Complain

You’ve heard that list “100 Things to Do Before You Graduate” and you’ve, of course, snickered like a 5-year-old when you saw “have sex in the stacks” on it. But I don’t live in fantasy world, so I think the list should really be “100 Things that Will Happen to You Before you Graduate.” And Number 32 on that list, just before “you will black out” and just after “you will pass out in a Donlon elevator,” is “you will get an open container violation”: a feat I had failed to achieve until this Orientation, when I got a ticket for pouring the water cup of a Beirut game out on the sidewalk. So, thank you very much Lt. Tyler for bringing me one step closer to completing the list. Now, if I could just find a girl willing to...

— WJM

Carp

I’m so mad that the “P” section of Uris library is on a different floor than the “PA” — “PZ” sections. How does that make sense to anyone? Also, how is it that people STILL don’t get that Temple of Zeus doesn’t take Big Red Bucks? If you’re in front of me in that line, and you don’t have exact change ready, you might get a cucumber slice down your collar. I swear I could vomit with rage.

— NHB

Grouse

What’s really making me mad as hell so far this semester is the irksome game of Musical Chairs I’ve been forced to play in nearly every one of my poorly air-conditioned classes. Because of the student tendency to “shop” around in the first few weeks of school, there are too many jean skirts and seersuckers shorts for the number of folding chairs in each lecture hall. So while we sweat it out on the sidelines, I implore ye freshmen: drop your classes ASAP, and enroll in Psych 101. And if not, at least start saddling up two-to-a-seat, or showing up late like the rest of us.

— RBF

Nag

I walk into a Mexican restaurant. I sit down. The waiter comes over; we make small talk; he presents me with the menu. I open it. I look at it. I mull over it. The waiter has gone for chips. A-ha. Bingo. The Sirloin Mexicana. Yo estoy ready to order. The waiter comes back. What’ll it be? he asks. The Sirloin Mehicana, I respond. What? he asks, perplexed. The Sirloin Mehicana, I say again. The waiter’s face begins to crinkle; his eyebrows start to creep together. Oh! he shouts — the Sirloin Meksicana! Yes, I breathe, resignedly. The Sirloin Meksicana. So much for life’s small pleasures.

— MPC

Moan

Goodness gracious, can somebody please pave Stewart Avenue!? My Volkswagen Beetle made a cameo in Ithaca my sophomore year … until Stewart Ave ripped the bottom of it off! (Thankfully, after schmoozing with a mechanic in Lansing about NASCAR, he stapled the bottom back on for just $20.) It’s my senior year and I’m back with All Wheel Drive (joining the ranks of Subaru-driving Cornellians,) but I still wince every time I drive down the pothole-filled, broken-brick street — and I live on Stewart! Ithaca, Cornell, anyone: pave Stewart Avenue! — SHO

Whine

Yo I don’t even know where to start. Clearly, there’s the fact that the CRP department feels like they don’t need to update the Fall 2006 course roster to the Fall 2007 Course Roster until a week after classes have started, ensuring that I have to renegotiate half my schedule to try and finish my concentration. Even worse is that after three years I feel like an idiot for not being able to predict that they’d do that. The real reason that my life’s not progressing as it should at the moment, however, is that my ornithologist housemate insists upon stashing his dead birds in our freezer. If you need to skin a bird and ship it to some museum, or use it for some biologist ceremonial shit or whatever, go for it … but don’t think it’ll accrue interest in the freezer. This is seriously cramping my food access since I don’t really feel like cooking up tofu that’s been basking in the same air that circulates around a morgue of Ziplock bags. Seriously Glenn, get your effing warblers off my Häagen-Dazs. — THK

Grouse

I hate it when drunken columnists who complain about alleged “musical chair” games show up at my apartment on random Wednesday nights, terrorize my roommates, spill water all over my room and refuse to leave.

— OZO

Nag

No class on Friday this semester. I’m probably asleep as you read this. I’m probably dreaming of gourmet stews and endless supplies of veggie burgers. Wait ... this is no kvetch, this is ecstasy! How ironic!

— JAS

Moan

Sometimes wearing glasses is the biggest to-do! Every time I go to a party and the temperature outside is anything under 60 degrees, which, of course, is every-freaking-day, the split-second I walk in the door my glasses fog up like a boiling teapot — except this time everyone’s watching. My glasses get so fogged up, you could write HELP! straight on the lenses. I mean, I actually can’t see out. Completely fogged glasses is a complete embarrassment. Seriously. Biggest tragedy of everyday party life.

— SOG

Complain

Walking past the waterfall is the worst thing, literally, ever. Every time I have to walk across that footbridge and the water is gushing down at about one million gallons per second, the spray completely drenches me and I feel like I’m in line at Disneyland for Splash-Effing-Mountain! And also, this is not to mention the fact that whenever I’m on my cell phone approaching the bridge, the noise from that damn waterfall completely overtakes me, and my life.

— TK