First of all, I should probably point out that I am really, really easy to annoy.

Moreover, when I'm feeling irritable, I tend to go on the hunt for things that I know will wind me up more.

That guy on my Facebook feed who is so blindly ignorant and bigoted? I'm going to read every single airheaded status update of his from the past year.

That girl on Instagram who hashtags everything about her relationship to within an inch of her life? I'm going to sit there and scroll through every damn photo.

Hell, this morning I even googled "Adobe is shit" when I couldn't get Illustrator to do what I wanted it to at work and then spent a couple of minutes scrolling through ranty forums, revelling in this celebration of crapness.

Getting irritated and letting it take over for a little while is my way of blowing off steam. When I was at school, my friend Olivia (who is still one of my wonderful best friends today) and I would wet ourselves laughing at our old-woman style rants. Complaining wasn't something else to get annoyed about, it was something to be ridiculed. Our anger would break down in a beautiful, hilarious catharsis. Think of those films and TV shows with a grumpy main character for whom everything goes wrong to comic effect. We were kind of transforming ourselves into that person for a while and turning the groans into laughs.

Needless to say, our early friendship cemented "moaning = good" into my brain. Which doesn't always go down so well in the real world.

But I say - who cares! 

This morning, I came to the realisation that I am currently following an obscene amount of blogs. I used to just add every and any blog to my following list without really looking at whether the content was relevant to me or not. Stupid, I know.

I realised that I was skipping past posts in my feed without even considering them simply because I didn't enjoy reading that blog. It was definitely time for a clear out!

As I went through, I saw more and more things that now define what I'm definitely not looking for when I click on someone's page. As a result, the first in my Grinding My Gears series will be about things that annoy me about blogging, probably at some point later this week.

Don't worry, I'll keep up the sweet smiley facade for the rest of the time but you know when you haven't had chocolate properly for a week and a half (by properly, I mean half a kilo in one sitting, I had 2 squares of dark chocolate last night and it was. not. satisfactory.) and you start feeling like you need to talk about your feelings?

Yeah, that's what I've got right now.

What annoys you? Is it the little things like people walking slowly on pavements or does technology drive you absolutely nuts? Is it your friends, family, other people's families, your colleagues, your dog (surely not!).. what is it? I'd love to know if anyone else shares my little self-indulgence :)