Feeling Evil

Toward the end of college, the Muse and I took a few classes together, one of which was a modern American history class taught by a senior graduate, who would, at the slightest prompting, tell you about his search for a tenure-track professor somewhere, anywhere. One day, he said that “we would be talking about the past today, but all of history is in the past, I guess, so we’re going to talk about it anyway.” As was typical of these classes, we were sentenced to a one-hour “discussion section” of about 10 students led by a junior grad student. When the Muse and I walked into our discussion section, I more or less decided that there was no point to showering or brushing my hair because I was never going to be as good-looking as the grad student teaching the section.

We’ll call this Adonis “BS.” Well, BS seemed to develop a bit of crush on the Muse, which, as you can imagine, did not please me. Moreover, this guy knocked my grade on a paper about the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath down partly because I said that one character in the movie was a clear allusion to FDR. Specifically, BS wrote on this part of my paper, “From under what deconstructionist rock did you get this?” Later, in college, when an actual professor referred to the fact that the character in the movie looked amazingly like FDR, I wanted to hunt down BS and rub his nose in it.

Well, the Muse and I got to talking about BS a while ago. She referred to some newspaper columnist saying that he was “so gay” for some other man, I said that I really didn’t understand the concept, that I understood how other guys could be super good-looking like BS, but that I didn’t really understand the “so gay for” thing. This led the Muse to Google BS. What she discovered induced me to develop a truly wicked, evil sense of superiority.

The Muse’s Googling turned up that BS got his Ph.D in 2001 – a mere nine years after our class with him – then went and got a law degree – in 2006 – and is now a junior attorney at a Nevada firm, practicing water and environmental law. I practice water and environmental law. I graduated from law school in 1995. I have been an attorney for over 12 years. I made partner in 2002.

As soon as the Muse showed me BS’s current occupation and status, my immediate thought, “Oh my God, if he was my associate” – notice the ownership allusion, “my” associate – “I would make his life miserable.” I started cooking up miserable projects I could give BS. I would send him to depositions with obnoxious opposing counsel. I would work the words “deconstruct” and :”rock” into every conversation.

I knew this was bad, but, ooh, it felt good. Like milk, I guess a little hypothetical revenge does a body good.