Sometimes things that don’t happen to people happen to me.
You know, like when you watch a movie and some character is saying something scathing and derogatory about some other character, and he notices the slack-jawed wide-eyed faces of his audience and says, “She’s behind me, isn’t she?”
That doesn’t happen in real life, right? There’s no way. Except that it’s happened to me.
This is the paradigm for my existence.
At Borders a few weeks ago, I bought a few books – Accelerando by Charles Stross (which I’m on the verge of abandoning because of how aggressively it tries to out-Gibson Gibson) and The Digital Plague by Jeff Somers (which I devoured in two days), since I know you’re curious. The cashier engaged me in a quick convo about the books, which isn’t strange. That’s a cheerful, engaged employee. When I worked at a bookstore, I would try and do this sometimes and it would never work. Maybe that says something about 16 year old Jeff’s social acumen, or maybe it says something about the kinds of people that shopped at the Village Green in Edwardsville, PA – I don’t know.
But anyway, I digress. That’s a cheerful, engaged employee. That’s not strange. Well, maybe that is strange. In the midst of the chat, she begins to write down on the back of my receipt books that I “have to read.” I’d read every single one of them. At that, the girl squeed in delight (the actual sound of it was onomatopoeic) and drew a large heart on the receipt because I was “amazing.” She then insisted that I read Ender’s Game, which I have never read, mostly because I’ve heard that it was subpar, juvenille and because Orson Scott Card has strong personal opinions that I disagree with. But a week later, I had a copy of Ender’s Game sitting on my to-read shelf.
Which is not to say that, to paraphrase the song, I am in love with the Border’s girl. I’m a voracious reader, and when other voracious readers tell me to read a book, I generally read it. Which is how I read Twilight, now that I think about it. That there were hearts involved barely played a part.
Anyway. I’m getting ahead of myself. My friend, who’s known me for about ten years at this point, scoffs when I tell him this – he was browsing comics while I was in line to check out. He believes that my natural gregariousness (which I have decided that I am going to call gregariosity because I like it better) leads to exaggeration. He demands to see the receipt. Which I show him. He is shocked momentarily, and the admits that he shouldn’t really be shocked.
