I teach Chinese college students who are remarkably similar to what I imagine some of my friends were like in high school (it’s hard for me to be sure, as my memories of high school are tainted with the belief that I actually had my shit together which, in retrospect, was quite obviously not the case). I attribute this to their rather sheltered upbringing—when you’re only allowed a single child you tend to shelter that child, I suppose—and it is something that I’ve learned to work around (my first semester lesson about love and sexuality didn’t go over well, and I’ve not had the chutzpah to try it again).

A good friend of mine is a second-grade teacher and she complains that when she’s with her friends she still talks like she’s talking to 7-year olds and sometimes finds it hard to communicate with people who do not harbor a predilection for eating paste (on an only loosely connected, personally tragic but publicly hilarious, tangent, she recently broke up with her boyfriend because he sniffed glue—I kid you not). I feel her pain, as I find myself sucked deeper and deeper into the trite Machiavellian world in which my students dwell.

I know that Michael is dating Becky, and is quite upset that she doesn’t put out (given her personality and her body, were I in his position, I might feel the same), but that the reason that Becky doesn’t want to sleep with Michael isn’t because she doesn’t love him but rather that her last boyfriend used her for just that purpose. I know that Kid (that’s his name, he had it coming into class, and after a brief discussion about ‘Kid’ not really being a name I decided to leave it alone) likes to go out and drink on Friday night and is rumored to be spending his daddy’s money on the ladies that inhabit the houses of ill repute which litter this part of the city like guano in a cave. I don’t want to know these things, mind you, but the deeper I fall into this world the more perversely addictive it becomes.

I never had this kind of drama in high school. Most of my friends, bless their hearts, were as fun as a group of lepers at a buffet when it came to this kind of excitement—which is to say they were upright, decent human beings who didn’t ruin their lives having barely started them, but still absolutely drama-free—and thus these interactions feed that needy part of my personality that was prevented by my testicles from watching Dawson’s Creek way back when.

I really, very badly, need to get a new job.

Posted by John on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 7:14 am.