While sitting in my apartment and writing a paper, contemplating the best ways to spend my day, I got a phone call from my little sister. Like me, she gets easily frustrated with things that she can't immediately benefit from. Like me, she's a bit irrational. And, like me, she always needs a sounding board for her anger. I suppose what goes around comes around after all.
"What's wrong, kiddo?"
"Jack, this is bullshit! I have to take two semesters of a foreign language to graduate!" I could hear the sounds of traffic and voices in the background, breaking through the static and distortion of the cell phone. "I'm in America, they should learn English to come here!" I held the phone away from my ear while she went on her tirade. Matt turned and looked smug that I was the one suffering through petty, impotent rage for once. Bastard, I ought to cut his brakes.
"Are you even listening to me?" she half-shrieked into the receiver. "Gawd, it's no wonder you can't get a girlfriend, you can't listen worth a damn. You're so self-centered, you know that? I've got a problem and you're ignoring me!"
I sighed and put the receiver back to my ear. "Ignoring the irony of that statement, you've known about those requirements for two years. You're a junior, when did you miss that part?"
"I knew about it! I just didn't think it'd be so hard! Other languages are retarded, everyone should just speak English."
"Aren't you taking Spanish or something?"
"The hell? No, I'm not taking Spanish. Fuck Spanish," she said. She spit, hopefully onto the sidewalk. "I'm taking French. It doesn't make any sense, and besides, when am I ever gonna need to know that? I'm not going to Paris anytime soon."
"You never know, it might come in handy..."
---
Marie
I met Marie in high school. She was, and still is, an extremely attractive woman. She had an amazing rack and the kind of body that not only flatters it, but suits it entirely. Brunette and with pouty, full lips, Marie was one of the most attractive women I'd ever seen when I met her my senior year of high school. She was an exchange student from Belgium who had elected to do another year of high school in America rather than go to college in Europe. Having realized that I was never going to manage to have sex with anyone that actually knew me, I immediately decided that Marie was my best prospect. She was foreign, she was attractive, and I had been taking French since freshman year. The problem with this set up was that Marie had met a good friend of mine, Lisa, who was not on the same page as me with this endeavor.
"Jack, I can't let you hit on Marie," she announced one morning before class in the cafeteria. I roused myself from half a hangover and focused on her. "Explain."
Lisa came up next to me. "Look, you know we're, like, best friends in the world. But you can't hit on Marie." She looked at me with wide doe eyes and smiled. God bless her little heart, she was a charmer. It would take more than beauty and the fake promise of sex I could never have to derail me.
"Why can't I? I'm not some random scum bag off the street," I said. The fluorescent lights above me were burning out my retinas and the headache was beginning to pound. I could have hosted a tribal fertility ritual in my head.
Lisa sighed and put her hands on her lap. "Let me level with you. You're a nice guy and all, but she's not American. Most of your charm gets lost in translation." She began to look around for someone to back her up, but our friends at the table had chosen their sides. As the desperately lonely intravert, my needs and wants eclipsed hers, and the crowd swung against her. Her boyfriend, Marco, a small Portuguese guy, unceremoniously pushed her aside.
"Don't listen to her. Go for it. Marie's hot. You can do something with this." He glanced over his shoulder at Lisa. He leaned in to whisper to me, "You realize I'm not getting laid because I want you to get laid. Do it." The other guys around the table nodded sagely at Marco's brave sacrifice. The game was on.
Marie walked in a few moments later and sat down. She spoke English exactly as your fantasies would want her to -- unsure of herself, making cute mistakes, the accent playing with pronunciation and emphasis as an abstract sculptor would shape the human form; familiar, recognizable, but hauntingly different. I wasted no time in sidling over to her conversation with Lisa. I cleared my throat. "Hey Marie."
"Allo Jacques! Ow are you?" she chirped. The crowd watched and waited, eager to see how I engaged. There was no way an ordinary man could accomplish this. However, like all extraordinary men, I had an ace up my sleeve.
"Tres bien, je pense. Ca va?" Marco and the rest of the guys were interested. This was an interesting gambit, one that was only rarely used in the New Jersey suburbs. Legends of its success rang through our collective memories, tales told by older cousins and uncles about the women they slept with when stationed in Germany or studying abroad in Spain. Marie, however, looked pleasantly surprised that an American was speaking her native language. I assumed I was in the clear.
