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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!"
-
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.
This person was real?! Unbelievable.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAA!
Hee!
I was also in school with this person. How can this be?
This person was not only real, it looks like she was also ubiquitous.
Mr. Sgazzetti,
If you could post this in one day (I would have drawn it out over 6 days at least for NaBloWriMo), I’m assuming you have a cornucopia of delightful items in the beet cellar. Aside from you being hilarious, you are cruel beyond words.
Category VI was my favorite. Coffee spray all over the keyboard. Well, it was geting a bit sticky. I’m off to DP for a replacement.
Just think, she’s probably annoying her cubiclemates as we speak.
Apricot scrub and floss IN THE CLASSROOM? Oh.My.God.
Truly. You have a knack. Well grieved.
And a researched follow-up on where Plücker is now would most definitely be the filling in the Twinkie™.
Priceless…just…priceless!
The Category VI was also my personal favorite. And the sneezing…was it with pickle relish, polish style? Or was it a particular zestiness with which the sneezing took place?
It was zesty sneezing, for sure. And of course I couldn’t break this up over a series of days; that would be like cutting up a sheet of inverted Jennies or selling Michael Jackson the Elephant Man’s bones one at a time.
Ah, thank you, thank you. It has gotten better in this form, slightly different than the original. For example the addition of (sharp-cornered) which I think was not in the original adds some much needed context.
I can assure you this woman was real. I was in these classes with her and JDS. I can assure you as well that this list is not complete–the original was several pages (all caps, on graph paper)–and it is all true. What would we have done in those classes without her? Would we have actually listened to Istvan? Heaven forfend.
I do think you’re making up the stuff about poetry, though. Unless you took some lit classes I was unaware of.
Oh god, I so dearly love this list. I must forward to a few people. Or link to it on my website.
Let me be absolutely clear about one thing: this is not fiction. That said, the original Uniball-on-graph-paper version is long gone, like the play we wrote on beer coasters and cocktail napkins, jdog. This list survives only because it was inserted whole-cloth into an abortive novel attempt, and so a few (stress on few) tiny details were changed to fit that context. Chief among these details are the mentions of literature classes. The Hungarian linguistics professor’s name was changed, and the Offender’s name was also changed (but is here changed back). Her first name is here omitted, since I don’t think releasing her entire identity to the internet is adequate punishment for brazen flossing of teeth during lecture on what was in fact not Donne but actually Theory of Bilingualism.
Jdog is right: I did not take any poetry courses in graduate school, but I stand by the spirit and content of this list.
Our play, “The Half-Assed Egoist”, also survives through this transcription-of-fact-into-fiction-and-back-again manner. Look for it in this space soon.
Let no one–and I mean NO ONE–ever, EVER again interrupt a lecture on Donne with Twinkie wrapper crinkling.
I’ve often suspected you had at least one novel in you.
[...] 2. banjeroo is consistently funny, but I liked this entry because it a) pointed me towards isoglossia’s List of Grievances and b) reminded me to stop sniffing and “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BLOW [MY] N [...]