That Girl is appalled.

I hate rude people.

I don't just mean people who say or do outrageously rude things-- everyone hates that. I mean people with no sense of manners, etiquette, or decorum.

I'm also a college student. This poses a bit of a problem.

It's mostly evident in relation to food and the dining hall-- from the very second I enter, and people either let doors slam in my face or don't let people exit before they enter. This is Not Acceptable. It's common courtesy-- it takes no extra effort to hold the door for a second, nor is it going to kill you to step back while two people leave, thus creating space inside the vestibule for you to stand without being uncomfortably close to everyone else.

Then, you have to wait in the atrium for your friends to show up. If you call me and tell me that we're eating at six, I'm going to be waiting for you at six (actually I'll be there at 5:55, but I don't expect you to be there until six). Showing up at 6:15 and not apologizing for being a quarter of an hour late is Not Acceptable. This goes double for anything where we're on a schedule-- lunch before class, catching a bus to go downtown, club meetings, and so on. Is everyone my age incapable of showing up on time to anything? I don't mean five minutes-- that's okay. People stroll into classes twenty minutes or half an hour late, and don't so much as apologize to the professor. My friend Jodie is the absolute worst-- she's probably about ten minutes behind on life in general-- to the point that I call her when I'm leaving for class (ten minutes before it begins), and she's STILL at least ten minutes late. I actually lie about what time things are just so that she gets there on time.

Back on topic, once we get into the dining hall, we have to find a table and mark it as ours, usually with coats, scarves, backpacks, and other such "students in a cold climate" paraphernalia. This is relatively uneventful.

Actually getting food, however, is a totally different story. It seems to be impossible for people to use serving utensils, then place them back in the tray in such a way that the next person doesn't get sauce all over their hands or have to go digging through the pad thai to serve themselves. Even worse is when there isn't a utensil for something at the fruit salad bar (peaches, for example), and rather than getting another fork to use, they take the spoon from something like the yogurt and shovel peaches onto their plate, thus absolutely sullying them for those of us who DON'T. LIKE. YOGURT! If you borrow the spoon from the grapes, I can deal. Even the syrupy fruit cocktail is on the gross side of okay, but the yogurt? NO.

After I've had a fit over this, I have to go and eat with my friends, none of whom have any idea how to hold a knife and fork and use them to eat correctly. This isn't just rude, it's really gross. It's not hard to put your fork in your left hand, knife in your right, nor is it difficult to cut your meat into pieces before you eat it.

Except it seems that it is.

I'm really losing steam on this entry (the yogurt-y peaches took a lot out of me), but there's more. Far more.

I really just want to put up signs all over campus with Miss Manners quotes on them. They'd probably get ripped down by drunken philistines soon enough, but for the brief, brief moment? Glorious!