The Saga of Chainsmoker, Or Why I Read and Remember the Footnotes

2nd Update: Hot RA works in my building! He's in the appellate division, so we chatted about a case that was before my judge (and I helped with the opinion (research)) that the losing attorney swore she would take to the next level, which is where he's working. The law kids here seem intimidated by the stature of my law school, which amuses me. And when I tell them where I went undergrad, they are ready to get down on their knees to worship my massive brain. I feel superior for a moment, and then i remember a girl who routinely popped up in my english classes until 4th year. She had lived in my building first year and plastered her entire door with overlapping naked Abercrombie and Fitch models, and the walls of her room with ginormous blow-ups of gin bottles and the marlboro man, whose lifestyle she supported with her incessant chain smoking. Throw in someone gorging on fatted calf and coveting his neighbor's booty (inanimate & animate) and it was hedonism central. In class, she would spend the period making it clear with her eyes that she thought we were all complete nerds (i'm not disputing this fact), then in the last 10 minutes, raise her hand and make an incredibly insightful comment that would ignite the professor and embarass the rest of our paltry half-baked musings.

It wasn't until the 4th time chainsmoker did this that I realized she was reading the editor's annotation at the bottom of the page. Verbatim. When a friend of mine was puzzling over the discrepancy between chainsmoker's behavior and her grasp of meaning in literature, I pointed to the note in Dante's Inferno quoted that morning. Next class, my friend said "Chainsmoker's point is an excellent point that the editor made on page blankity blank." Our proper British professor flushed and fluttered a little, but recovered by quickly flipping to a complete different section. I couldn't even look at chainsmoker, for fear that she'd burn a cigarette hole in my arm for being cheeky.

To this day I wonder if I would have the guts to do that in class- either action, the verbal plagarism or the whistleblowing on someone who could prolly take you out without breaking an acrylic nail (unless the smoking left her winded halfway through). The first, definitely not. The second, probably not, but not because I don't have the guts, but rather I think the professor would have caught on at some point. Why make a deliberate enemy of someone devoid of conscience on something that doesn't really matter in the long run? if the class were on a curve, hell yes I'd turn her ass in.

In this little story I'm not saying that UVA kids are uniformly stupid or even that Chainsmoker was dumb. Chainsmoker was crafty, and she probably used that craftiness to get in. But she wasn't compelling, and her comments when not read out of the book were brain-numbingly inane and taken off the first lines or the introduction to the work we were reading ("Shakespeare likes to write about strong women. But he also writes about weak women." "Yup. That is a true statement, alright.")

After remembering the saga of chainsmoker, I think "Admission to and even graduation from UVA is not a sign of unending, omnipotent, supreme-being-like intelligence" and it takes me down a peg. But it is nice to be appreciated :D