Inner Poise

There is a man in my class who annoys me.

He's insufferably all-knowing, socially obtuse, makes unkind jokes, is always late to class though he lives 5 minutes away, and is ungenerous.

For instance. There is an unspoken rule that when you go and buy a snack for yourself, you offer it to other students who are around. Everyone shares. This fellow does the same. He sometimes even takes food from the wrapper even when the owner isn't there! And he never, but NEVER brings food to share. Today he bought two fried snack things, and offered not a bite to anyone else. Yo, YOU'RE the one working at the stock exchange here, buster! How about easing up on taking food from people who don't have jobs?

Sister Maria, the 42-year-old Japanese nun with whom I was paired for the oral midterm. She's extremely sweet and very, very conscientious. Earlier this week, this fellow was seated next to her, and because he was late and missed the answers to a page full of questions, he took advantage of a moment in which she was asking the teacher something to take her book, plunk it on his side of the desk and start copying answers! Without even fucking asking her!

I was seated with him and the Catholic priest today, and we had to read out questions given to us and make up answers using the grammar pattern we'd just learned. This fellow read the question when it was his turn, but didn't deign to make up any answers, instead staring off into space. The priest and I chugged along by ourselves for a while, until I waspishly pointed out that the fellow hadn't answered any of the questions.

The know-it-all-itis may be the worst of it, though. Yesterday we had to memorize a short dialogue, and the teacher pointed out natural stops in a particularly long sentence. I was practicing this dialogue with the fellow, and he stopped me to laugh, "You know, you're reading this like a robot! People don't really talk like that, you know, not with all the breath stops and stuff. They just say it. So try speaking naturally."

Damn. Just recalling that makes my blood boil. The fellow has lived in Seoul for two years and is getting married to a Korean woman in May. So yeah, he's pretty good at Korean. But he by no means has bragging rights. When we're reviewing vocab, his voice is always heard asking "What's this? Okay, what's this?" Then, when someone else tells him, he turns to the next person and says, "Car. It means car," as if that person didn't know. Half of the time, he's misunderstood the explanation and the word actually means toaster oven or something.

Today, he said with absolute conviction and surety that the verb "to live" was conjugated a way that I was 95 percent sure was incorrect. But when I said, no I don't think so, I think it's this way, he shook his head as if he were the teacher and pronounced the incorrect conjugation even more exaggeratedly, as if I were a dolt. Grrr.

Have you got a sense now of how much he bugs? I must admit, I said "PLBBBT!" when the teacher confirmed that I was right about the conjugation.

I should NOT let this guy get to me. Because he's not being annoying as hell on purpose -- that's just the way he is. He can't help it. But I can help my reactions. As the Dalai Lama so rightly says, if your neighbor hates you, it's no good hating her back, since it just comes back to bite YOU in the ass. (Somewhat paraphrased.) So I will do my best to treat this schmuck -- I mean, person -- as a test of my patience from now on.

How will I do this? By reaching over and pulling his tongue out of his mouth the next time he implies that someone is several stages below him on the evolutionary scale? Good idea, but, uh, no, unfortunately. I don't think I'll get any patience points for acting as jerky as he does.