A One Girl Revolution

So I had a really wonderful lovely weekend at Georgetown, but first I feel compelled to tell you about the experience I just had on the train coming home. I sit down in DC on the aisle (I have that little claustrophobia thing) and along comes this guy to sit in the window seat. Immediately pulls out his computer and all kinds of stuff, gets all set up and wants me to notice he's doing it. Opens a word doc in Courier New-- the yes, I'm writing on a computer, but at least it looks like a typewriter font. Puts down a few more paragraphs, hems and haws over them. I'm reading the Times on my Kindle, ignoring him. Finally he asks whether I happen to be a creative writer, he needs help with his story. No, I'm not a writer, but I read. Why not? So I take the bait, I read the story, talk to him about it for a few minutes. It's pretty good--so clever that it teeters on the edge of being really smug and annoying, but it doesn't fall off the cliff. I find he's that way too. He's exactly the kind of boy I would have been infatuated with when I was his age (20). A little too smart for his own good, which comes off as eccentricity, not arrogance. He's good looking, but grew up scrawny and awkward enough that he's not aware of it. And he doesn't need help with his story, he needs me to read it so I can see how clever he is. This is how he gets girls, I realize. I also realize that he doesn't realize how old I am. So I burst that bubble pretty quickly, but we spent the next two hours talking. He is alternately engaging and cloying. There are moments when he's genuine, talking about his best friend who he'd just visited in DC, but he spends an awful lot of time regaling me with stories of all the colorful characters he knows, all the silly random things he does for sheer novelty. More stuff that would have made him so interesting to me at that age, but seems so much more ordinary now. I had a major wave of nostalgia for those boys as I was sitting there--the ones would blow off Russian History on a Thursday afternoon to sit on Copley Lawn in the sunshine just to pull out an A on the final anyway. The ones who talked constantly of being disaffected and finally up and left the country after graduation, using the ex-pat persona to house their disillusionment. Nostalgia, but not interest. When we got to New York, I was ready to leave. He was unready for separation, wanting to be Facebook friends. I told him flat out I feared stalking, but gave him my card anyway. All I have (or need) on him is a name: Donald.