majority of people. More than half the people in a random sample. More people than not. Do. Not. Use. Illegal. Drugs. Most have never even tried pot, which is by far the most popular illegal drug.
What freaking planet are you weirdos on that not being a drug user makes you unusual, or an outlier of some kind? Are you not aware that we actually spend billions of dollars every year locking people in cages for using these drugs? Has it escaped your notice that the bill of rights has been severely eroded so that we can more effectively hunt down the buyers and sellers of these products? Did I wake up in some alternate freaking reality where pot is legal and “Weeds” is an alternate reality fiction about what the world would be like if we actually had these insane and ineffective drug laws?
Okay… now cigars, cigars are out of the mainstream and right into fetish territory. I’ll give you that.
@sethmanapio: True Fact: Everybody else is always using drugs, having sex, enjoying life, etc. more than you are.
@sethmanapio:
Awesome. Could you come over and tell me what I mean some more? I didn’t get enough of that when I was in therapy… :-P
If I say it’s the culture surrounding drug use that annoys me, then that’s what I damned well mean. It shares some common ground with religion, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the only part that rankles me.
Mostly it’s the stupid fucktards who want to do drugs but feel the need to justify it by acting as if there’s more to it than just wanting to do drugs. Pretense is pretense, whether it bears a resemblance to religion or not.
Oh, and as for the whole “not doing drugs isn’t against the mainstream” thing… maybe instead of trying to make people feel stupid for feeling that such a choice is against the mainstream, you could try to understand WHY people would feel that way.
All the statistics in the world don’t change impressions, and it seems to me that because drugs, alcohol, and the like tend to be given a certain air of glamor and subversion, people end up with the impression that these things are more pervasive in the culture than they actual are. Media fearmongering surely doesn’t help.
When people make an active choice not to buy into the subversive “coolness” of drugs, but people around them go along with it (whether they use drugs or not), it makes those who don’t get it feel as if they are out of the mainstream. Clearly something like this is at work, or why else would so many people post that here?
@Expatria: Oh, and as for the whole “not doing drugs isn’t against the mainstream†thing… maybe instead of trying to make people feel stupid for feeling that such a choice is against the mainstream, you could try to understand WHY people would feel that way.
—————-
Really? Because I thought I was among reality-based thinkers here, people who might consider it important to ask themselves why what they think is so completely out of step with reality. But I guess you think I should be holding hands and asking how people feel.
And I certainly don’t mean to make people feel stupid, but the seventh time I make a point in one thread is about the time I start getting snarky.
As to your subjective and limited experience with drug culture, again, what you are saying you have a problem with is not actually drug culture. It isn’t a question of what you freaking “mean” in some touchy feely way, it’s a question of whether what you are describing is drug culture per se or if it is something else. I’ve been in that culture. What you are describing is not “drug culture”, it’s a religious culture that uses drugs.
@SkepLit: I can understand that. People put their dogs in crates for similar reasons. I definitely don’t have a problem with parrot ownership as long as they are treated well, and not treated like a decoration.
@Expatria:
Add to this the likelihood that many (most?) self-identified skeptics have a university education. This is basically arguing by stringing stereotypes together, so take it for what it’s worth, but it seems at least superficially plausible that picking 100 random casual acquaintances of a randomly chosen skeptic will net you a higher percentage of people who have at least tried pot than picking 100 people from the population at large. And why would any of us have a strong emotional reaction to a culture which does not impinge upon us?
@sethmanapio:
I don’t buy it.
@Expatria:
Yes. Drug culture shares with religion the demerit of dubious epistemology. However, when it comes to legislating people’s sex lives, controlling who gets to marry, trucking medievalist claptrap into school curricula and starting bloody wars over worthless patches of desert, religion is still in the lead. The reasons for disliking one should not be wholly conflated with the reasons for disliking the other.
@Expatria:
George Harrison, of all people, had a keen observation about this. Back in the days when LSD was legal, he and John Lennon got surreptitiously dosed by “the wicked dentist” — he slipped it into their coffees, and that of their wives, one evening at a club, apparently in the hope that it would act as an aphrodisiac and get them all back to his flat for a group shag. Typical shenanigans ensued: they saw the red light glowing behind a button on the elevator and ran around screaming that the lift was on fire, etc. George and John found it an amazing and enlightening experience; later, George said that he had the mistaken idea that everyone who took LSD became a wonderfully enlightened person, when in fact, many were the same jerks they’d been before they ever dropped acid. An important lesson to learn.
(The serious hallucinogen users I’ve known have all been physicists, mathematicians, chemists and electrical engineers. Their attitude typically seemed to be, “Let’s spend the next eight hours injecting noise into our neural nets. And listen to Orbital.”)
