I Am A Horrible Person

And here's why:

Yesterday I went to see a free movie, which necessitated standing in line for a while. Andy and I had hoped to eat some enormous pancakes beforehand, but our plans were foiled by the insane popularity of the Griddle Cafe on Sunday mornings. It was a restaurant absurdity rarely sighted in LA in which the number of people sitting and eating was evenly matched by the number of people standing and waiting.

Anyway, Andy parked near a bagel place and I parked near the theatre, so I waited in line and he got some breakfast carbs. So I'm standing, waiting in line with all these other people who are on the Creative Screenwriting mailing list and this guy lines up behind me and starts chatting me up. Normally I find this flattering, and even if I don't find the person attractive, the encounter is kind of interesting or at the very least entertaining. This guy was deeply unattractive and also deeply uninteresting and also deeply awkward. At one point he asked me if I was "an artiste of sorts" (that's pronounced "ar-TEEST") and at another point gave his reason for moving to LA as being something that happened due to "the winds of fate".

I gave what I thought were pretty clear social clues that I was no longer interested in talking to him, like turning away for long stretches of time and giving terse answers. I'm too much of a chickenshit to be super jerky and make a fake phone call or just tell him I didn't want to talk to him. But he was impermeable to any hint that the conversation was not fun for me. We were not talking about anything interesting, he kept asking me personal questions, and we were stuck in a line. At one point, we heard a car crash down the street and I thought, "Thank Christ, a diversion!" But he was not to be deterred.

Maybe it was Sunday morning crabbiness or the lack of pancakes, but I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at him and not just because he wouldn't let me out of the conversation, but because I was out of his league. Which is a terrible thing to say, and classist, and materialistic and superficial and completely true. I was offended that he thought he could chat me up.

But it's true, right? People pair with people who match their level of desirability. My psych textbook chose to illustrate this with photos of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, and Rhea Pearlman and Danny DeVito. This is a central concern in casting characters who are couples: would you believe that these two people are together? I know real life couples in which one person is considerably better-looking than the other and I wonder about the dynamic between them. When the cluster of attractive traits is imbalanced, it's weird.

This is why you can decide not to like someone because they have shitty taste in music.

I guess I should maybe call this post, "I Am A Superficial, Though Realistic, Person"

The story ended with the line starting to move and me waiting at the theatre door for Andy while my dogged companion went to score a great seat. Andy showed up a few minutes later with bagels, narrowly missing being introduced as my husband.

The movie was good. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly". Dude gets paralyzed and his ex-wife who he had never actually ended up marrying stays by his side even though he is grotesque. He had a great personality, though.