My fellow students didn’t want to talk to me back when I attended City College twenty years ago, and they don’t want to talk to me now that I’m twenty years older than they are. I should be grateful for the consistency, but I have a fond memory of a study group from my US Government class. And so I continue reaching out to those seated around me, and this is the story of one of those times.
As part of the educational track I’m pursuing, I had to take an introductory Excel/Access class, and in that class was a woman with the coolest cat-eye glasses I’d seen since leaving San Francisco (I’m thinking specifically of the frames worn by the owner of
Cafe Madeleine on California Street for those of you in the 415). They even had rhinestones in the corners – girl was working it! Since I’m always on the lookout to score unique frames, I make it a point of asking people about their eyeglasses if I find myself admiring them. The class was incredibly basic, to the point of being stultifyingly boring, so at the first break I made a beeline to, I’ll call her, Dory.
Turns out the frames were vintage and were inherited from a family member who had worn them in the 60s, and, in talking to her further, it turned out that Dory had recently moved from San Francisco, too. She had recently recovered from cancer and had moved to a cheaper town to be able to afford living off a disability paycheck. She had worked for a large computer-related firm for many years before having to quit due to illness. What luck, I thought, not only do she and I share the love of vintage frames but also are newbies to town and are interested in computers! By asking one question, I found someone with whom I had so much in common. We chatted over the course of the semester, and, even though we didn’t have any more in common, we amused each other to the point that we were able to keep from falling asleep in class. Mistaking that connection for something much more worthwhile, we hung out a handful of times, which is where I learned of her deep, abiding hatred of everything Long Beach.
First of all, I should have known better than to agree to meet her outside of class because, as funny as I found her, all her humor revolved around everything sucking. Nothing was ever to her liking – not her neighbors (apparently, her deaf neighbor was too loud), not the school’s out of date buildings and instructors, and definitely not the citizenry of Long Beach. I distinctly remember her constantly disparaging the school’s facilities for not being state-of-the-art elegant like San Francisco City College’s. I was stumped at her love of that campus as I had spent the better part of ten years there jumping through prerequisites for four or five different majors, and those buildings haven’t been state of the art since Jerry Brown’s first governorship. I alternated between freezing my ass off in the Science Building, built 1942, and suffocating in the poorly ventilated Batmale Hall, built 1978. I finally asked if the chemo had affected her memories, and she admitted to having only ever taken PE classes, which met in the gymnasium that had been built in 2008. Clearly, making a thorough evaluation before reaching a conclusion was not her strong suit. However, I persevered! How could I not empathize? We were both new in town, but she was even more broke than I was!
I next entertained her complaint of our teacher’s mediocre instructional style. I really couldn’t fault her there because our teacher was so obviously phoning it in. Her lecture material was the PowerPoint provided by the book’s publisher, which she slavishly read, slide by slide, without stopping to answer any questions that might pop up. Even answering questions after lecture depended on her mood, and Dory and I found ourselves fielding questions and assisting other students through lab assignments. Dory, once again, used this example to decry the value of an education at LBCC in comparison to one at CCSF. Until I pointed out her mistake, she thought hiring rules for instructors were different at each school even though the community college system is run by the state. She had convinced herself our teacher had only a high school diploma (and had also added a backstory about the instructor being a hoarder – I couldn’t figure out the how or the why, so I just let that one go), so I pointed out that the State of California requires a Master’s degree for teaching post-secondary education. Our teacher wasn’t uneducated, she was just lazy. Another time I mentioned fondly the many PhDs who had been my instructors at CCSF, and she snapped, “Well, that’s gonna be the last time until you get out of this school!” Her mouth was literally agape when I told her my current Spanish teacher had a PhD from UCLA. Up until this point, I thought that if I listened to her bellyaching that, eventually, she would work it all out of her system, except that day never came. I think what ended up happening is that she took my patience as tacit agreement and let ‘er rip!
I finally had to draw the line after the time she and I were at a crowded restaurant, and she loudly exclaimed that everyone in Long Beach is illiterate. She and I were talking about our class, and I wondered at much less computer literate I was finding people in Southern California than in Northern California, except she heard “illiterate,” and yelled at me, “YEAH! EVERYONE IN LONG BEACH IS COMPLETELY ILLITERATE!” The five-top next to us stopped talking to turn and stare. I was so embarrassed that all I could do was sit and stare, too. I was caught completely unaware and had absolutely no come back, while she glared at me malevolently as if defying me to argue with her. Looking back, she was probably spoiling for a fight and was looking to take out the many frustrations of her life on anyone nearby. Needless to say, that was the last time I made plans with her.
I would have been happy to remain friendly with her in a classroom setting, but I think Dory sensed my lying down a boundary and flipped right the fuck out. I remember one time she was crazy pissed off that smokers were standing too close to the classroom door and ignored her when she tried to move them. I think the problem may have been that she told them they had to stand fifty yards away from the door while smoking (I think the rule is forty feet). Anyway, I laughed when she told me because how is anyone going to walk half a football field away just to smoke?! Of course, she launched into a lecture about how she had recently recovered from CANCER and that her health was important to her! She was so ticked off that about an hour later she slipped me a note telling me I had hurt her feelings and that she couldn’t believe I had reacted that way. I didn’t have a reply to that – well, nothing constructive – so I ignored it, and when she didn’t mention it either I thought it was a done deal. I mean, really, if she’s so sensitive that secondhand smoke will kick her out of remission she should be wearing a gas mask or a plastic bubble or something!
The final straw came one day when I was using the school’s computer to get some work done. During this time, I was knee-deep in a volunteer job and had just been offered a paid position thanks to all my hard work. One day, I arrived in class extra early so that I could send out a mass e-mail on behalf of my soon-to-be boss. I remember I was sweating the grammar on this one, and, after taking forever writing the damn thing, I was reading and re-reading it to make sure it was perfect. Dory showed up a few minutes before class and wanted to chat about her weekend and her ongoing job search and blah, blah, blah, me, me, me. I was in the homestretch of checking my e-mail, and I knew that if I didn’t send out the message before our mood swing of a teacher arrived that I wouldn’t be able to send this message until the early afternoon (it was a six-hour class: it met once a week and combined lecture and lab in one session). Consequently, I was only half paying attention to Dory, who mid-sentence asked me, “Are you all right?” I did a sort of double-take and told her I was fine, but just then the teacher walked in and shut down all further talk. That didn’t stop Dory, though! She sent me a text message, “Are you OK? You don’t seem your normal self.” I wasn’t about to get busted playing on my phone, so I didn’t reply, but during our break she asked, “What’s wrong?” By this time, I’d lost my patience with her concern, especially since I’d already answered the question, so I very exasperatedly told her, “I’m fine. Just accept it as an answer!” And that was the last time she talked to me.
Mine is a minor, if wordy, tale of woe, but, happily, crazy is out of my life. Now I have to learn the warning signs before I instigate conversation with the next freak (but I’m still going to ask people where they got their cool eyeglass frames)!
