|
Current
Links:
Blogs &c
Music
News & Politics
Magazines &c |
Last night, Joe and Amy and I invented a new word: Zebulous. It's the state of being drunk, naked, and a law student. "You were being particularly zebulous last night." The past two days in a row, I have witnessed scenes of what I would call public interpersonal dischord. Two days ago, I was sitting outside work, next to the fountain, where people generally congregate and eat, read, sleep, etc over their lunch hours. Just a few yards away I noticed a young woman talking on the phone. Nothing unusual about that, per se, except that she was also sobbing rather heavily and dabbing her eyes with a tissue. These situations kill me because social conventions prevent me from going over there and asking her if she's all right, etc, and she'd probably prefer I mind my own business anyway. So instead I sat there and let my worst-case scenario machine go to work, speculating what the problem might be. Sickness? Death? Probably not, or she wouldn't linger by the fountain. Not accepted to Yale Law? Maybe. Bush held a secret election the previous night in which he won? Frighteningly likely. Breakup with her boyfriend? Getting dumped? Most probably. She was being broken up with. Or sorting out the post-breakup detritus. But you never know. The second such instance was not quite as troubling, though it presented a much more immediate conflict. I was walking home from the train yesterday when a young man and a young woman burst out of an apartment down the street. The woman began walking briskly down the sidewalk while the man stood awkwardly on the front steps holding a tallboy. The woman said, "Just don't expect me to help you ever again. You're such a liar!" They were both probably weighing their need to forcefully address each others' wrongs against the inevitability of a public scene. The young man started to follow the woman, who was still moving away from him, though a bit slower now, probably hoping he would follow her. In a relationship fight-or-flight paradigm, flight is a dicey gambit, because there's always the chance that Person A, from whom Person B is departing, may call the bluff and not follow. Worse still, Person A might feel an overdue sense of relief that Person B is finally gone, which of course is not the effect Person B is hoping to achieve at all. This wasn't the case with Helper and Tallboy, however, and I surreptitiously glanced over my shoulder on my way in the opposite direction, as Tallboy shuffled after his erstwhile parter around the corner patio by Penny's Noodles, presumably setting down his can of beer to avoid compounding his public interpersonal dischord with a charge of public drunkenness. Both scenes were sad. Both elicited from me that dreadful mixture of compassion, rubbernecking curiosity, and worst yet, the immediate ability to ID completely with all involved parties. |