Seven Red

I’ve decided that I want to start cataloguing my general jerkness so that I can see it out there, and maybe stop being so much of a jerk. So from time to time I will describe an event from the day that had me acting like a total jerk. Hopefully, the very act of transcribing my jerk behavior will eventually force me to curtail it, even a little bit. So, my biggest jerk moment of the day.

I went to Blockbuster before picking up Ellie, cuz it’s Friday night, and my readers well know that that’s how we roll. The Blockbuster was strangely empty for 4pm on a Friday, and they had signs all over noting a special on movies, so I guess they’re hurting. In any case, there was only one other customer in there, a guy in his late-30′s, maybe early-40′s. He was walking around looking at the movies, but he had his cell phone, and was describing various options to a woman he kept calling sweetie. I know it was a woman because I could hear her voice through the cell. He was describing options in great detail. A lot of them. Madagascar 2. My Winnipeg. Miracle at St. Anna. That’s just the M’s. Detailed descriptions of each, together with explanations of the other films that the actors had been in, or recommendations from other people they both knew. It was driving me fucking crazy. I know I must have whispered shut the fuck up under my breath about three times. Then he got to the S’s, and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Sign-doshe, he kept calling it. “Sign-doshe, New York. It’s called Sign-doshe, sweetie. Sign-doshe, New York. It’s with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, sweetie. Yeah, the bad guy in the Mission Impossible. Yeah, the creepy guy. Sign-doshe. I dunno. Sign-doshe New York. I heard it was amazing, sweetie. Sign-doshe.” He decided on the film, so returned the last copy of Bill Maher’s Religulous to the shelf, near where I was standing. “Are you looking for a copy of this?” he asked nicely. I nodded. Sure. Then it was jerk time:

“Sin-ek-duh-key,” I said. “It’s sin-ek-duh-key. Synecdoche, New York.”

“What? Oh. Thanks! Hey sweetie, I was pronouncing it wrong. Some guy just corrected me.” (That’s right, that’s right, it rhymes with “corrected me!” Sin-ek-duh-key) “I feel stupid. It’s sin-ek-duh-key.”

I guess on the scale of anti-social behavior, correcting the guy on an admittedly difficult word is somewhere lower than, say, ripping that cell phone out of his hand and smashing it under my foot. But it’s still pretty dicky. God, I’m terrible. And moments after such episodes, of course, I think, wow, I was just a total fucking dick to that person. Sometimes even during.

My colleague posted this story on Facebook, about Facebook. The premise is that thirty-somethings have a far different relationship to Facebook than “Millenials,” or whatever the fuck they’re called. The writer learns this when she finds out about her husband’s life as a teen through his Facebook friends. Here’s what she says:

And it seemed as if half of them confessed crushes on him. These were girls frozen in his memory with teenaged breasts, AP English minds, and a sense that anything was possible. Like this one girl from seventh grade. She friended my husband on Facebook and then reminisced about the day his family moved away. She had put on her favorite dress, painted her nails purple, and worked up all her courage to hug him good-bye. “Isn’t that SO funny,” she wrote, “How silly we are as kids.”

You’d think I’d be mad, or at least threatened by all this nostalgia. But I wasn’t. For a split second at least, my husband was less familiar to me, and I mean that in a good way.

Wouldn’t this story have been more interesting if the husband had turned out to have been some misogynist dick or something? And people were friending him just to tell him to fuck off, finally? Instead, she learns that he was like, totally hawt and cool and all the girls loved him. Is she experiencing nostalgia, or straight-up regression?

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