February 3rd, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Unhumored
A black man in a gothy trench coat introduced himself to me a few weeks ago in the dining hall. I wasn’t alone, but I was waiting for my friends to join me, and so I grabbed a spot at one of the longer tables. He told me his name was Fate and pulled a chair closer to where I was sitting. Later, I found out that Fate was a moniker, that his name was really David, and that said moniker was inspired by his reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu. He relayed this information to the guy sitting next to me because I suppose my group of girlfriends didn’t seem to be the type of crowd receptive to this sort of knowledge.
A few days later, I took the bus downtown so I could buy groceries at Trader Joe’s. I chose the shortest check-out line, but soon realized that it was short because the cashier was especially chatty and especially chatty cashiers are not something most people are comfortable with. He asked me what my major was, to which I replied film. He told me that he was a literature major and that all of his fellow lit majors weren’t pursuing writing careers now that they were out of school. He recited a Chinese proverb, something along the lines of the key to achieving something is to start and continue. He said that if a musician was really intent on making music his career, he’d have to be famous after 80 years of ‘keeping on’ regardless of talent.
There are a few ways I could steer these experiences; this retelling of them. I could lament my uncomfortable position in social interactions with strangers, offer an overarching theme of Chinese philosophies, or invalidate my previous distaste of humanity by reflecting on why these little occurrences, albeit ridiculous, force me to reevaluate my perception of the world. Or I could say it’s irrelevant and continue focusing on the here and now.