General complaining

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
April 18, 2007

My colleagues, who have articles printed elsewhere on this very page, have a certain focus and determination in expounding upon their singular pet peeves that I admire, mostly due to my inability to pick one pinnacle, have all, end all, be all annoyance to wax philosophic about for two columns of text. Perhaps I’m a misanthrope (in fact, it is almost certain that I am, my partners on the Collegian, my friends, my family, my enemies and upper level Lasallian administrators assure me), but I simply can’t narrow down the long list of peevish things that get under my skin.

Take, for example, people who chew with their mouths open. For the love of St. Michael and anyone or anything else you might find sacred, God gave you lips so that specks of chewed-up food didn’t come hurtling out of them while you masticate. The dribble and showers open-mouth chewers start repulse me unto my very soul and cause me to doubt all things. And the noise! Not to sound like the Grinch overlooking Whoville, but the noise, noise, noise is what gets me. The ceaseless chomping, a sound akin to nails on a chalkboard, or the feeling of cotton in your mouth or rubbing an emery board over a jagged nail—it goes through me like a laser beam. Chomp, chomp, chomp—slurp! There are certain people I cannot eat a meal with because they chew with their mouths open, and my writers (such as Amanda Hamedany) have proposed writing entire articles against their roommates who stay up until the wee hours of the morning, chomping and slurping, preventing rest and relaxation.

Next on my list: junk e-mail. It suggests that I need a miracle weight loss drug, that I’m wanting in the manliness department, that an Estonian prince who has been dethroned will pay me big American bucks if I finance his upcoming attempt to reclaim his kingdom, that I can get any drug of any color in the rainbow for cheap through online pharmacies, that a bank I don’t use has misplaced my account number (and if I could send them my account number and PIN, that’d be super), that someone has hacked my non-existent PayPal account and so on and so forth. Essentially, junk e-mail is 4 a.m. TV ads made communicable and dumped like waste into my inbox. I have long considered writing a novel based around the subject lines of these electronic wonders: “MIRACAL DRG CIALIS SOFT GEL TABLITZ CHEAEP!” or the occasional vaguely worded subject intended to loop you in just enough to open the virus-laden communiqué, “John says he needs to talk to you, Devon.”

My name is not Devon, according to my Social Security card, the number of which many of these e-mails seem intent upon eliciting.

Lastly, I can’t stand MySpace. I don’t really need to waste space explaining why. Just go there and poke around for five minutes or so and you’ll get it. Unless you enjoy meandering chain bulletin posts, streams of friend invitations from made-up profiles of adult movie stars and obnoxious music being blared at you from everyone who thinks that Erasure is the most underrated band of the 1980s.

Actually, it is. Erasure deserves a little respect, as it were—consider this my retraction of that last critique.

Right or wrong, justified or just plain bitter, these are some of my annoyances. These pet peeves need to be put down—and at first opportunity.

costellom4@lasalle.edu