I think I have outrage fatigue.

I followed a discussion about restaurants recently that followed a piece written by a chef who complained about patrons who wanted things made to order, or who liked their steaks well-done, or who committed what were, in her eyes, other sins against cuisine. The discussion included people on both sides for whom this was a deeply significant cultural and ethical issue, and who believed that failure to come down on the right side of this issue indicated a character flaw that could never be overlooked. On the chef's side are the Foodies. How dare the plebeians request that you omit the capers?! How dare they ask my staff to prepare grilled cheese sandwiches for their children instead of serving my famous Brie Clown?! Would you stand over a doctor's shoulder and tell him how to do your surgery? OUTRAGE! On the other side are the People Who Eat At Perkins, At Least Sometimes. How dare this elitist declare herself the dictator of my dinner?! I am the master of my steak, I am the captain of my baked potato! If I want to eat it with ketchup, I will do so, and I will not be interfered with by the likes of you!

See, I don't have a problem with people who are outraged about war or civil rights violations or things of that nature, because certainly outrage over those things seems like a perfectly appropriate response. Those things are the reasons outrage was invented. But I wonder about dilution of the concept. I worry about a glut.

You can find people who are outraged about the newspaper, about the toilet paper, about the way other people talk, about the way other people dress, about the way other people eat or do their hair or talk on their cell phones in restaurants. Sometimes their generalized fury is such that they can barely stand to be on either side -- today they are apoplectic about people who believe in astrology, but tomorrow they may be equally disgusted by people who make fun of people who believe in astrology. Today it is corporate executives, and tomorrow it may be trade unions. Today it is trial lawyers, tomorrow it is dumb-ass hippies, and the next day it may be trial-lawyer-dumb-ass-hippie hybrids, like that girl Sandra Bullock played in Two Weeks Notice. Oh, and a lot of them are outraged about the lack of an apostrophe at the end of "Weeks." Actually, they are outraged by romantic comedies in general. And action movies. And pretty much all movies that don't end with someone getting shot in the head. Not that they aren't capable of getting up a good head of steam about people getting shot in the head in the movies.

My point is not to deny anyone his or her petty complaining. Petty complaining is one of life's great pleasures. I myself have a Mortal Enemy of the Week. Furthermore, many of these are perfectly legitimate annoyances -- especially the missing apostrophe. But too much time spent in a legitimate state of tooth-grinding upheaval benefits no one but dentists.

It is in the spirit of helping you (well, not you, of course, but maybe that guy next to you) recover from a state of excessive outrage that I offer the following symptoms of Misplaced Outrage (MO):

You are outraged over something you cannot spell. Yes, I know that spelling does not correlate with intelligence, and I know that some people have specific spelling deficiencies and blah blah blah. But if you want me to believe your screed against "corprate welfair," go ahead and run it through the checker first. It's not so much that spelling is directly relevant as it is that if you don't know how to spell it, you probably haven't seen it in print very much, which means you are getting all of your information from whomever you happen to speak to -- or, God forbid, listen to on the radio -- in the course of your busy day, and that is a perfect recipe for misinformation, which is perhaps the leading cause of misplaced outrage.

You are outraged by the actions of a fictional character. There may be one incident in ten years in which an action taken by an artist qualifies in the sense that the artistic message is so hateful or vile that no other reaction is possible. But nothing a fictional character does is going to cut it. ""I cannot believe Buffy turned her back on her friends!". No. What you feel when fictional characters misbehave is toy outrage, just as what you experience when they die is toy grief, not real grief. Do not confuse the two.

You are outraged over something to which you specifically agreed. If you sign the contract that says, "Mooning the president of the country club under any circumstances will result in the immediate termination of your membership," then your outrage is misplaced when you moon and they terminate. Even if you really, really didn't like him. But it was in the tiny print! Yes, I know. You have to read the tiny print. You'd hold them to the tiny print that protects you, wouldn't you?

You are outraged about wickedness without having accounted for the possibility of benevolent idiocy. From time to time, people are just evil. Much, much more often, they are morons making misguided attempts to act on principle. Yes, some people's principles are wicked, and in those cases, you are on firm ground. But when there's a mess, and there's a guy whose job it is to clean it up, and he futzes it to high heaven, suspect idiocy. Apply the same theory to any stray remark of less than ten words. Idiocy can generate ten words without breaking a sweat.

You are confusing outrage with perfectly healthy buttinskyism. Think carefully before becoming outraged about anything unless you can come up with some way in which it might potentially, in some way, cause harm of some kind to you or someone else. You can be annoyed by thongs that stick out of women's pants, but they're not doing anything to you. Ditto the guy down the street who is unhealthily obsessed about his lawn, the cartoonist in your local paper who isn't funny, the person who lives in another state who painted his house with peace symbols, or the fact that your friend's boyfriend uses the word "irregardless."

You have it in your power to eliminate any potential nexus between your life and the subject of your outrage and have chosen not to do so. Are you still watching it? Reading it? Going there? Dating him? Using it? Taking it? Sleeping with her? Living there? Wearing it? Eating it? Calling him? Working there? Buying it? Listening to it? Talking to her? While these are not perfectly reliable indicators of MO, they are strong markers. Expect to be asked to explain them.

You are outraged because someone else disagrees with you about a verifiable fact. There is absolutely no point in becoming outraged during an argument over how many executions have taken place in Texas in the last ten years. Stop arguing. Stubbornness is not an acceptable substitute for Google.

You were not outraged until you heard exactly one speech, read exactly one book, or had exactly one conversation in which you became irrevocably convinced that outrage was appropriate. No person's credibility is powerful enough to entirely support another person's outrage. This is why hearsay is inadmissible. You've got to have more than one guy's say-so before you go into a grinding indictment of humanity. I recently heard a guy in a bookstore holding court about all manner of things, doing about a fifteen minute monologue about foreign policy and electoral politics, drawing two women he was talking to more and more deeply into his Birkenstocked fury. And he was wrong a lot. Like, a lot. That's the thing about MO -- once planted, it spreads like kudzu. You must be a human weed-whacker. Check, double-check, and triple-check. A subcategory of this symptom, incidentally, is that you are outraged about something that is debunked on the front page of snopes.com.

You are outraged about voice mail menus. NO.

You are outraged about the behavior of a celebrity. This is simply not important enough. Famous people do not matter. Who they date does not matter. These things are plentifully worthy of scorn, satire, chatter, and other forms of miscellaneous griping. They cannot, however, carry the weight of actual anger. You can hate J.Lo; just don't hate J.Lo, if you know what I mean.