When I’m watching a film or television show, I often have trouble focusing. It isn’t that I can’t focus…it’s more like I can’t focus without motivation. This motivation can easily be inserted into any program with the addition of an overwhelmingly attractive individual. Hell, I’d watch Wolf Blitzer Reports if Brandon Flowers were on it.
Similarly, I need some kind of motivation to go to class each day. Now, the attractiveness of a UVA student can only go so far. Without several layers of make-up and an ultra-airbrushing lens, none of these kids are much to look at. So I stay focused through a motivation that has always seemed more empowering than attraction anyway—pure hatred.
Sometimes it’s obvious who you are supposed to hate in a class (see the white girl in my Fictions of Black Identity seminar who on one occasion broke down crying because she felt there was too much racism in the world and on another told us about how when she wuz a lil gurl in Atlanta, all the black kids who went to her scoowul would corn row her hayurr and call her their white Barbie doll. There were black kids in our class, too, and they called her things too, none of which were “white Barbie doll.”)
Other times, you have to get creative. Here’s a helpful clue—pick someone sort of ugly. Obnoxiousness without ugliness is like lemonade without lemons. For me, it’s usually someone who could have looked normal had they been a normal person, but for whatever reason, the more they talk in class, the more warped their face becomes. I’m thinking of two people in particular right now…The Reason I Go To Spanish and The Reason Aside From Matthew Hughy’s Wrath That I Go To My Media Studies Discussion.
The Reason I Go To Spanish could be cute. Really, if she had been my suitemate first year, I’m sure we would have gotten crunk juntas. Pero, eso no was the caso. I met her, short and jean-jacket clad, while doing a group exercise. See, what I usually do when the teacher assigns a group exercise, is avoid all eye-contact. Everyone is throwing around subjunctivos and pluscuamperfectos like they’re frisbees and beach balls. The chaos is such that in my non-eye-contacted-bubble-of-safety, no one notices that I use group exercise time to take four minute power naps. With my eyes open. But not this particular day. This day, the girl takes me under her with into a three-person group, where I try to sit in silence, but she keeps going “Y tu, Marissa, que piensas?” She sees me as the weakest link and is trying to power-tutor me in four-minute intervals. This is not all. She starts every sentence with, “Cuando estaba en Peru…” and every time the teacher walks by, she makes some little comment about how her time abroad relates to what we are studying now. The more she rolls her R’s and fakes an accent, the more she resembles a cartoon dog. To be more precise, she looks like Gromit with a swollen eye. Like Wallace just took a frying pan and comically banged her in the eye, and now she is barking for attention with really advanced palabras.
The Reason Aside From Matthew Hughy’s Wrath That I Go To My Media Studies Discussion is not cute and never would have been my friend even if a tsunami blown way off course killed everyone in Charlottesville but the two of us. She looks like a turtle and wears those glasses that are actually so convex that they make her eyes look tiny and beady. Matthew has a question, and she has an answer. Every time. But of course with Matthew, no one ever has the answer (except him) so really all we get from turtle girl are sonic booms of overconfidence stifled by Matthew’s unapologetic rejection. It’s actually quite entertaining.
Once in a while, you can have lemonade without lemons…like that Country Time Powdered stuff. And what you get with this is the case of the Hateable Hottie. There was def a hateable hottie in one of my discussions. I saw him and the vacant seat next to him from afar, and walked over with a suggestive “Is this seat taken?” No, he told me, hair falling perfectly and eyes twinkling. I took my seat. I had found my new boyfriend. And then I saw his shoes. His shoes looked like someone broke apart several different colors of highlighters, gave them to Jackson Pollack along with a pair of white Reeboks, and let him go to town. Then they fed a bunch of kids various flavors of that Pop Quiz colored popcorn from the early nineties, forced them to chug Surge for several minutes, and then let them puke all over the Pollack canvas. Seriously. That doesn’t even begin to describe the atrocities that are his shoes. That isn’t the end of the story, either. It’s most of it…but also, he really sucks and thinks he’s the shit, and he’s in the military and like wears his uniform to class on days he doesn’t wear the terrible shoes.
That’s all I have for now. I need to go sit with turtle girl pretty soon and watch her shell get cracked.
(Originally posted on Thursday, February 28, 2008)
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