Annie, you so encapsulated? articulated? why lawyer types can be so annoying! $%$##@ present company excluded, of course. I just ran into this kid I went to college with named Carlos. He was a small, stocky, broad-faced, greasy-haired latino who grew up in the P-pines, whose most memorable quote was "I love little brown girls." He lived on my hall sophomore year, illegally--he crashed on the floor of a closet-sized single for 3 months with some other dude, OR he was letting some friend crash on HIS floor, I can't quite remember. The guy reeks of sketchy pretension, and I'm surprised I haven't run into him sooner, as he goes to the law school here. We're in the coffee bar across the street from the library, and he's got deodorant hanging out of the mesh pocket of his backpack, along with other toiletry items. The second I see him, I regret stopping to say hello to him (in fact, I thought I saw him last week, but I kept walking).
"Oh my God, Patty!" he said. "Here, come sit with me for like, 2 minutes. I'm running off to class, but let's catch up."
So he regales me with stories about the thriving nightlife here, and arts and culture, and how I should totally go to see this Samuel Beckett play in Harvard Sq, and or check out "le balet d' Australia" (said, of course, in the original French), and how it "pushed the envelope of what constitutes as classical ballet, blah blah snore snore snore.
As luck would have it, he lives about 4 blocks away from me.
Then he says, "Let's do the number exchange. But I should warn you, my girlfriend just moved back to Boston, so I won't have much time to do anything. But if you need some help getting acclimated, and like, you find yourself alone on like, a Friday night--" (the implication here being if I had no life, he would swoop in and...rescue me with his social networking prowess?) "--totally give me a call."
I should have asked him how he would manage to squeeze me in, with all the fox hunting trial cases to pore through. Sheesh. Instead I told him I'd been here for 5 months already, and I was pretty much acclimated. Then I countered with one of the most irritating passive-aggressive phrases ever to emerge from the work world:
"I'll let you go."
"Okay, yeah, cool, let's totally hang out."
ARGH#$@!
Okay, back to work...
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4 comments:
not that i want to blow up spots (yours or mine!), but how you described the things he discussed (ballet, theatre, etc etc) sounds kind of small-liberal-arts-elitism to me (rather than one in law school). believe me, i have a terribly love of all things liberal/arts/schooly and culturalesque, but i think this guy's issues mainline above and beyond-- sleeping in a closet? deodorant in his pocket? you successfully sketched me out with just those descriptions!!
I guess in all honesty, it's cool that's he's such a Renaissance man (he got brownie points for knowing Ha Jin's "War Trash"). I was just irritated by the fact that he thought I needed cultural enlightenment, AND he presumed that I might be interested? that he had to preface stuff about his girlfriend, etc etc.
Oh, it was also that he's so fake about stuff. I don't do well with disingenuous people.
yeah, my vote is for elitism rather than law-ism. Overeducated, yupsters.
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