A few things were bugging me during the Cannes Film Festival but I didn’t want to vent for fear of muddying the waters (as well as not wanting to sound overly pissy). But now that I’m out of it and wandering around Spain I’m figuring what the hell. I was irritated on an almost daily basis by the following:

(a) People doing the “mall meander” along the Croisette. That’s a Fran Leibowitz term that refers to New York tourists walking much too slowly and forcing purposeful striders like myself to walk around them. These people walk along like they’re they’re half-asleep in their bathrobes at 3 am, shuffling into the kitchen to get a glass of milk.

(b) People who don’t sit as much as collapse-flop into seats directly in front of you, like four-year-olds falling backwards onto a bed of pillows, and in so doing banging your kneecaps. A good portion of these same people also tend to rock in their seat like 185-pound hyper poodles. (“This is fun…like a rocking chair!”) They seem unable to just sit in their seat like a statue or a bean bag or someone like myself might. Then again Wednesday night at the Michael Haneke/ White Ribbon screening my knee pushed slightly against the seat of a guy in front of me, and he gave me a dirty look. Fuck him too.

(c) Older men who wear shorts and sandals. I don’t want to even glance at their white legs and funny-looking digits. Show some self-respect and wear long pants and loafers, for Chrissake.

(d) Older short guys who huff and puff as they take take three or four minutes to place their small suitcases in the overhead rack on a train. (Okay, this isn’t a Cannes peeve — it’s a train-from-Narbonne-to-Barcelona one.)