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June 26, 2006
pity this
When I took my leave of grad school and Spokane, I promised my friends Sue, the Creative Writing secretary, and Lynn, my boss, that I would stay in touch.
They laughed. "Yeah, we've heard that one before. We'll hear from you for a year, maybe two, and then never again. You'll just fade away. They always do."
This Thursday, 12 years and three weeks after that conversation, Lynn and Sue arrive at my house again. I will remind them of their scoffing a decade ago. They will beg me to fade away with dignity.
Mothering. You can't spell "smothering" without it.
While I love being with my old friends, there's one component to their mothering I could do without. To their generations, it's positively freakish for a man over 24 to be unmarried. He is presumed helpless—drowning in his own loneliness and filth—whatever the case might actually be. Without a wife to mop the floors, my floors must be disgusting. They must be. That the maid mops them a couple times a month is immaterial, at least until I marry her. And thus will our time together include many a comment about my complete inability to function. Good times. Good, sexist times.
I will have heaps of pity piled upon me during this visit, and not for my stupid elbow injury, losing all my friends at once, Percy continuing to live—or anything else for which I might actually deserve pity. Nay, I will be pitied for not making the same choices they did.
This leads us to an emerging peeve of mine: when people profess pity for you about something with which you're actually quite happy.
"No, you're not," they seem to be saying. "Snap out of denial and be miserable."
Any time I'm less than elated, it's because I'm single. My feh time at the Super Bowl? It had nothing to do with Detroit or corporate sterility or a crappy game. "I just wish you'd been able to take someone with you," ached Lynn.
"Um, there wasn't exactly a shortage of volunteers. I just thought that given my good fortune in scoring tickets, the money from the second ticket should go to char—"
"I think you would have had a better time if you weren't alone." She sounded ready to weep.
"I go to games alone every year. I love doing that."
"Still..."
Ca-righst. Do graduating students really fade away, or is it more of an all-out sprint?
posted by john at 7:09 AM • permalink