What Do You Secretly Hate?

Replace the Atlantic Ocean’s water with champagne for just a theoretical moment and imagine their similarities: champagne would create giant waves and suck back during low tide, it would froth and foam and tickle your nose. Swimmers would declare it a hangover cure and parents would caution their children, reminding them not to swallow it. It would be equally wet.

Now replace the champagne in your glass with ocean water. Again: froth, foam, tickle your nose. Its presence alone would make everyone joyful. There would be preference over where it came from (Is this salt water from France, or is it New Jersey?) and after drinking too much, you’d no doubt get sick.

But what the ocean and champagne really have in common is that secretly, I hate them both.

Hate is a strong word and we’re told not to use it, so if it softens the blow (and we should get more specific anyway) I dislike going in oceans with rough waves. Put me on a beach with my feet in the sand, however, and I am elated. Put me in a sail boat on top of the ocean and you can’t get me off it. Put me directly in the shallow, still waters of the French Riviera or a Sandals Resort and I will stay submerged until you come for me. Give me a breathing tank, face goggles and flippers and I will scuba dive until my air tank threatens to fail me. Yes please to all of that. You get it.

Here’s the part I hate: being knocked over by giant waves, being submerged against my will and losing my top or bottom in the process, choking on brine, tangling my hair, losing contacts, touching seaweed and stabbing my food 100 times while everyone near me goes, “Isn’t this fun! Isn’t your hangover totally gone? Nature’s cure!”

And the champagne? It gives me a headache, every single time, and makes me puke.

But you can’t declare hate for either publicly without expecting people to throw water balloons at your perm in angry-mob response. They don’t give you enough time to say, “No, I actually love the ocean, just not when it very blatantly tries to kill me!” And they don’t care that champagne makes you puke. Suck it up!

So I had to say it here. Get it off my chest. Repression isn’t good for us, you know? Your turn: what thing (feel free to add a million qualifiers, as I did) do you secretly hate?