Meet My Pet, Peeve

As soon as I graduated college, I went right back for more school so I could earn an endorsement for teaching Chemistry.  Yesterday morning I was sitting in my Organic Chemistry class and I heard the worst sound in the world: crunching.

Now, usually I'm okay with crunching, whether it's dried leaves, bike tires on gravel, or an apple in my own mouth.  This crunching was different though; it was the crunch of someone eating granola in the middle of a lecture.  Maybe it's because I was secretly jealous that this student had the foresight to bring a snack to the two-hour lecture, or maybe it was because I could barely hear the professor over the impressive jaw smashes of the granola-masticating human, but it drove me crazy.

It was there in the lecture hall, slinging hateful insults at the unknowing student through thoughts that I realized that I have a problem with eating noises.  A couple of nights ago, in fact, I had been silently screaming at The Man for eating a burrito next to me.  Because I'm a jerk face.

Of course, my own eating noises are usually fine, but other people eating is just terrible for me.  It's one of my pet peeves.

I have many other pet peeves: I absolutely hate it when people write "LOL" or use "u" instead of adding two stinking letters and looking worlds more educated.  It frustrates me to no end when people neglect to use their turn signals while driving.  Girls that do the Disney version of a sneeze (you know what I'm talking about; that high-pitched squeaky noise that sounds exactly like "ah-choo!") make me want to slap them and tell them to sneeze like a human.  Basically I can be a very hateful person when it comes to my pet peeves, is what I'm saying.

So as I was mulling over my jerkish ways I started thinking about the phrase "pet peeve."  Why is it a pet?  Why isn't it just a "peeve?"

I decided that it's because we treat our peeves like pets*.  We don't ignore them and get on with our lives, because then our pets would die.  We think about them often, sometimes we feed them by picking out annoying people and focusing on how much we hate them, and we nurture our little peeves.  Where would we be without our peeves?  We wouldn't be as "unique."  There's no way in the world someone else is annoyed by the same things we are; our peeves make us special and different.  Just like a cat.  Ok, maybe the metaphor doesn't work perfectly.

So here's my challenge for the day: let one of your pet peeves die.  Maybe you're going to finally wear socks with sandals and realize how heavenly it is, maybe you're going to "LOL back and forth on the text line" (yeah...Black Eyed Peas), or maybe you're going to sit back and ignore it when your significant other blatantly picks their nose in front of you.  Whatever it is, I salute you for your courage and strength.  I think I'll tackle my food-noise problem first :)

*Other names for a pet besides Peeve: Damned Spot, Ruprecht, Wade Wilson (if you got all of those references, we can be friends)