Why people are ridiculous and the certain angst that comes with realization that this one last paper is not going to somehow magically write itself

Misanthropy intensifies greatly at this time of right-before-finals (and beyond!).

I mean, really. The annoyingness of mankind in general just expands and expands and expands and expands and expands at this time of year.

A few recent instances of people being just being generally annoying in all of their annoying human annoyances that they insist on annoying me with:

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Guy in 7-11: What country are you from?

Me: What country?

Guy: Yes. What country?

Me: Uh, the U.S.?

Guy: Oh...you're very tall.

Really, guy? Really? It's just such new and shocking information for me! I had no idea. I will look at the world in a new way, now, thanks to this deep, profound new insight that I have been given!

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Bus-cell-phone-talker.

Conversation is a part of life. I get it. Really, I do. But hold it down. I don't want to hear about your roommate drama and that you are having problems with your man and that you always seem to be just so darn attracted to the ones who can't seem to love you back.

A solution: go find a nice, quiet corner and engage in some hearty introspection and realize that your current man-issues probably stem back to a bad relationship with your non-committal father. The key word in all of that is corner. Alone. Not on public transportation at 8:15 in the damn morning where I just want to try to wake up and get to school and don't wish to have my ear filled with the shrill recountings of your life's dramas.

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Slow coffee-stirrer girl.

She opened up her sugar packets one at a time and stood there and moved her stirring stick at about -10.56783 miles per hour and she also insisted on stirring about 50 times. And look, I'm all for making sure that there is complete sugar dissolution in one's caffeinated substances, but there is a line between thorough sucrose distribution and standing there endlessly swirling the liquid as though if it makes that nice clockwise swish in her cup just enough times maybe it will turn into some kind of magic elixir and give her superpowers.

It's just common courtesy, friends: stir with some celerity when people wait behind you. You know? At least pretend that you have some reason and motivation to be awake at an ungodly hour and stir your coffee with some verve! Or at least just move so that I don't have to stand there watching duck-threesomes on the nearby grass while your wrist stirs slower than I conjugate verbs.

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Also, this was my fortune cookie today:



That's it. It's a true sign from the deities! I'm changing majors tomorrow. Computer science here I come.

I never really liked poetry anyway.

- - -

Oh, it must be finals when I am perturbed by things as innocuous as fortune cookies.

Exceptional bitterness abounds during this time.

Also, sitting here ranting to the internet has effectively wasted too much time. It has also not changed any of these things because tomorrow there will probably still be yet more bus-phone-talkers and coffee-counter-hoggers and fortune cookies full of bullshit advice.

In other words, I'm supposed to be writing a paper right now. But I'm not quite yet at that moment of night-before-it's-due panic that I seem to require to produce anything worthwhile. I'll give it another half hour or so...

I wanted to write about how Virginia Woolf uses semi-colons like how Lindsay Lohan avoids underwear, but I don't think I can get out 8 pages on that in the next twelve hours. So maybe another time. But seriously, Virgy, why not just use a period every now and then, eh? Sentences don't always have to be a page long. Just a suggestion. Which makes me sound like an ass, suggesting things like that to a very well-known, very dead, authoress.

But honestly, whatever. It's modernism. You can blame everything on it. Meaning, you can effectively blame postmodernism on it, which is good because there needs to be something in history to account for current literary sludge.

I actually really love modernism. It's just a little problematic in that too much of it will mess with the head. You can't dwell in it for too long. Too much is the incessant threat of solipsism.

And death by semi-colon.

I really must stop this. I am clearly not talking about anything here. Unless you consider the a-symmetrical aesthetic tendencies of semi-colons to be somehow profound. In which case I would generally pity you. But when compared to the prospect of paper-writing, the terribly unbalanced nature of grammatical markings really does seem kind of fascinating. Especially when you consider that The Semi-Colon is meant to balance equally weighty thoughts, whereas The Colon, however visually pleasing it might be with its equal dots, is really the one that represents lopsided thinking.

Oh, what a terrible conundrum!

Silly language, always having to go and be such a shady hoodlum.

You know what they say...you can take the words off the street but you can't take the street out of the words!

So this, I think, is the point where work actually desperately does need to occur. Here's hoping that this night produces something that is at least quasi-comprehensible and that tomorrow produces people who are at least minimally more tolerable than they have been this week.

Onward!