Everybody sniffles. It seems like, just with cracking one’s knuckles, once one person starts, the whole room starts in a chorus of nasal fluid reuptake. I am okay with sniffling, being a chronic sniffler myself, as I am allergic to roughly everything that has either cell walls or fur (and also cockroaches. Cockroaches!). This morning I forgot to take my daily hit of Flo-nase, so sensing that I would be sniffly, I went to the bathroom and gathered some toilet paper for use during my two hour Shakespeare exam.
A girl sitting next to me did not take the same precaution. Yes, there were a lot of snifflers in the class, but she had the wet sniffles, the kind that are really noisy and make other people around kind of nauseous. The slurpy kind of sniffle. Yeah, ew, gross. So she kept sniffling during the entire exam, which started at 7:30 in the morning, and continued well until about 9:30 when I finished. I was tired and grumpy at having to take a final in the morning, and thus unable to concentrate very well already; how am I expected to write a lengthy description of the wonderfully touching scene in Hamlet, when Ophelia falls from a tree and drowns really slowly while temporarily being held aloft by her billowing bloomers and singing showtunes, while a nose is slurping at sonic boom level just two feet away from me?
I kept thinking at her, “arrgh why don’t you just get up and go to the bathroom and blow your nose?” Then I felt bad and thought maybe she was stressed out about the exam and didn’t want to take precious essay-writing time to get up and blow her nose, and then thought about going to the bathroom myself and getting some toilet paper for her. Then I thought it might be weird, and she might be embarrassed that someone had publically acknowledged the fact of her nose-slurping, and she might cry and then we’d have MORE nose-slurping. So I didn’t say anything, and put up with the nose-slurping, though my hastily eaten breakfast of last night’s leftovers threatened to leap out of my throat and onto my exam and ruin my brilliant analysis of Ophelia’s gravity-defying bloomers.
I share this mature reflection with you, the Internet, just in case any of you are chronic snifflers: yes, people can hear you, and yes, it’s totally gross. Blow your nose!
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I teach high school, and have to teach respiratory courtesy as part of my job. The young’uns often have no difficulty sneezing and coughing without covering their vile little mouths. GACK.
And then, during allergy season (which runs, in NC, from February until October) my classroom begins to sound like a TB ward. I have kids who will cough repeatedly because they won’t blow their noses. There are the sniffers, the snufflers, the throat -clearers (and I was raised by a wonderful woman who, when drunk, cleared her throat repeatedly, so that it is now a sound that raises my shoulderblades to my earlobes), the throat-clickers, and the really vile throat scratching bullfrog ENT clearers.
My least favorite are the kids who clear their sinuses by loudly sucking the crud down into their toes. I sometimes tell students that their sinuses are their business and I’d like them to keep it that way.
FYI: Richard Brautigan has a poem about Ophelia drowning and one about Hamlet on a motorcycle. I think they may both be in _The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster_.
Great share thank you. I will be coming back soon for sure.
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