. . . a Nuisance

Not only did I not seduce any men with my haunting saw music, but I also turned off my five roommates to the other forms of music I was required to learn during this semester spent pressing onward through extra Gen Ed courses. For “Creative Music,” I had to learn how to play a conch shell as part of the repertoire. While my roommates joked about Lord of the Flies, I blew spit into my loaner conch shell, trying desperately to get that low trumpet hum. Between this and my attempted ukulele playing, I was voted Least Appreciated Roommate.

If I wasn’t insufferable enough around the house, I also dragged my friends with me to slow-moving play productions and Film Club showings. My friends are also art-appreciators, but none enjoy slow-moving performances quite as much as I do. While Liz died of boredom next to me, I took in every moment of Red, a play in which an old man and a young man wax philosophical for two hours, occasionally adding more and more red paint to a canvas until it was just . . . red. Omg, the title makes so much sense now. I finally understand art.

And then there was Paris, Texas, a film produced in the 1980s, where everyone looks sunburnt, sweaty, and hairy, and the main character trudges through ugly cities and desert landscapes to find his estranged wife.

“Please, guys. I want to see this one!” I begged my regular Film Club crew to go with me. We had been given a schedule of all the showings, and Paris, Texas was one they were all hoping to avoid. “Please,” I folded prayer hands under my chin. I turned to Kate, “I’ll bring playdough for you if you come with me.” I bribed my friends like they were my children who didn’t want to go to church. I also happened to have playdough on hand because it was college, and we all go through phases.

“Fine,” they grumbled.

We sat through an hour and a half of this ugly, boring film. I was glued to the screen, desperate to find something redeemable in this chore of a movie, Kate and Jason passing back and forth globs of playdough that they rolled into snakes on the pull-out desks connected to our lecture seats. And then, an hour and a half in, the film stopped as the computer logged out. Jason laughed under his breath.

“What? No,” I said. Brandon, Film Club president, toddled up to the computer and tried to log back in. The system didn’t recognize him as the admin.

“Well . . .” he said, sighing in defeat. “I guess we can finish it next week?”

My jaw dropped. We only had a measly twenty minutes left, and now we had plodded through it for nothing. My friends audibly sighed in relief.

There was a pause as the president and vice-president tried to figure out an alternative to finish the movie when Kate shot up from her seat, “UGH! Guys, I got playdough EVERYWHERE.”

Brandon shot us a confused look as he powered down the computer.

As we walked across the parking lot to our cars, Jason said smugly, “That movie just wasn’t my cup of tea,” calling back to our first Film Club attendance where one student had sat back in his fedora and offered his critique of Back to the Future.

Not finishing Paris, Texas—the worst movie of all time which I had forced my friends to sit through—was not my cup of tea either. It was like an unresolved chord progression, an inhale without an exhale. For my friends, it was a precious twenty minutes back into their lives.

. . . A Villain

In high school, there was no class I both looked forward to and dreaded more than Drama. Playing games, dancing, and generally having fun with a teacher who rarely enforced any rules always made it a pleasant way to end my day, but I was very self-conscious and shy, so at times it also felt like torture. Thus, I had mixed feelings going into the one theater class I decided to take to fulfill my public speaking requirement in my sophomore year of college.

The first class started with a nap, so I couldn’t complain. The professor instructed us to lay out on the dusty floor and close our eyes as he painted a picture of our bodies slowly, painstakingly dissolving into sand with his soft-spoken words. Am I paying for a relaxation class? I guess it could be worse, I thought.

Unfortunately, this element of relaxation began to turn sour for me as I quickly learned we would be starting each class with partner massages, which seems to be a staple activity for aspiring thespians. Now, I enjoy a massage as much as the next person, but not in this context. Not here in class. Not from a rando I didn’t know. My anxiety rose anytime we started pairing off for this “warm up” activity, and I would end up with some dude who looked like he was twelve or a girl who spent the whole time bragging about what a good masseuse she was, everyone had told her so.

Despite the massage circles that made me shrivel inside, the worst moment in this class came from our discussion of The Glass Menagerie. I was ready for this because I had already done so much analytical reading in my English courses that I felt more in my element. The class began to talk about how tragic the ending was, that Laura would never find love and was destined to be a spinster with no future. The instructor nodded his head and uttered agreement with the depressing ending. I raised my hand, eager to acknowledge how the breaking of the glass animal from her menagerie actually could mean a turning point for her, that she had grown as a character: “I think the ending could be read as hopeful and positive for—”

“Yeah,” the instructor cut me off with a patronizing head tilt and a crinkle of his nose, “I don’t think so.”

And that is the beginning of my villain origin story.