O1d Sk001z

It's back to skool...er...school time again. Today was the first day of classes at the university, so I made an appearance to verify audition times, look for class books, verify lesson time, etc. Going to class over the summer sort of put reduced expectation in the amount of human traffic I'd seen at campus. There were a ton of people. And what does a ton of people mean? Good people watching.

As I was wondering around, I saw many people who were trying hard to be beautiful. I walked next to one woman whose skin was so tan and leathery, she looked like a drum head, stretched tight across a floor tom.

I saw a girl who annoys me immensely. As always, she found something humorous in what I said to her (her: "How's it going?" me: "Well."), and laughed her laugh. This laugh is sort of stifled, as though she doesn't know whether or not she CAN laugh at something I said, but still wants to show me that she gets whatever joke she thinks I'm making. I like conversation; I really do. When I talk, I like to use words that (to me) explain as close as possible what I'm trying to convey. I also tend to talk in complete sentences, using several different parts of speech. This makes me sound funny, especially to young or unfamiliar ears. And by "funny," I mean stuffy and elitist, but in a laughable way.

I saw a five foot one girl with platinum blond hair parking a cream-colored Cadilac Escalade. I didn't realize they even came in "cream," because you usually see them in the three primary colors: black, even-darker black, or Darth Vader. She was wearing what I could term "Paris Hilton-chic." A pastel-colored top (in this case, some sort of electric aquamarine), white pants so tight you could see the cuffs biting into the flesh of her shins, some sort of bizarre foot apparel that looked like a cross between a platform shoe that a 70's pimp might wear and a piece of wicker furniture from Pier 1, and moviestar sunglasses from the 70's (white frames, round lenses).

The effect was instantaneous. I was instantly and proundly struck by the realization that she was a better class of person than me, that her (or her parents) money made her more desireable, and that if I spoke to her, she would be justified in turning up her nose at me. Sigh. The courtly love idea of the "unattainable woman" isn't dead. C'est existe!

It's also strange to be wandering around with lots of people. Now, in every big crowd, I think I see people I know. I usually don't know anyone, but as soon as I let my eyes wander, someone says "hi." I suppose it means I know a lot of people, when I can see someone, talk with them, and have several other people I know say hello as they walk by. And not just in the music building, where that sort of thing is likely to happen. Sometimes the number of people we know can suprise us, since we don't think about most of them after they've left our field of vision. I was constantly being suprised with thinking "oh yeah, Betty goes to this school. I remembered her, but forget where I'd remembered her from."

Comments

  1. That last bit is like the inverse of my life...I keep thinking that I'll eventually run into someone I know (what with being from this stupid state) and that has yet to happen.

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  2. I always find when I start at a new university that I think I recognize people there from other places I've been. Usually out of the corner of my eye, I'll notice someone and halfway have the urge to say "Hey!" But, on closer inspection, it turns out to be a stranger. It's a weird feeling.

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