“Do you scrap?” asked my roommate, Jillian, perkily.
Um, no. I abhor physical violence. Besides, other than my acerbic wit, my regal bone structure is about all I’ve got going for me. You just can’t take risks with cheekbones like these.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“YES!!!!” (Her intonation clearly indicated four exclamation points.) She hauled out her scrapbook and that’s when I realized that Jillian and I could never be friends.
The problem wasn’t the scrapbooking. It was the fact that she said “scrap” when she really meant “keep a scrapbook.” I just can’t take people like that seriously.
She also started most of her sentences with “When I get married…” Of course, none of these thoughts were realistic, like “When I get married I’ll lose all sense of self.” It was always something like, “When I get married, I want to release butterflies at the reception.”
The problem is that when I hear people say things like that, I think they’re joking. So when I mentioned that butterflies seemed an apt symbol for the release of her hopes and dreams in favor of supporting her husband through business/medical/dental school, she got offended.
Some people are so touchy. And then I look like the bad guy when I say, as tactfully and gently as possible, that I thought she was surely jesting, since buying a bunch of butterflies and releasing them at a wedding reception was about the dumbest idea I’d ever heard.
She’s now on the wrong side of her twenties, still unmarried. Even though I still can’t take her seriously, I do have to say that I feel awfully sorry for her, since she’s still trying to satisfy her sexual needs through scrapbooking.
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