Just heard the stupidest exchange between two graduate students (a term beginning to mean, for me, lately, "whiny self-indulgent mortgager of the real world"):

Whiny Student #1: My stupid husband just yelled at me for not checking the oil in the car when I filled up yesterday. Says it's bad for the engine and blah blah blah.
Whiny Student #2: God, how insenstive.
Whiny Student #1: I know! I tried to tell him: "Hey, why don't you try to get your MA and raise kids at the same time!"
Whiny Student #2: If I were you, I'd be late with the McNuggets tonight. Make him wait.

Bear in mind that Whiny Student #1 had been surfing the Internet all day (maybe doing literature-related surfing, true, but such a distinction isn't going to mean much here). Bear in mind also that a) it's her husband's car, not hers, and b) her kids were in day care until 3 p.m. at which point she leaves work early to go get them and dumps them in the living room to play Nintendo while she does her homework.

I don't want to keep hearing this stuff. I'm just a fly on the wall, subjected to diatribe after diatribe of idiocy. Deep inside I'm afraid I'll turn into one of these creatures, but every so often I'm reassured. Why? Because a) whenver I shirk responsibilities, I own up to it, and b) I rarely read the required books in the first place.