Thursday, April 05, 2007

How to make an effective decision-making tool wish it had never been born

She sits on the cold floor, her back against the wall, her knees pulled up close to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She picks up her pen, her sketch-pad, draws a line down the center of the page and starts writing.

1. "Lies. (in block letters, underlined twice. The second line so fiercely that the paper tears a little). Lies all the time. About everything. His family, his holidays, even his goddamn internships! Why would anyone lie about something like that?! I didn’t even get an internship, did it ever occur to me to lie about it? No! Lies about his mother, for crying out loud. Says she’s suffering from a life-threatening disease of the spine. And (of course!) she used to be a dancer. "

2. "Steals ideas from Creativity editions and passes them off as his own. I can’t believe how much I praised his India Ink idea, how slack-jawed with awe I was, how stupid I felt for not being able to come up with a concept even a fourth as intelligent as that. And how he was all modest and self-effacing about it. “Oh I was just doodling and it came to me. It’s no big deal.” Arrgh! D, you bloody stupid fool!"

3. "Copies down Robert Browning’s poems and claims he’s written them. Apparently, having the same initials as a Victorian poet implies that you are him. Apparently, he also thinks he’s the only one in college with a library card. And like that's not enough, he denies it so vehemently when confronted, that I begin to doubt myself.


And in the right column, in a much less forceful hand, she writes, “Makes me laugh.”

8 comments:

iz said...

you have been blogrolled.

J. Alfred Prufrock said...

(pushes glasses back on nose in Woody Allen fashion before speaking)

Umm ... I don't know whether I should point this out, but really, you're making a taxonomical error here.
You see, Points 2 and 3? They're basically sub-categories of Point 1, so they should really be 1a and 1b.
So the next time you ... excuse me? That hurt! I don't think it's legal to use a rolling pin to ... ouch!

J.A.P.

Revealed said...

No no no. Never, but never make pros-n-cons lists!!! Didn't anyone tell your heroine that???!! Tsk. And she thinks it's an effective decision-making tool!! Good grief!

(Also, since apparently every1 does the full disclosure thing around here, I blogrolled you too. Quite a while back. Just FYI. Cos even if you try to wrench your link away from my sidebar, I won't relinquish it. Nuh-uh.)

Anonymous said...

Very good stuff. You really are on a roll here, aren't you? And I don't say that because I am nice, but because I can read.

Falstaff said...

I'm not sure point 3 shouldn't be a pro. I mean okay, so he copied the poems and didn't write them. But at least he picked Browning. Good taste has to count for something. It would be much worse if he were ripping off, say, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

And come to think of it, would you really want to date someone who wrote My Last Duchess and Porphyria's Lover in the original?

Chronicus Skepticus said...

Iz:
Oo what fun! So have YOU btw. :D

J.A.P:
Rolling pins? Who needs rolling pins? These hands are weapons enough for the likes of you!

*practices ninja moves*

HOWEVER, since you have actually commented without our holding a gun to your head, we shall merely subject you to an icy look.

Revealed:
Heh! No, no-one ever told my "heroine" that. And on her own, let's just say she wasn't the brightest crayon in the box. :D

As for the linking, gosh, thank you! *blushes red*

Sougata:
You just made my day.

I'm smiling so much my face hurts.

Falstaff:
You know, I never thought of it that way.

And then I could've ripped off Bronte and then he could've played Wilde and then I'd play Parker and we could've gone through the whole poetic pantheon!

Damn! I wonder why these things occur to you only in hindsight.

And I'd forgotten Porphyria's Lover...ergh, creepy.

Falstaff said...

cs: True. It would have ended badly though. Eventually you would have got to Tennessee Williams, at which point you would have gone around telling kind strangers you were pregnant while he would have tripped over the sofa, broken a leg, and spent his days drinking and waiting for that click in his head. Still, as he would have said - 'Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all.

Szerelem said...

Makes me laugh. That would *probably* wipe out all the cons.
But Revealed is right - list aren't a good idea.