With all of my summer girlfriends winding down and my plate back to
empty I started dating a girl who seemed pretty cool. She was not.
Her older brother had been my co-host on the morning announcements
the year before and was considered by myself and many others to be a
pretty cool guy. She was riding on the coattails pretty hard and if
you only knew her for a little while you may well be, as I was,
tricked into thinking that she was a pretty original and interesting
person. My friend who had just recently been elected to student
government with me had dated her for a few months at the end of the
last year and that was endorsement enough. The first couple of times
we hung out we were with a group of friends and we watched movies and
did other hard to get to know someone things. Her family and friends
were huge fans of a independent comedy called 'Ruben and Ed' which
was actually fairly funny in an acid trippy kind of way.
However, their
weird ownership of the movie made it less funny, as we were trying to
watch it they kept pre-laughing jokes and then reciting funny lines
along with the movie. It was an experience very similar to watching
Monty Python with a super fan who wants to show the people he is
with, especially Python virgins, that he gets it and loves it deeply while he ruins it for everyone else.
That type of person loves to watch the joke unfold as they help it
along and keep looking at your face to make sure you are getting it
the same way that they are. All in all a delightful way to watch
anything. Besides independent film her family was into borderline
mainstream stuff that they felt was very esoteric and thereby made
them cool by just knowing about and appreciating it. It was not that
at all. It is best summed up in her claim that her favorite music was
underground stuff, I asked which bands she meant and she said without
self awareness or irony, the multi-platinum recording artists Cat
Stephens and Simon and Garfunkel. I think that for a while there in
the seventies, eighties and nineties every movie was required, by
law, to have a song by one or both of those artists. I at first
thought she must be joking but she was sincerely ignorant and was mad
when I had laughed involuntarily. I told her that those artist were
among the most well known in the world, not Madonna or the Beatles
but right up there. She argued with me and said she had never met
anyone who even knew who they were. Well, maybe so, but that little
exchange should have put my ears up that I may be dealing with
someone not entirely on speaking terms with reality.
