When I graduated from highschool, we were supposed to write "obits"--little responses to abbreviated questions to squish beside our grad pictures in the yearbook and apparently sum up our personalities and lives in high school and after. The queries were PP: pet peeve, AM: ambition, PD: probable destination and K4: known for. Here's mine (if I were braver I'd scan in the picture; I'm not):
AM: to have one, to be a licensed driver, to blowdry, to reincarnate my fetal pig, to name that smell, to get the fish joke
PD: the bus 4ever, sleeping thru the apocalypse, K.N.'s floor, crushing my rage into a tiny ball
K4: too much hair, "I don't get it...oh, yeah, I do."
Though I did get my license (I corrected the spelling error--"liscenced"!! jeez!!) that's pretty much the same as I would write now, especially the last bit. But you'll note--no PP! At the time, I thought there were no peeves I wished to be remembered by (if you think I'm obnoxiously rose-coloured now, you should've seen high school, especially at intramural badminton!)
So things have changed, as I do have a few peeves now. And as KateN's dissection of a pet peeve has inspired me, here's some headliners from recent peevishness:
--the tap of a fork-tine against tooth enamel
--the rainbow-coloured spinning wheel Macs replace the cursor with when something's not responding
--when people say "How are you?" as an alternative to "hello," without waiting for an answer.
--Cyclists on the sidewalk! oh, my most hated ever, cause it's dangerous and not just annoying!! Like, I get that that many drivers in Toronto are horrible to cyclists, but taking a bike onto the sidewalk is like someone who is pushed around at work coming home and taking it out on their family--sidewalk abuse!! I got clipped by a bike-rearview mirror recently and was so very unimpressed.
Ahem. So, yeah, I get a little more tetchy as I age, I suppose. But I really would love it still if someone would explain the fish joke to me.
I was waitin' for the hot flashes to come
RR
Rebecca Rosenblum...
is a writer and editor who likes a lot of stuff. This is a blog about that stuff, and also her writing. Rebecca is the writer-in-residence at Jean Vanier High School, and was a juror for The Journey Prize 21. Her work has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award and the National Magazine Award. Her first book of short stories, Once, was published by Biblioasis and was one of Quill & Quire's 15 Books That Mattered in 2008. Rebecca's stories are occasionally seen in Canadian periodicals and her second collection, *The Big Dream,* is forthcoming from Biblioasis.
2 comments:
I am the God-King of Pet Peeves, as I have so many of them that they are about to reach critical mass and achieve sentience, at which point they will rise up and smite my enemies. Or something.
I'm really just posting because I want to hear the fish joke.
August, I actually don't think I can reconstruct it! The fish joke was a nigh-on incoherent tale of a red fish and blue fish trying to get home for dinner. My friend J's friend told it to her at camp and laughed hysterically, though J didn't get it, so then J told our gang, and we meditated on possible punchlines throughout adolescence. To little point (but what is the point of anything one does in adolescence?)
R
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