Then she began to speak.
I still smiled pleasantly and nodded, but I was lost. Good God what had I done? The look in my eyes tipped off the Guy Council and they took on the countenances of pallbearers. I had just condemned myself to death. Lost in my own defeat, I hadn't noticed she had stopped talking. She looked expectant. Had she asked me a question? Shit!
"Quoi? Qu'est-ce que tu a dit?"
She rambled again. I could only catch a handful of words. I was positive I heard "cute" and "talk" and "phone number." Holy shit, maybe it was working. With renewed confidence, I boldly said, "Oui!"
Marie rolled her eyes at me and turned around. Rebuked, I returned to where I had been sitting. It was only after several minutes that I realized what she had said:
"You only tried speaking French because you think I'm cute and wanted to talk to me and get my phone number, didn't you?"
Marco turned and glared at me. "Look what you've done. Now no one gets laid."
12 October 2008
01 October 2008
Welcome to the College Experience
"Goddamnit, Matt!" I pounded my desk for emphasis and turned to look at him. "Just...goddamnit!"
My roommate, a man of unshakeable patience considering how it is to live with me, hesitated before turning around. My temper is a flash in the pan - it flares and dies usually in under a minute over what really amounts to minutiae, the minor discomforts that everyone has to go through everyday. I could see the wheels turning in his head as he stared at his computer, a real life version of Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off at this point. If I don't turn around now, he'll just keep yelling, he won't stop until I pay attention to it, and when I do I have to sit through him yelling about something. Eventually he relented and sighed. "What is it now?"
I gestured the wildly at the screen. "This fuckin' douchebag has some damn fan club website for him! What compels a person to allow that kind of idiocy to happen? Good God." In my defense, the man on my screen was a douchebag: your standard New Jersey guido motherfucker, complete with a pound of gel to hold up his blowout haircut, overly tanned for October, throwing up faux gang signs, and making that half smirk half kissy face that every girl makes between the ages of 16 and 24 in pictures. You know the face. The lips pout outwards and are drawn to the side in a cruel mockery of a smile. The eyes roll up and eyebrows raise, attempting to give a "who cares" aura to the whole thing. The face is turned away from the camera and the contorted mouth is dead center so what should have been a profile shot becomes a Picasso rendering of the female form. That expression alone is enough to warrant hating someone - the fact that it was on a man was unforgiveable, a conscious decision to be one of the worst people in the world.
I go to a small state undergrad in New Jersey populated with all sorts of upper middle class human detriment from the suburbs surrounding Philadephia and New York that just weren't ambitious or wealthy enough to make it into Rutgers, St. Joe's, or NYU. It's a never-ending museum of annoyances, truly a display of the evils of the American Dream gone awry. Loads of people talk about the carnival of wasted potential that makes up the corporate world, or the shells of men that populate the military, but there's a ridiculous myth in the American culture that college is the best time of your life and that every minute is spent on sin and debauchery. Everyone is hot, everyone is drunk, and everyone is having a great time. A four year party for $40,000. Not only is this a lie, but it's a dangerous one, especially considering the general trend towards making college just an extension of high school. But I digress.
College is a collection of the worst kinds of people. In high school, you understood that what you were doing was just a means to an end. For most of the people there, college is the end. That acceptance letter is the culmination of their lives, their Paradise, and they want their seventy virgins lined up and waiting. For the first time these people, now dubbed adults, are out of the house and on their own, ready to abuse and waste their parents' money.
The concept of working towards something, anything, is beyond them. Freshman year is a haze of drunkenness and forgettable, easy sex. Sophomore year brings a smug sense of satisfaction - you've seen all there is, and you lord this over the incoming freshman who now look to you for guidance. To the typical 20 year old, this senseless adoration is the first time anyone has looked up to them, and college is the greatest thing in the world. In junior year, words like internship and grad school are uttered in hurried whispers, taboo, the unfunny punchlines to a cruel joke. The unfortunate recipients of such things are changed in every way. They bear the unmistakable mark of the Real World on them. Senior year is a revisit of the freshman experience as you realize the ride's over. A wake for your soul before you actually become a person.
