Pandemic Peeves

Anyone feeling a little more annoyed lately?

If you ask my 10-year-old daughter what her pet peeve is she’ll say it’s power walkers. Something about people doing more than strolling but less than running drives her nuts. And the arm-pumping just sends her over the edge.

We all have our peeves. In the time of coronavirus, we all have a lot more of them. My shoulders tense daily when I’m trying to focus and hear loud chewing or slurping or tapping or breathing:

ME: “Could you please keep it down? The breathing is, like, a lot.”

HUSBAND: “I shouldn’t breathe?”

ME: “Breathe. Just quieter.”

I had a robust list of annoyances before the pandemic. Many of them had to do with grammar. I’ll be the first to admit I’m no expert on language. I’m sure my writing is riddled with all sorts of errors from misplaced commas to split infinitives to words left off the end of a

But if you’ll cut me a little slack, we can have some fun:

DON’T FEAR ME

This goes back to grade school when every time we’d say, “Me and Michael are going to the movies” our parents would jump in with, “Michael and I”. It happened so many times that it was imprinted on our brains that we should never, ever, under any circumstances use the word “me” in a sentence that includes another person because then we’d sound dumb.