You have enough things to worry about during your first few lectures; you need to size-up the professor, skim the syllabus to see which books to avoid buying, and ogle the TAs. One thing that shouldn’t give you grief is finding a good seat. If you want to start the semester on the right foot, here are a few folks you should steer clear of.

- Tweedledee & Tweedledum: They signed up for the class together, the live together, they went out to the bars over the weekend together, and they probably hooked up with the same skeezy dude. Now they want to recount the entire experience for everyone in class in the loudest whisper ever recorded…from right behind you.

If you can’t switch seats: Give them the old GASP treatment. It’s a 4-step process, Glare, Ahem, Say Something, and the last ditch effort — punch them in the face.

-Kitchen Sink Guy: He brings a traveling coffee mug, a laptop, two coats, all of the textbooks for the class, and a sack lunch. Worst of all, he tries to squueze it all onto his little desk, or worse, yours.

If you can’t switch seats: Grin and bear it but draw the line at your desk, or at least make him share some of the sack lunch in trade.

-Ms. Magoo: She can’t see the board, she can’t hear the professor and she can’t stop asking you to repeat and or clarify everything that’s going on. Essentially you’re playing Annie Sullivan to a second-rate Helen Keller; an annoying girl who listens to her iPod on high and thinks her glasses give her a case of fat face. Read More »

Ah, 90210. I remember sitting on my couch in middle school, my legging-clad legs propped up on the coffee table and my boys size extra small plaid shirt tied to one side around my waist, watching every episode religiously. I mean, these kids were so cool and had such dramatic lives and how awesome was it that they got to go to school by the beach?! I loved everyone, except Donna — who was whiny and had horrible fashion sense — and often dreamed that my high school experience would be full of ex-boyfriends, accidental drug overdoses, trips to Paris, and constant sexual tension.

Sadly, reality isn’t half as fun as fiction. But happily, 90210 is coming BACK to prime time TV later on this year! The promos and whispers have finally begun to surface, and one interesting (but I mean, how are the two related?) tie-in with the 90210 resurgence is OPI nail polish. Apparently, OPI is bringing out a “90210 inspired collection” of polish colors with names inspired by either the new cast or the old one — we’re not sure which.

It’ll be interesting to see how a company ties in nail polish to a series, but I’m sure today’s consumer culture will not disappoint. If, however, they try to make a color that has to do with Donna — stay the eff away. It will look ugly, and quite possibly make people suddenly decide you’re too annoying to live.

[Editor’s Note: check out the Mom Jeans on every single cast member in the above pic. PRICELESS]

I mean, Instant Messenger has been around forever. Remember those days in high school, when you would tell your parents “you just don’t understand!” and then stomp up to your room and begin to IM 20 friends at once, bitching about how your parents just didn’t understand?

Or how about Freshman year in college when you somehow managed to get your crush’s AIM name, and then proceeded to sit over the keyboard for hours, sweating about if IMing him and “just saying hi” would somehow make you a creepy stalker?

If you’re in my generation, you grew up with AIM, just like you grew up with boy bands and obesity. Growing up with AIM means that we’re all too familiar with the “Away Message”, a strange societal habit of TMI. Even though Away Messages tend to vacillate, there are a few that pop up time and time again. Below, we’ve captured the top 5 familiar few. Read More »

I write the following with the understanding that no matter how annoying Facebook can be, it will never be more annoying than Myspace. (Editor’s Note: I am not so sure…) And I will not stop using Facebook because of these things.

10. People You May Know. Otherwise known as “People that you don’t know well enough to be friends with”, “People who have rejected your friend request”, or “People you hate and would never friend even if their lives somehow depended on you friending them.” Facebook has been around long enough that if you haven’t found your friend yet, and he or she hasn’t found you, then you probably aren’t very good friends to begin with.

9. The Mini-Feed. Because you need constant reminder of the things you’ve recently done or said. Or applications you’ve added. Or songs you’ve listened to. Or things you’ve edited. The mini feed takes up like ¼ of your page (unless you are a dirty application whore: see below) and when you try to delete things, it keeps adding other things from days and weeks ago.

8. The Education and Work box. I say this is annoying, but it’s honestly the first thing I look at on someone else’s page. I do it because I am a masochist and I like to hurt myself by seeing how well these people that I hardly know are doing in places that I would love to move to. Read More »

“See? This is us in my living room? Isn’t he cute? He’d be so much cuter if his face wasn’t squished by my head…”

This sentence isn’t offensive on it’s own, but couple it with an hour’s worth of similar utterances, and you’ve got one of the most annoying situations in life: The Girl Who Won’t Stop Talking About Her Boyfriend.

I was recently in the presence of such a girl, and found myself silently contemplating all the ways in which I could force her mouth shut permanently.

Trying to do work around one of these female specimens is impossible. You just can’t do it. No matter how interested you try to make yourself look in whatever work is in front of you, Girl Who Won’t Stop Talking About Her Boyfriend will continually engage you in superficial drivel.

The shallow conversation she tries to engage you in will always be one-sided, however. Even though she’ll ask you questions that will keep you away from you work, she’ll routinely answer those questions herself, not having even a second to wait while you search your head for something remotely friendly to say.

Girl Who Won’t Stop Talking About Her Boyfriend usually picks single people to torture. It’s a subconscious, animal-like sense that she has about her—she can smell singleness like a shark smells bloody fish heads. Read More »

I don’t know how many times I’ve griped about the girls down the hall who pump heinous music at the most inconvenient times of the day, but we’ve all had a go of annoying neighbor syndrome.

So much so in fact, that one particularly skeeved neighbor decided to start a website about it.

Rottenneighbor.com is a site that blacklists bad music-blasters, stilletto-wearing tap dancers, drunken hall-pukers, and don’t-give-a-damn landlords.

It’s actually kind of genius, if you think about it. When hunting for a new place, you get to see the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, but you’ll never get see through walls.

How do you really know what you’re getting yourself into?

RottenNeighbor makes sure you won’t drop big bucks on a dream apartment that turns quickly into a nightmare via your first run-in with the crazies next door.

You can also check out the super situation, which is ideal to someone like me, who spent a summer in the city getting completely ignored about my faulty stove and the flying cockroaches. Read More »

Welcome back to my weekly rant on all things bothersome. Things that we all experience, that we often think: “Whyyyy?? Is that really necessary?!”

This week: claiming rights to a band.

Example: The Fray, Maroon 5, Corinne Bailey Rae, The Backstreet Boys, Jesse Palter, Madonna, Ok-Go Tally Hall.

Some of these musicians you’ve heard of- some maybe not… some are or were huge stars, some are unsigned. Yet, if you listen to any of these artists’ songs in front of another person a conversation like this will ultimately ensue:

You: “How good is this song?”
ITRNO (Is That Really Necessary Offender): “Oh, this song? Yeah, this song is good, but I’m so sick of it now. I started listening to The Fray loooong before they were signed to a major label and way before their CD was available to the public. In fact, I knew every single word to this song before they even wrote it. So, ha! I am so cool. Way cooler than you because I listened to this band first.” Read More »