NRFU Diary - Day 3

I wouldn’t have imagined it possible, but it got even worse yesterday. But that particular cloud had a thin silver lining.

It turned out that Ellen wasn’t the only attention junkie in our group of 15; several other women had only been hiding their neediness lights beneath bushel baskets. As the day progressed — glacially, except not quite that fast — at least four of them seemed to be trying to come up with more intricate hypothetical situations we could ponder and ponder and ponder. Eddie, the boorish fat latino, continued to blurt things about his Extensive Experience in the Field at random moments in between doing the most hideous doodling I’ve ever seen. And we’re not talking about demure blurting, but sharp, canine blurting that on at least three occasions rudely shattered the trance I’d managed to go into.

Then it got worse. They decided it wasn’t enough to dream up ridiculously intricate hypothetical situations in which we census...enumerators might be at a momentary loss as to which little box to put a X (not a check!) with our No. 2 pencils. They began cracking jokes too, not a one of them far below my own lofty standard of excellence.
One of the few pleasures of being ancient is coming to understand how we age, and how very little we really change. One member of our group, a dour, rotund little woman of late middle age, is forever finding in our many workbooks and manuals exactly the arcane bits of knowledge our instructor needs to make a definitive ruling on some tricky issue. She is absolutely joyless and nearly inaudible as she advises the instructor of her discovery, and every time she does it I picture her at seven being praised as Daddy’s Perfect Girl because she never raises her voice above a murmur and can spell words you’re not supposed to be able to spell until middle school, or name all 50 state capitals.

So here’s the thin silver lining. Being around these people raises my self-esteem. I’m (silently, except here, in the privacy of my own rantings) arrogant, but not boorish or needy. Where others are forever desperately cracking stupid jokes, or blurting, or posing complicated questions just for the joy of having the instructor’s attention, the worst I do is mutter, “Oh, for crying out loud!” or even, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” occasionally when, for instance, Ellen yet again derails the train, if you will, to complain about the clumsiness of the prose in one of our manuals. I dare to imagine that I look pretty good in comparison.