I asked my best friend to try to convince Di that I am in fact a died-in-the-wool geek and not merely a carpetbagger, “I never actually knew Chris before university…”
I never actually knew Chris before university, and I arrived at college from the redneck KKK sticks of Central Pennsylvania with nothing tempering my near-frat-boy essence but an upbringing by professor parents, one childhood year in the jungles of Liberia, and an exchange year in a Socialist high school in Berlin.
However, the fact is that Chris was president of the debate team, student council president, and spent his free time reading pulp mercenary novels and memorizing details of small arms and Soviet weaponry when he wasn’t actually doing unofficial JROTC training with the other lightly maladjusted wannabe military geeks. He had a very, very pretty girlfriend, but she was a virgin and he adoringly kept it that way out of some dorky Catholic school-boy worship of Mother Maria.
When he arrived at university, he seemed like a great guy to me – not the standard pot-hazed, Long Island, backward baseball cap fare of GWU, but rather, intelligent, witty, and motivated. But then, that was seen through the eyes of a date-the-blonde-captain-of-the-cheerleading-squad, rock-on-to-Aerosmith, become-a-diplomat-for-the-cool-parties-and-the-awesome-diplomatic-immunity 18 year old.
Although a latch-key kid, raised by TV, he fortunately chose nature documentaries for himself, which I guess proves inherent geekiness.
He’s a sophisticate by conscious choice, not by heritage. He arrived at university aspiring to be East Coast, aspiring to be Europhile, and with grand, ambitious plans of Senatorhood and the like. Really quite dorky, actually, come to think of it.
However, in the meantime, he has indeed crafted himself into quite the sophisticate. Now, if he’d just drop his naive, clueless idealization of middle America (of which he has as much of an understanding as he does of the !Kung), and admit that he is, despite his silly visions of himself, part of the liberal, coastal elite with a fundamental disdain for the things that the hoi polloi represent, then he’d finally be stepping into the shoes he’s crafted for himself with the feet he’s carefully primped and powdered to carry the sophisticate he’s become.
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Just lovely! This truly cracks me up!