The people that go through this, my friends and me included, are all in that mindset. It's unavoidable. Give anyone in their late-teens access to beer every night and joke classes and they'll fall into it. The problem is that many of these people are man-children - physically adults, but mentally stuck at 15. Most of them are still stuck in a high school state of mind, which is a side effect of the sheltered suburban lifestyle mixed with the absurd levels of political correctness that our country is full of. It's a frustrating world with frustrating people.
Matt appraised the picture on my monitor. He nodded and turned back to his computer. "Yeah, that guy's kind of a douchebag," he said. A moment later, "Wanna grab a beer?"
My roommate, a man of unshakeable patience considering how it is to live with me, hesitated before turning around. My temper is a flash in the pan - it flares and dies usually in under a minute over what really amounts to minutiae, the minor discomforts that everyone has to go through everyday. I could see the wheels turning in his head as he stared at his computer, a real life version of Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off at this point. If I don't turn around now, he'll just keep yelling, he won't stop until I pay attention to it, and when I do I have to sit through him yelling about something. Eventually he relented and sighed. "What is it now?"
I gestured the wildly at the screen. "This fuckin' douchebag has some damn fan club website for him! What compels a person to allow that kind of idiocy to happen? Good God." In my defense, the man on my screen was a douchebag: your standard New Jersey guido motherfucker, complete with a pound of gel to hold up his blowout haircut, overly tanned for October, throwing up faux gang signs, and making that half smirk half kissy face that every girl makes between the ages of 16 and 24 in pictures. You know the face. The lips pout outwards and are drawn to the side in a cruel mockery of a smile. The eyes roll up and eyebrows raise, attempting to give a "who cares" aura to the whole thing. The face is turned away from the camera and the contorted mouth is dead center so what should have been a profile shot becomes a Picasso rendering of the female form. That expression alone is enough to warrant hating someone - the fact that it was on a man was unforgiveable, a conscious decision to be one of the worst people in the world.
I go to a small state undergrad in New Jersey populated with all sorts of upper middle class human detriment from the suburbs surrounding Philadephia and New York that just weren't ambitious or wealthy enough to make it into Rutgers, St. Joe's, or NYU. It's a never-ending museum of annoyances, truly a display of the evils of the American Dream gone awry. Loads of people talk about the carnival of wasted potential that makes up the corporate world, or the shells of men that populate the military, but there's a ridiculous myth in the American culture that college is the best time of your life and that every minute is spent on sin and debauchery. Everyone is hot, everyone is drunk, and everyone is having a great time. A four year party for $40,000. Not only is this a lie, but it's a dangerous one, especially considering the general trend towards making college just an extension of high school. But I digress.
College is a collection of the worst kinds of people. In high school, you understood that what you were doing was just a means to an end. For most of the people there, college is the end. That acceptance letter is the culmination of their lives, their Paradise, and they want their seventy virgins lined up and waiting. For the first time these people, now dubbed adults, are out of the house and on their own, ready to abuse and waste their parents' money.
The concept of working towards something, anything, is beyond them. Freshman year is a haze of drunkenness and forgettable, easy sex. Sophomore year brings a smug sense of satisfaction - you've seen all there is, and you lord this over the incoming freshman who now look to you for guidance. To the typical 20 year old, this senseless adoration is the first time anyone has looked up to them, and college is the greatest thing in the world. In junior year, words like internship and grad school are uttered in hurried whispers, taboo, the unfunny punchlines to a cruel joke. The unfortunate recipients of such things are changed in every way. They bear the unmistakable mark of the Real World on them. Senior year is a revisit of the freshman experience as you realize the ride's over. A wake for your soul before you actually become a person.
The people that go through this, my friends and me included, are all in that mindset. It's unavoidable. Give anyone in their late-teens access to beer every night and joke classes and they'll fall into it. The problem is that many of these people are man-children - physically adults, but mentally stuck at 15. Most of them are still stuck in a high school state of mind, which is a side effect of the sheltered suburban lifestyle mixed with the absurd levels of political correctness that our country is full of. It's a frustrating world with frustrating people.
Matt appraised the picture on my monitor. He nodded and turned back to his computer. "Yeah, that guy's kind of a douchebag," he said. A moment later, "Wanna grab a beer?"
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