Introduction
Here’s a sad one, from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.
Latin [Class] is for Lovers – October 19, 1990
I just can’t concentrate on my Latin homework anymore. It’s tempting to blame this on girl trouble, but that would be overstating the case, like saying you have car trouble when in fact your car was repossessed. I just have this empty space, this lack, where I thought I had a girl.
She’s in my Latin 1 class, a freshman. I’m a junior, but on
the stunted, naïve side so it feels perfectly natural to be chasing after
freshman girls. Besides, just like them, I only recently arrived here in
Berkeley, having transferred from UCSB.
Latin class had been going fine before R— caught my eye and
became a constant distraction. My god she is fly. Of course, there’s not a lot
of mingling among classmates, not with a discussion-style language class of
only fifteen students. I passively admired her for over a month before making
any moves. (Well, I did rework an old sonnet in her honor, but never gave it to her or anything. I did get course credit for it in my Shakespeare class.)
From Psych 1 I learned that mere proximity can increase
attraction, so I took to sitting next to R— whenever I could, which was most of
the time. She always takes a chair right up in the front row, where you’re a
sitting duck in terms of getting called on. So I’d take the invariably empty
chair next to her. It’s a tough price to pay, getting called on twenty-four
seven, but well worth it. This one red-haired guy seems to have had his eye on
this same girl, but he has never gone so far as to sit in the lethal chair. I’ve
had to really focus so as not to play myself. (This is a constant risk for me
because I study far less than my peers. I loafed through my first two years of
college, and old habits die hard.)
The instructor, Jonathon, is cool enough, I guess. He has
this really soft, airy East Coast voice that sort of floats out over the
classroom. He likes to remind us how easy everything is while he tackles some
obscure grammatical structure most of us don’t even know in English. I think
he’d single me out even if I weren’t sitting in the front-and-center death
seat, simply because he likes my name. To be more precise, he likes what he thinks my name is: Dale. I don’t know
how he managed to misread this on the roll sheet the first day, but he’s
sticking with his mistake. And due to his mellifluous style of speech, he
pronounces Dale “DAY-oh.” (Is it a coincidence that this is how we pronounce
the Latin word “Deo,” which means “God”? I don’t know. It could be that he is
making a little joke.)
Jonathan seems particularly prone to call on me when we’re
learning some totally new grammar rule. Here is an actual quote from class: “Okay,
as you can see, the past-contrary-to-fact construction uses the pluperfect
tense of the subjunctive mood in both the protasis and apodosis clauses. This
is really quite straightforward. Would somebody like to take a crack at the
first example, please, DAY-oh?”
The only thing I have on my fellow students is that I’ve
actually used my newly acquired Latin skills outside of class. This won’t help
my grade in Latin, of course, but I might as well get some mileage out of it
here: I read this rad Sir Thomas Wyatt sonnet for an English class. A guy sees this deer and is so blown away by how
beautiful she is that he finds himself uncontrollably and shamelessly chasing
after her, and after finally catching her, discovers something that makes all
his efforts futile:
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
The footnote in my Norton
Anthology of English Literature has this to say: “Noli me tangere quia Caesaris sum (‘Touch me not, for I am Caeser’s’)
was inscribed on the collars of Caesar’s hinds which were then set free and
were presumably safe from hunters.” After studying Latin I can read the whole
thing and could even tell you about how the negative imperative, or
prohibition, uses a complementary infinitive, which is then followed by a conjunction
and the name Caesar in the dative case to indicate possession when used with
the subsequent present indicative first person singular form of the verb “to
be.” But I won’t go into that because it’s boring.
Less boring, of course, is my own pursuit of R—. How has that been going, you might ask? Well, a few times we hung out after class, sitting on
the lawn chatting. I’m trying out this new form of humor where I basically bag
on myself. I’m told this is endearing somehow, and in any event it ties in
nicely with the embarrassing behaviors that I stumble into anyway. For example,
Jonathan was calling on me in class and—due to a combination of sleep
deprivation and this strange college-induced narcolepsy I seem to suffer from—I
actually started falling asleep right in the middle of being drilled. “DAY-oh,
are you falling asleep?!” Jonathan
asked, incredulous. “No, of course not,” I muttered, as the class erupted in
laughter around me.
