September 22: rejection

  This past weekend I was at Target picking up some socks (thank God it was just socks) when a really bizarre thing happened. As I was navigating the aisles of the super crowded store and puzzling over the intercom announcements in Spanish, I lock eyes with a dude over a sea of carts and notice he's looking at me as well.

  At first I dismiss this as typical D.C. area behavior. People here stare. And not the way I stare, stealthily -- they stare noticeably, at everyone. Walking down the street, people lock eyes with you as they pass you and sometimes hold it until you're gone. It's really unnerving. I've started playing really uncomfortable games of chicken with dudes at the crosswalk, where we make eye contact from a distance, then I look away (like any normal person would), then look back to see them still looking at me, then look away, etc.. You can repeat this up to five times at a wide crosswalk, and I mean really wide -- they give you like an hour to cross. Okay, not really, but a lot of the timers above the 'walk' sign start at 60 seconds.

  Anyway, I see this guy, he sees me, our steps slow and then stop as we both do the narrowed-eyes-tilted-head expression of simultaneous recognition and confusion. Who do I know in Arlington? I'm thinking. No one.


  Except this dude, 'cause he's my nemesis from the undergrad history thesis program.

  Not Al the triple-majoring, girlfriend-proposing Catholic, who once sent me a bullet-pointed page of critiques on a chapter draft that included remarks on my choice of punctuation. No, the other one, whose politically-centered and colorless thesis made peer reviewing even more painful than it already was. Talk about dry reading -- I'm pretty sure that rubbing two pages of his work together briskly enough could start a fire.

  He was a ruthless critic as well. Every time my work was up for review, I could always count on this guy to trap me with questions like "Why do you consider Oklahoma part of the South?" and "Why is Woody Guthrie more important than, say, Arlo?" After giving up on trying to explain the historical significance of our favorite Dub-G, I challenged him to name an Arlo song. He named two. I looked like a fool.

  Anyway, it was this guy walking down the same aisle as me in a crowded Target in a state neither of us are from.

  We stopped for a minute and talked  (apparently he moved here to look for work - yeah, good luck.), exchanged happenings since graduation, enjoyed an awkward moment or two with his mother ("Well you two should exchange phone numbers and meet up!"), and then went our separate ways. The phone thing never happened, so I felt obligated to end this interaction with  a noncommittal "Okay, I'll facebook you!" Which meant the nightmare continued, because I had to go home and add him two years after it would've been appropriate.

  I'm pretty sure this has happened to me multiple times. Hey, I know we met years ago but I've spent the whole time being afraid of you and not wanting you to judge me on my profile on a social media site. But now we're cool, right?


  Apparently not: six days and counting, friend request not accepted.