What is your...?

What is your favorite color? What is your favorite number? Who is your favorite band? Coke or Pepsi? They can go on and on, and it’s questions like these that are one of my biggest pet-peeves. They are one-answer inquisitions, meant to capture the essence of a person by way of a very general and, in my opinion, superficial statement. What if I said that my favorite color was blue? What would you think of me? I have often been asked that question, and I have at one point or another claimed every single color in the rainbow to be my favorite. When it was a beautiful sunny day, I would have chosen yellow; after spending a day hiking in the forest, I would have answered green; in a bad mood, purple, and when I've been happy, then pink, and so on. Okay, so maybe this means that I’m schizophrenic. The point is, we humans are way too complex to be categorized by these mundane little questions.

On the oh-so-popular myspace.com website, I see new bulletins every day from my "friends" letting me know "more about themselves" through surveys with these type of questions asking about the most random things, like “What song are you listening to right now?” and “Do you secretly pick your boogers?” I recently discovered that a long-time friend of mine’s favorite food is peanut-butter ice-cream and Doritos (together, no less), and let me tell you I was floored—it was like I didn't even recognize her anymore! I was also shocked to discover that her hair-brush is black, she doesn't like big dogs, and her favorite name is Angie. What the heck? Why do I care about this stuff? And what makes her think that we know or like her any better now? From this I gather...that she will be fat one day, she probably likes cats and she might get one someday and name it Angie, and that she brushes her hair sometimes. Wow.

I wish people would stop thinking that filling out those personal pages with arbitrary little tid-bits really allows your acquaintances to know you any better. Do the facts that you watch Friends religiously and you dig Nirvana let others to see into the depths of your soul? And if I happen to hate Friends, does that mean that we can’t be friends? If you want to get to know me, send me a message, or, you know, say something simple to me in the hallway like, “Hello!” rather than sneakily looking for useless information about me, wondering what my favorite cereal might be, and if my cereal and your scrambled eggs would clash. (My “about me” section is blank, by the way, so if you were even inclined, don’t waste your time.)

As for the particular question that the point of this blog is supposed to be about, I must say that I don't have one major pet-peeve; there are many other things that annoy me much more than what I’ve just rambled about. For example, I can't stand it that when I walk out of the library door for fresh air, I am usually met with a cloud of smoke created by the ten or so fiends huddling right next to the ashtray, which was ever-so-smartly placed right in front of the entrance. I don't like to see people litter, as it takes away my faith that all is good in the world and shows me instead that people can be narcissistic and ignorant little pricks. You know what I really can't stand? Crocs. When I see someone walking around campus in those god-awful shoes, I have to force myself to look away at something pretty, like a cloud or a tree, and I tell myself "Just breathe, Nicolette, just breathe--they will soon pass and everything will be all right once more." Who invented those things anyway? Sigh…alas, there is nothing I can do about Crocs, it is a free country.

So: 1. Don’t ask me what my favorite color is, or I will probably scream. 2. Crocs are not fashionable, nor are they cool, or sweet, or any adjective that is positive. 3. Remember folks, don’t litter, it’s bad for the environment.