April 17, 26 J.E.
Believe it or not, I
actually went and got a life this past weekend. My brother’s female friend whom
I had hung out with a couple of times before (you know, the bisexual communist)
invited me to join her and a bunch of friends for a birthday party. It was
better than what I had already planned for that weekend, which involved some
pliers, peanut butter, a squirrel, and a petrified circus midget.
Unlike the last time I went to
visit, this time I didn’t have a blowout on the highway, so it was already
going better.
So I arrived at her apartment,
and was the second one to arrive. The guy who was already there was pretty
cool, except that he was a Philosophy major. Now I don’t know about you, but
that was one of those majors I’ve always made fun of as future assistant
managers of McDonald’s. Still, he was a
pretty cool guy.
Next came a chick who was
studying to be a drug and alcohol counselor. I guess that’s a reasonable
profession. I mean, my evil cowhead MOM is one, so how bad can they be? She was
also a lesbian, which also isn’t a bad thing, but it still puts her on the Somewhat
Unusual section in the library of my mind.
Then came the other ones. A
History major. An Art major. A Music major. An Undecided-After-Two-Years major.
It slowly dawned on me that I, God help me, was the most normal, average person
in the room! Certainly I was the only one who will be making more than $30,000
a year at some point in my life. I can only imagine how alien and strange I
appeared to them, a pragmatic, kill-‘em-all-let-God-sort-‘em-out realist in
their land of flowers and butterflies. I was the blackest sheep in a room full
of black sheep.
I am certainly no stranger to
off-the-wall weirdness, as you may have gathered if you’ve read ANYTHING
else my eager mind hath wrought, but common sense is my compass. In college, I
hung out with all the engineering, science, and computer major dudes who happened to dabble into various arts.
They were weird, certainly, but at the end of the day, they had very practical
aims of contributing something solid to society.
So there I was, Mister MBA among
liberal arts students. I might as well have been naked and painted blue. Still,
though, they all seemed perfectly cool and decent folk, and we did have some
significant common ground and interests. In other words, when I become dictator
for life of the North American Economic Bloc, I probably won’t go out of my way
to have them liquidated.