Critic

I’ve always found it a little bit pretentious when something, anything starts off with a dictionary definition, but I’m not overly critically about it, I’ve done it myself on at least one occasion. It helps set the tone for what you’re getting yourself in to as a reader, to spell out exactly what you’re trying to set up as a writer and it generally just looks cool, as demonstrated by every teenager with a thesaurus or magician with a TV show on A&E. To be even more frank about it, what I would like to demonstrate is that I’m not a fussy person, because I have been called so on a few occasions. At least, that I don’t think that I am, any more than I think you should be. So allow me to introduce to you, the dictionary (.com) definition of fussy:

FUSSY
fuss·y Pronunciation[fuhs-ee]
–adjective, fuss·i·er, fuss·i·est.
1. excessively busy with trifles; anxious or particular about petty details.
2. hard to satisfy or please: a fussy eater.

It is necessary to also exemplify what it means to be petty, as in “particular about petty details.” Petty means, “Of little or no importance or consequence” or, “Of lesser or secondary importance, merit, etc.”

So let’s say, for instance, that I am eating in a restaurant. A restaurant is, by definition, a place where food is served to customers. The food and the service of it are the important things; the food and the service are not petty details. All that I expect from a restaurant is that it is clean, that the staff is friendly and competent and the food tastes of what the price tag leads me to expect. A place has to be judged on its own merits, but if you’re in the restaurant business, you should at least be able to churn out something as good as or better than I can make in my own kitchen without leaving me feeling patronized for it.

Call me an emotional eater, but to me, eating bad restaurant food is like eating pure hate. I become consumed by it, growing exponentially spiteful, filled with the gamut of emotions still harbored by the dark side of man. I understand that sometimes mistakes are made, but a vocal complaint is easy to address and I am not eager to give out second chances to a restaurant that has made no effort to rectify their blunders. There is just no excuse for bad service or truly awful food. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect a certain level of quality out of everything in life. So it’s not that I’m hard to please, it’s just that I refuse to settle for mediocrity. I think it is important to be critical of your surroundings. If nothing else, this is the essence of a critic, of which I would one day like to become professionally.