I found it.

I found a reason to hate him. It was easier than I expected. I didn't have to search or anything. One day it just kind of appeared, shouting out at me, "Hey! Why are you ignoring this? It's perfect! It's annoying. It's heinous. So hate him! Hate him!"

And it's not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be.

It's disappointing really.

Let's consider a somewhat analogous situation.

This summer, I lost my stamps. This is the same book of stamps I've been using since the middle of 2006. I simply don't mail things very often. So one day, after mailing out a bill or two, the stamps disappeared. Gone. Vanished. Without a trace.

I searched my car, my apartment, my tote bags, my pockets, my car, my apartment, my desk, the organizer thingies that cover my desk, my closet, and then my entire apartment again. I didn't find the stamps.

Readers, I live in an efficiency apartment. Some of you might call it a studio apartment. The point is: I live in one room. One ****ing room, and I lost something. How do you do that?

So I was pissed. I was determined to find the stamps. I was on a mission. And that meant that I had to go to the post office every time I needed to mail something. And rather than buying stamps while I was at the post office, I would come home empty-handed, continuing to be pissed off about my missing stamps.

Until one day earlier this week, I was looking for a specific stack of post-it notes in one of the drawers of one of the organizer thingies upon my desk, and I found the stamps.

Recall that I had searched that same damn drawer many times during my frantic search for the stamps. Could I have found the stamps the first time around? Noooooooooo. That would have been far too simple.

And yet, when I finally found the stamps, when I was no longer looking for the stamps, I felt nothing. No sense of victory, no triumph, no joy, no elation, nothing. They were just stamps -- left exactly where they should have been.

In case you're not following the logic here, let's wrap up the analogy.

I don't hate him, but now I have a reason to, should I ever want to. And I don't feel good about that. Don't get me wrong -- I don't feel bad about it. This just isn't what I expected.

What happened to the good old days, when finding the missing stamps was fun?