Anya Kamenetz Is Now Only The Second Most Annoying Person In New York

She has been supplanted by this person, one Theodora Stikes, who hawked her twee new book with an excerpt in the New York Times Styles section this past Sunday.

Now, as Antid Oto has pointed out to me, the problem with deeming someone the most annoying person in New York is that it is so subjective. You can't really argue for it or expect others to agree. It's completely different from objective designations like "blue," or even normative judgements like "offensive." It's just something that really rankles the individual judge, i.e., me. Probably there's something about Anya, for example, that I relate to, a kind of distorted reflection of qualities in myself that I despise. It's a quintessentially personal call.

However, I maintain that the following young woman is so annoying that anyone, anywhere would have to agree that she is the most annoying person in New York.

I myself am repulsed by anyone who in her second sentence makes a sweeping generalization about "my generation" (especially if that generalization involves the phrase "smiles on Myspace"). But I accept that that might be a subjective quirk of mine as a reader. It's the ending of her piece (meant to be, I think, cute and fun) that merits an indictiment at the International Criminal Court (and it needs to be emphasized that these are the very last words of her very long piece -- meant to be a kind of hilarious coda that encapsulates her entire argument):

Hanging out in the real world one weekend, I went to a Flavorpill party. I was sucking down a cigarette with the head of Flavorpill when our cellphones rang at the same time. We flipped them open to see who was contacting us. He turned to me and said, "Dennis? He's really got to go someplace new."

I looked down at my screen and noticed that Dennis had sent out a Dodgeball message that he was at a bar on the Lower East Side — the fourth such message that week. I turned to the Flavorpill guy and said, "I didn't know you were in Dennis's network."

He nodded. We laughed. I exclaimed: "You aren't in my network. Why aren't you in my network?" I couldn't believe it. Here we were in person and both in Dennis's network, but not in each other's. That almost never happens.

Without looking at me, he responded, "Rock it."

"Rock what?"

"Rock my network."

Rock it, indeed.

As I read that, my face twisted into such disgust that I realized everyone in the cafe was looking at me.

Well, readers, I looked up Theodora on Myspace. She was practically begging us to.

This is what I found.



QED.