Dear Front and Center,

In the last couple of months I feel like I've gotten to know you pretty well. At first I was impressed by your multiple Masters degrees, and now you're about to finish up your PhD, I'm assuming. You are, or at least have been, the eternal student. But the small measure of admiration I felt for you has quickly dissipated in the last month. I just can't take it anymore.

Comments intended to be jokes once in a while are not grating, even when they're not funny in the first place. I can appreciate attempts at lightening the mood, however poor those attempts might actually be. What I can't stand, however, is your incessant stream of poorly crafted cracks. Your sad taste in humor is further magnified by the other students in our cohort who are much funnier with better timing. Timing is essential, and implies an awareness of circumstances that you seem to lack altogether.

Funny is how they quietly usurped the sign-up sheet for breakfast next week and graded each person on their choices, and came up with a complete rubric for why they made their grade decisions, as well as comments for future improvement. They punctuated the joke by doing it all during lecture, and proudly presented it to our professor at the close of class. Not funny is how you continue to harp on a topic and make jokes about something that, A) nobody finds funny or even interesting, and B) with the lack of reaction somehow propels you with more momentum to save the joke. Please, for your sake and ours, just stop.

Everything about your presence screams for attention. You strategically place yourself front and center in every class, but you don't stop there. To make sure that everyone on the periphery hears your "clever" comments, you have this big booming voice and supply your own laugh track as a que to the rest of the studio audience. If that wasn't enough, you're also a massive physical specimen who towers over people even from your seated position. I seek for refuge, but you have cut off my every opportunity for escape from you. And you round it all out with your $2 plastic flip flops, and dirty caps with the velcro strap on the back. I'm from California and probably wear sandals way more often than the USRDA, but you seek to top even me by insisting on wearing them to 8 AM classes in the winter even when it's raining.

Congratulations on finishing up your last couple of weeks of classes. No matter how many degrees you might have accumulated along the way, it's just not a good idea to enter the workforce when you're close to 40 and with a family. It's just not. I think to shout hallelujah any time I think about the sweet release I'll get from you after next week.

Best of luck. May the wind always be at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, may the rains fall soft upon your fields, and may you just get the hell out of here.

With the kindest intentions,

Me