The Hour Badly Spent

So that’s why you disappeared in such a hurry.

What am I to make of this?

This girl, this rancid whore, was in my Shakespeare class. I found her to be kind, well-read, intelligent, and pretty dorky (the character of any single person is manifold and complex). Toward the end of the term, we sat next to each other in class, because we – along with a heavily tattooed lesbian – decided to perform a scene out of “As You Like It” for extra credit. In addition, this fostered a healthy informal discussion of our assignments and of Shakespeare in general. This acquaintanceship only grew and grew, until finally, exam day came (I studied with the lesbian).

Then, exam day went. At the end, I knew I had done well.

Then, we got our exams back. The professor announced that a few people had gotten A’s. I was certain I was one of them.

And I was! 92%! Smugly, I peeked over at hers.

96?

What the fuck? What am I to make of this?

Four points! She beat me! By FOUR fucking points? I re-read my short answers, my essays. I had gotten my facts right. My prose was subtle, gently ironic. I knew for a fact hers was too prolix. Four points!? Mind you, of course, that I wasn’t looking at this as a contest, but as sweet as she is, she’s also a Type A studyholic and mopping the floor with her would have been a symbolic triumph for chain-smoking slackers everywhere. And now I had failed them all. What are they to make of this?

Apparently she thought the same way; after we shared our scores, she said something to the effect of “in your face,” which I actually found kinda cute.

Nevertheless, I let her walk a few steps ahead and then unloaded 3 rounds into her back.

I felt kind of bad, seeing her twitching and moaning in pain like that, her blood expanding into the fresh white snow around her, like she had laid down to rest on a giant maxipad. With wings. So I shot her again, in the head, and she stopped moving. Then I took all the cash out of her purse. But to be honest, it wasn’t much money, and I still sort of felt bad about the whole thing, even after using her crisp fives and tens to buy cigarettes and Snapple at the gas station.

Obviously, however, I couldn’t bust a cap in our unresolved sexual tension, because now that she’s made a full recovery she feels strongly enough to click in a few places and send me a photo of a heart-shaped chocolate candy.

What am I to make of this? If I were, in fact, as close to her as you fear, I would have probably told her that I HATE chocolate. The best way to make me lose weight would be to make me live in a Godiva store. The cloying aroma of chocolates sweet and bitter would always spur me on to do something else. To AVOID chocolate, you see. Something like scrape out my gums with a red-hot poker. Make out with a hobo. Swan jump off of a gorge and dash my brains against the rocks below. You know, fun stuff. Ahh, chocolate.

So there it is; this chocolate she has sent to me and about 19 of her other Facebook friends, many of them women who are probably also crazy for me. Surely, however, she was thinking only of me and wanted to disguise her passion by slipping it in with all those other nobodies. What am I to make of all this? Since when did overachievers have friends?

The lesbian got a 97, and believe me, her days are fucking numbered too.

Respectfully: on a serious note, I think you’re misreading the point of this site.

If this were eHarmony or adultfriendfinder, giving chocolate with little hearts would be cause for concern. Of course, I suppose if I were on eHarmony or adultfriendfinder in the first place, that would be cause for concern in itself. But I’m not on those sites, you see. I’m on the eff-bee.

The mood here is not “nice shoes, wanna fuck.” It’s more of an idle, friendly merrymaking, but for people who can read (total facial, MySpace!). Some of the interaction borders on flirty, but it’s more or less what-you-see-is-what-you-get, i.e. not a whole lot of sexually charged subtext, so please don’t read too much into it.

People.
Are.
Just.
Being.
Friendly.

It’s not like someone actually went to the effort of thinking up an amusing, clever, sexy pickup line. She just clicked a few places and sent a picture of some chocolate. From the looks of it, she sent the same thing to like 19 of her other closest Facebook friends too. At the same time! Teh internetz lets you do things in mass like that. No big deal. People do it constantly. They’re just being friendly! If you hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have noticed it for a week, because sometimes I’m not so friendly. Sometimes I’m stabby.

“Sometimes people get cut. That’s life.” There, I quoted a LiLo movie; now I’m going to go somewhere to re-evaluate my alcoholism.