In my third try at college (and I’m almost positive that isn’t what the old saying means) I took a class called satire. What the fuck kind of class is that? Satire? That had to be the dumbest idea for a subject that I actually paid to learn since I took BOWLING my first go around at college. ...and got a C.
I mean, honestly, can you really teach satire? I guess you can define it...but that’s a course that takes about two minutes. The syllabus for the class said we were going to be reading all of this great satire from history. Ancient Roman satire? Something about the idea of reading translated satirical documents made me want to slam my head into a desk.
How was I even supposed to know what the hell it was they were satirizing? I didn’t see “extensive knowledge of ancient Roman history” on the prerequisites for the class. Then it hit me. First we were going to have to learn ancient Roman history just so we could read some ancient Roman satire that had been translated a dozen times before it got to my shitty photocopy.
Fuck.
Satire is just being mean to people in a funny way. It’s like being a bully with words. When someone says that the President is stupid...they’re stating an opinion. When someone says that the President is a fucking retard...they’re being mean about it. When someone goes on TV and does an impression of the President being a fucking retard...they’re satirizing him. See...it’s just a fancy word for being an asshole.
Speaking of which, I once worked with an asshole who wrote satire. At least he said he wrote satire. In reality it was just him commenting on what he saw without adding any kind of wit or humor or thought or...man I hated that guy. I went to one of his book readings and even the people at the coffee house thought it was garbage...and these were people at a coffee house. This guy actually had the nerve to try and sell this crap. And this stuff was so dry it would be the equivalent of writing down my grocery list and charging you a dollar to read it...or worse asking you to sit there while I fucking read the thing out loud...and then asking you to give me a dollar so you can have your own copy. Satire is not your opinions...douchebag.
Anyway...where was I? Lost on the first page of the prologue...this is going swimmingly.
Alright so in this class with me are my best friend and my girlfriend. I don’t know why we took classes together. It always just resulted in me trying to make him laugh so hard he’d leave the room...and then she’d always get pissed at me. To this day I couldn’t tell you which one was the more desired effect.
She was always trying to actually learn the material...and to her credit she did well in that area. Of course she was also one of those people who would ask you what’s about to happen in a fucking movie she knows you hadn’t seen before. Like I’d been magically hiding a time machine for years that I just used in case of this exact emergency so I could skip ahead five minutes and tell her what the fuck would have happened if she could have just sat silently a little longer.
I think he wanted to learn too...but he never made it far enough through a class period for me to figure that out.
To make matters worse this professor was one of those people who had actually gotten so old and out of shape that any physical trait that denotes gender had eroded away. It was either a frail old fat guy...or a less frail old fat lady. The voice didn’t help because years of smoking had taken away anything but the sound of gravel being gargled. The name wasn’t giving any clues either since every goddamned piece of paper I could find just said “Professor Whateverthefuck” on it. Forget about the way it dressed too...it was the middle of winter in Buffalo. Much less about style and much more about wearing whatever it took to keep your nuts from freezing off. ...Or tits from freezing off... FUCK. What was that thing?
I’d look around the room and everyone else just seemed to be accepting of this. It was all too much. I already had to come up with something to make him laugh and her pissed so that I could have a free night to watch something on TV without being asked asinine questions and now I had to deal with ninety year old “it’s Pat” spitting stones about the history of the Roman empire...IN A CLASS ABOUT SATIRE.
And THAT was the moment.
That was the moment that I realized that I didn’t want any part of the life I’d been leading anymore. I couldn’t stand school. My girlfriend and I had nothing in common. Pretty much everything in my life was only there because it’s what I’d come to believe lives had.
I was absolutely miserable.
And it was all about to change.
I looked over at him and he was already trying to contain a laugh. I looked over at her and she was already pissed. It didn’t even matter what I did at that point. He knew I was going to say something to make him break...and she knew that in doing so I was an asshole. Whether it was true or not...whether I did it or not...just didn’t matter anymore.
Expectations are a bitch. It’s been said that people don’t change. Well that’s bullshit. People change all the time. They change because of circumstances. They change because of opportunities. They change because of other people. They change because of themselves. It’s the perceptions people have of them that never change.
That’s where this story begins.
Right at the end.
...
So anyway I failed satire.
No comments:
Post a Comment