I don’t think I’ve been that much of a hater. Except for hating hippie shit, non-aspirational middle class satisfaction, super aspirational middle class striving exemplified by faux brass faucets or hand-polished marble refurbishments, calculated haircuts, poems about “the body,” the way the New Yorker now plants an umlaut over the second of two grouped vowels in words such as “cooperative” or “reenactment,” as if I couldn’t tell that those two vowels did different things in that word and I needed some help with the notion, the one dance most people do to 80s music, too cool for cool embraces of 70s singer songwriters who are not cool at all except for the magic trick of being held aloft by anybody with peenie jeans, chick lit book covers, judgmental bike jocks, missionaries, floral prints, and entitlement, I have been pretty enthusiastic about most things. Or, if not enthusiastic, at least willing to rationalize around my hatery. In any case, my attitude is enormously improved from its state when I was 14 and most of my statements began with the introductory question, “Do you know what makes me really mad?”

I have grown to cherish my ability to hate. Let me make clear that I don’t mean “hate” in that person-on-person way, that love-not-hate way. My hateration applies largely to the conceptual and the conveniently general. Knowing people who like a thing that I hate on usually downgrades my degree of hatery, or sometimes removes it entirely, because I like people, and the things that they choose to furnish their lives with become more meaningful in the contexts of their lives. My college roommate Rachel loved Mates of State, a husband and wife band that sang warbly, sometimes ill-harmonized songs about how happy they were together. I couldn’t stand their songs, their cuteness, their whole wholesome ish. But for Rachel, who had just met the guy who would end up being her fiancee, it was an ideal soundtrack. This alone pushed me to grudging acceptance, although I sadly didn’t get much further than that. I know, I sound so open-minded. As a child I had a running joke with my mother that I alternated open-minded and close-minded days, which had some residue of logic to it, like the notion of being sour if you eat too many sweets or the way my dad would tell me I jinxed his football games if I watched them with him instead of reading upstairs and listening to his bellowing below.

Because I have applied all kinds of conditions and exemptions to my hateration, I have been able to keep it close to me and dote on it. I have come to consider it a necessary part of my personality, the thing that was able to balance my mawkish fondness for so many other things. (Short list: karaoke faces, manicures, fish cooked barely or not at all, the movie “Clueless,” wholesome poetry-type engagement with the things of the world, every hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, the cellophane toothpick, bawdy food-related metaphors for the human anatomy in early blues songs, professional sports, and lucite globes with scorpions trapped inside.) I have made excuses on behalf of my hateration. I have tried to tether it to my critical faculties, with the implicit idea that giving up hating would amount to becoming a bovine happy clapper. But lately, unbidden, I have the sense that there’s no real excuse for being an asshole to anybody, and I am troubled by this wisdom. If this wisdom is true, I have been acting out of line for years, skewering the faults of others with a meticulous glee, especially if I have a good excuse at hand. My good excuses ranged from needing a cigarette to needing to be included by imperiously judgmental (but also very witty) friends. Maybe I’ve started to think that I don’t even need those things as much as it might seem. I don’t actually like this feeling, as wholesome and all-to-the-good as it may sound. I’m not writing an admonishing dictate of supreme moral clarity. I don’t always know how to be myself and be nice. And yet I am grossed out by the blemishes on my aura. I still want very badly to chastise hippies for thinking I might care about a drum circle. It all reminds me of that itchy feeling I got in my shins when I was in the middle of a growth spurt, and I don’t like that feeling because I’ve become accustomed to thinking of myself as grown.

In summation, fuck. I may as well start vacuuming the drapes.