What were they thinking????

 Today, I found myself in the grips of passionate, irrational anger to the point of wanting to destroy things.

Because of a toy.

You see, this toy is not just any toy that makes me hate being alive.  Usually, toys that sing songs (gag), do dances, or make giant slimy messes are the toys that I hate most.  Hence my status as Grinch of the century.  I especially detest slime.  UGH.  bleh!  Messy!  I can handle arts and crafts, but stickers get me mad too because no matter how carefully I police them, I >will< find a sticker in the dog's Floof later that day.  Play-Doh and slime are toys for playing outside.  Someday I will get us a plastic picnic table so that those toys can be played with more often, but that involves money, and, well... I don't have any of that right now.

But THIS toy!

It starts out looking like a generically-shaped fuzzy thing.  The player's job is to pull out each strand of fuzz, ONE. BY. ONE., to reveal what the toy really is.  In our case it was a plushie of a slice of pepperoni pizza.

The fuzz.  As fine as your typical embroidery floss, but... fuzzy.  Each piece is roughly 3/4" (2ish cm) long.  And, again, in INDIVIDUAL PIECES.  Neon-colored.

Had I seen the toy before the pulling began, I might have been less disturbed by it.  But I was in the restroom when TheKid got home as a proud owner of this toy, so she was able to sit at the table and begin pulling the strands and make a pile of neon-nightmares before I learned the mechanism and motives of said object.

So when I entered the room with the table, I saw a massive pile of neon-nightmare strands on both the table AND THE FLOOR (of course, TheKid is 6 and making a mess is what a 6 year old naturally does).  TheKid delightedly explained the job of ripping out each tiny piece of fuzz-thread until the object was revealed, all while my eyes tried to process this frizzy fuzzy pile of neon nightmare.  My first thought other than being annoyed at the mess is what the dog and cat's feces are going to look like after today when they consume all of these fibers... which then turned my anger to terror.  Yes, it's small pieces, but I am not willing to shell out the money for a vet call if my dog or cat consumes this stuff and becomes ill.

Who are the makers of this wretched object?  Are any of them parents or care-givers, let alone pet owners?  I can't imagine that they would be, because I would assume that they would be able to envision the horror that could go on with un-policed neon nightmare fiber.  I am baffled that this thing got past the testers without worries of lawsuits from consumption of neon nightmare fiber... but then, scented glue sticks exist.

It has taken me all day to calm down from this toy, and only because I flipped out enough to put the Fear of God into TheKid about cleaning up every neon nightmare fiber so that The Kid doesn't kill our dog or cat.  I might have been a little dramatic about it, but... I don't ever want to meet the person who came up with the idea for this piece of horror.  I'm still very heightened by it.

Ways that I coped:

I went grocery shopping.
I watered the outdoor plants/seedlings that we planted yesterday.
I took our expired eggs and hurled them as hard as I could, one by one, into the ditch behind our house where the woodchucks live.
I practiced difficult classical music WITH A METRONOME.  I thought for a few minutes that the torture of playing something with a metronome would help deflect my anger at this "toy" manufacturer and instead aim it at my instrument and Maelzel.  I didn't hate the toy less, but I did make the music I'm working on a lot smoother.

So at least there's music?