@sethmanapio:
OK, now we’re getting somewhere.
Who gets to define “drug culture”? The raver kids on ecstasy? That Wellesley girl I met who insisted on “sanctifying” her LSD with mint oil? The server administrators of Erowid? They guy who took some chemical most people have never heard of and thought he finally understood Maxwell’s Equations and Fourier transforms? You? Me? The True Scotsmen?
Oh, I just realized: insert “Shamanistic” between “Yes.” and “Drug culture” in my #149.
@Blake Stacey:
Thanks for interjecting, Blake. I was having a hard time typing out the onomatopoeic version of the frothing frustration I was experiencing. You made most of the rejoinders I was going to make, except probably more clearly than I’d have been able due to misguided emotional investment.
Oh, and is there a band called The True Scotsmen? Because if not there SHOULD be… though something tells me there probably is :)
I think they’re opening for The New Atheist Noise Machine at Berklee next month. (-;
@Expatria: Oh, and is there a band called The True Scotsmen? Because if not there SHOULD be… though something tells me there probably is :)
—–
True Scotsman fallacy? Sorry, but no.
I did not say that no member of the drug culture behaved in manner X, I said that manner X is not emblematic of drug culture in general, but are indicative of religious culture in general, and therefore if were cladifying annoying shits, the shamans go with the religious nuts, not the run of the mill stoners.
Second, less than half of American college students have tried marijuana. That’s tried, not “use consistently”.
So again, the impression that you might have that you are going against the grain by not habitually committing drug crimes is bullshit. Correct for college attendance and it is still bullshit.
Not using drugs is mainstream. It is the default position. It is what everybody else is doing. It is the normal thing to do. And why you guys seem to think that it is important that it be the rebellious activity is fucking beyond me.
Are we or are we not people who subscribe to evidence based positions about the world? Is it or is it not more important to base your view of “mainstream behavior” on what the mainstream is actually doing, rather than what you believe it might be doing? What about this position is controversial?
My two cents re: drugs:
It seems like the strongest opinions about what drugs can and cannot do for people comes from those who have never tried them. To me, it looks an awful lot like priests assuming a position of authority on matters sexual.
It’s easy to say, “your revelations are invalid, you were just tripping!” when you have no idea what the experience is like (note: rubbing your eyes until you see colors does not mean you know what it’s like to trip).
Psychedelics flood your consciousness with sensory information and spur cognition, making it nigh impossible to function in the physical world (you can’t sort out what’s going on in even the simplest of situations), but allowing you to focus on your thoughts in ways you’d never dreamed. You can have a month’s worth of profound realizations in the span of a couple of hours, simply because you become involved in your thought process so much more heavily.
Of course, the conclusions you draw are contingent upon the premises already present in your mind. If you’re an idiot, you’re going to think that God is speaking to you through your cat, and your reaction will be something along the lines of, “ohh, duuuuude!” But if you’re an intelligent sort, you’ll experience many breakthroughs about yourself, your mind, your place in the world, the nature of reality, all that fun stuff.
This has happened to me many times. I’ve sobered up and carried my newfound knowledge with me ever since. It has helped me to grow as a person, and a lot of it is stuff I’d have never thought of outside a psychedelic experience.
So by all means, talk shit about the idiots who take drugs—God knows I hate pot leaf posters and all that lame, stupid shit too—but just realize that this reflects poorly on them, not their drugs of choice.
I don’t like pot. tried it in HS just didn’t stick
I hate cigarettes
I hate that series :Friends. Never watched it
I never watched Seinfeld either…
Seinfeld. It’s (typically/mostly) a show about idiots getting all stressed out about nothing. Worse, it seems to have been fairly successful at setting cultural norms for values and behaviors and for teaching them. I find the show intensely annoying, and have never been able to sit through one.
I don’t like watching sports. “Why should I watch other people play a game?” I ask. I’d rather go DO something. I can always think of something better to do with my time than to watch other people play a game.
Survivor: It’s not bad enough that everything they do is silly and stupid, but then they top it off by consistently voting the best people off first!
@anthroslug: “I don’t drink – I get no joy from the effects of alcohol, I just feel rather sick (and I don’t mean hangover, I mean that the first thing I feel when the alcohol hits me is sick).”
I know what you mean: I have a low tolerance for alcohol and for the longest time couldn’t make it far into the second beer before I started feeling really sick. But then I worked for Anheuser-Bush for a while, so I have a slightly higher tolerance now.
Conformist mainstream nonsense: I tend to figure that “If a lot of other people are doing it, then I’m sure it’s being done quite well, so I see no reason why I should do it.”
Going to the movies.
Socialising.
Tomato sauce (ketchup) on chips (fries). The mere sight of it makes me gag.