You Think You Know Someone

In Conversations with Other Women, a man and a woman, who were once married, reconnect at a wedding. The director uses a pretentious, film-schoolish split screen for the entirety of the movie. While sort of annoying to watch, the point he is trying to make by separating the screen is that men and women never inhabit the same physical and even mental and emotional plane. I think this idea is applicable to all people - that we are fundamentally disconnected from each other mentally that we can never know anyone in his or her entirety.

Of course, the very definition of behavior is predictability, but knowing someone is like having a very sophisticated computer algorithm of if...then statements of all of one's"close" friends. For example:
If Farrah gets salad with meal,
Then, Farrah gives away salad.

If Bushra sees the pisiform bone,
Then she yells at offending person.

Of course, algorithms aren't infinite, and we can't always guess what people will do. And when they surprise us, it's like we have a week's worth of gossip to disentangle and analyze.

When I was in the Upper School, there was a super cute guy in my class, who we will call Duke Orsino (Twelfth Night has some relevance to this story, I promise). Duke was slightly on the weird side, but he was such a sweet guy who had a random sense of humor (i.e. he liked to give people the finger in class and giggled anytime the teacher said to turn to page 69). Duke was popular (all the girls swooned over him), and you'd never figure him for a sap or a sucker in love. Duke Orsino was, in short, a heartthrob - Carlisle's very own modern-day, chivalric Freddie Prinze in She's All That.

Unfortunately, after he broke up with his girlfriend, Olivia (name has been changed to fit my Twelfth Night metaphor), she was really sad, but also became really revealing about the relationship. After a football game, we went over to Olivia's house, and she got out her box of memories. Now, I'd like to think that Duke and I were fairly good friends; we weren't braiding each other's hair or anything, but I felt like I knew him.

But - I guess I didn't. Inside the box were crappy poems he'd written her. I felt like I was in a really shitty teen romance novel written by Francine Pascell or something. The poems were horrifically bad as one would expect from an unworldly 17-year-old Lothario. Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly the romantic type, and all I could think about my friend Duke was how fundamentally lame he was. We all had a good laugh on his expense as he wrote things about how having Olivia in his life "was the best thing that happened to me."

Then, came the horrific yearbook entry. He should have stuck with "Have a good summer"; instead, Duke wrote a three-page diatribe on how Olivia had "saved" him from depression and that "my heart beats for you," things you'd never expect the coolest guy in school to write about. I felt strange as if my conception of good and evil had been destroyed. If popular guys were insecure, lame, and horrifically bad writers when in love, then what could be said about the universe and it's strict paradigms of who was popular and who wasn't?

After that, I never looked at Duke the same way, as he lived up to his pseudonym by being in love with the very idea of love. In Twelfth Night, Orsino says, "If thou ever shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it remember me; For such as I am all true lovers are." And so, Martinsville's own Duke was such a "true lover," who we privately made fun of by yelling out random lines of his poetry in class as he sat there confused.

--By Mariam, who is super-excited about her My So-Called Life Date with Bushra and Nameless Friend.