So after class, I admitted to R— that I truly had been falling asleep, which was
inexplicable because being quizzed in Latin, far from being boring, is actually
kind of terrifying to me. This seemed to really charm her, so I bit the bullet and
asked if she wanted to have lunch sometime. She not only accepted, but
enthusiastically. In fact, I think she may have even blushed. (Actually, that
was me.)
We set our date for Friday after class. The next time class
met (Wednesday) I was trying really hard not
to play myself by being all perma-smile, and though I probably did a poor job
(i.e., was too visibly stoked), she was very tolerant. She mentioned our
upcoming lunch, which seemed almost too good to be true. I’d half-expected her
to totally forget, or pretend to forget, which would have been awkward. (Yeah,
I’m not a natural-born optimist. So sue me.)
On Friday I busted my ass to get to class early, but R— was
a bit late. No biggie, of course. But all through class she seemed not only to
have her gaze averted, but her entire body angled slightly away. It was weird.
I was getting this massive bad vibe off her. I felt like the proverbial elephant
in the room.
After class she couldn’t very well avoid me any longer;
after all, it was time for our lunch. We walked over to Mario’s La Fiesta on Telegraph, because it’s close to campus, has great food, and is dirt cheap (so I could
afford to pick up the tab, and if R— ended up being all modern and saying it’s
lame for the guy to pay, I could say, “Come on, the whole bill is under ten
bucks, it’s nothing!”). I’d never had a bad meal at La Fiesta, but this was
pretty close. R— was just a total cold fish. Where was the laid back, enthusiastic
chick I’d been so merrily chatting with earlier in the week? I couldn’t figure
it out.
Finally (actually, after not so very long a time, between
the chips-and-salsa and the main course) I couldn’t take the stony near-silence
anymore and said, “What is up with
you, anyway?” I know, I know, this is dating suicide, but what did I have to
lose? I was already done for and I knew it. The truth came out: she’d had this
high school boyfriend, and they were still really close and talked on the phone
a lot. They’d decided when they parted ways for college that it was silly to
try to stay together, so they were free to date, which was all well and good
until she told this guy about our upcoming lunch. He got all sore, and
petulant, and whiny (okay, I’m possibly extrapolating a bit here), and they
decided to “get back together.” Never mind that he’s at BYU, which is hundreds
of miles from Berkeley.
I was very suave about the whole thing. “So what you’re
saying is that he loved the idea of dating hot chicks at BYU but it never
occurred to him that you might be
more successful at playing the field, and he hadn’t counted on his own jealousy
and feelings of inadequacy,” I did not say. “Surely you’re aware that in Utah
they practice polygamy,” I did not go on to point out. I did, however, say, “He
should make you a collar graven with diamonds in letters plain, so there is
written, your fair neck round about, ‘Noli
me tangere quia Dickheadis sum.’” No, of course I didn’t say this either.
In fact, this third thing I didn’t think up until later. At the time, I just
sat there, biting my tongue. I was so, so disappointed because, even when
stricken with the awkwardness of the situation, R— was so, so fly.
I went home and played some Simon & Garfunkel. Yes, I’m that nerdy … but it’s not like I had
some girl over whom I needed to impress. Besides, I’d thought of just the song
for my mood: “April, Come She Will.” It concerns a love affair that begins in April (when “the streams are ripe
and filled with rain”), proceeds all summer until June when “she’ll change her
tune,” and on into July when “she will fly,” and so on until September when “I
remember,/ A love once new has now grown old.” Poor guy—but hey, at least he
lasted six months. I only made it six days! And with this realization, I was
moved to write my own song:
Monday, come she may.
The day is bright and filled with sun.
Tuesday, she will stay.
We spend some time just having fun.
Wednesday begins cruel play.
She now seems cold and so withdrawn;
Thursday, my nerves she will fray,
For now I know that something’s wrong.
Friday, I’m pushed away.
At all my pain she is just annoyed;
Saturday, she has gone away.
A love once made has now been destroyed.
I guess the song doesn’t totally fit because my little campaign
didn’t erode gradually—it careened off the road in the span of little more than
an hour—but whatever. I guess it’s also true that it wasn’t entirely my fault I
crashed and burned, though I can’t help but think a savvier guy like Sir Thomas
Wyatt would have known just what to do in this situation and surely would have
gotten the girl in the end. Oh well … at least now I can sit in the back of the
Latin classroom and maybe not get called on so much.
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