List of Grievances
A friend writes: “Hey, do you have the list of grievances [...] anymore? If not, why not?” She’s referring to some notes I kept back in school about one particular fellow student who seemed to register for every damn class I was taking. I was easily annoyed during those years. Regard:
List of Grievances
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Category I--Extensive Personal Grooming--Hair:
- Combing
- Braiding/unbraiding
- Ostentatious twirling
- Waving about, shaking loosely
- Deep sniffing of hair
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Category II--Extensive Personal Grooming--General:
- Applying Oil of Olay™ with Q-Tips™ to bags under eyes; smearing left-over Oil of Olay™ over already-amply-greased visage
- Copious utilization of cosmetic products of indeterminate origin
- Boisterous, flapping application of apricot scrubbing lotion to arms, elbow calluses, other extremities
- Brazen flossing of teeth during lecture on Great English Vowel Shift.
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Category III-- Lecture Feeding Behaviors/Inappropriate Insinuation of Food/Beverage into Classroom:
- Twinkies™, bagels, Rice Crispies Treats™, honey-roasted peanuts, caramel popcorn, Drake's Crumb-Topped Coffee Cakes (Mini)™, struedel, cotton candy(!), oranges, bananas, paw-paws...For exhaustive inventory see Annex 1.
- Loud and distracting crinkling of food wrappers during lecture on Donne.
- Spilling of coffee; lame, ineffectual attempts to clean up; breezy remarks about custodial staff. See also MILK.
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Category IV--Inappropriate Familiarity with Professors ("Hail-Fellow-Well- Met-Gladhanding"):
- Crass personal questions
- Unnecessary references to relationships with professors outside of class
- Offering Twinkies™ to old-school Mitteleuropean professor (see Category III)
- Uncalled-for jokes and gibes
- "Humorously" needling professor about return of exams being overdue.
- Failing to do assigned work, prostrating self on desk, screeching, "Doctor Hradetsky, I throw myself on your MERCY!"
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Category V--Lack of Attention to Material:
- Day-dreaming/wool-gathering during discussion of Georgian poets, then insisting Yeats was modernist
- Tangential, unrelated question-asking
- Extensive, pointed consultation of chronometer
- Premeditated sleeping, prop-camouflaged subterfuges
- Claiming "Um, I must have been sick the day you discussed clitics"
- Sweeping and/or flouncing into/out of classroom
- Close-sitting/crowding of others
- Ostentatious fiddling with unnecessary fountain pen
- Draping, flipping hair onto neighboring desks (see Category I) when leaning over to retrieve dropped fountain pen and on numerous other occasions
- Wilful soiling of adjacent students' clothing with filth-laden feet
- Wearing of annoying broad-brimmed felt hat à la Kim Carnes
- Flamboyant sneezing, with relish; looking pointedly about for acknowledgment of achievement in form of highly unlikely wishes for her health or blessing
- Excessive large-mouth-bass style yawning.
- Gratuitous/dangerous wearing of Spandex™
- Rook-like rummaging through depths of voluminous bag loaded with food and personal hygiene supplies (see Categories I, II, III)
- Uncalled-for, inexplicable hilarity during grave social moments
- Having surname 'Plucker'
- Gratuitous/pretentious use of unnecessary umlaut on surname-initial vowel
- Singing Monty Python's "Philosophers' Song" to no one in particular
- Constant wearing of annoying chiffon scarves, fluttering about, frenetically twisting, toying, flipping, flopping, never ceasing to tease and tweak!
- Responding to lecture about second-language acquisition with long-winded, pointless, random whining about personal humiliations "overseas"
- Whining, wheedling tone whenever mouth moves
- Refusing to cease strident prating even when professor interrupts her saying, "yes, yes, we understand you, we UNDERSTAND!"
- Deep cramming of gaping maw with struedel, open-mouthed cud-chewing (see Category III)
- Slapstick bumbling into classroom bottleneck propelled by inertia of overladen filebox (sharp-cornered) bearing legend: "LESSON PLANS"
- Exceeding classroom luggage allowance
- Habitually departing class three minutes early with great rustlings and gathering of personal goods strewn far and wide, leaving food wrappers, fruit rinds, puddles of beverage, exfoliated dermal material in wake...
Category VI--Projection of Self Outside Reasonable Personal Space:
Unfortunately, the annexes have been lost to the mists of time.
