Scene: Thai Orchid Restaurant, Interior

Scene: Thai Orchid Restaurant, Interior

          ‘It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.’ – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

          Time with daughters is especially precious after the nest has emptied, so I was savouring each moment of the expedition Ruth and I shared to the Thai Orchid in Ham East for bowls of green curry and heaps of personal connection, Ruth then living out in the world and not in a room in my house. This was some time early in this century.

          It was great. I was deeply enjoying both the connectedness and the curry when some faceless asshole who happened to be walking by our table butted in.

          Well, he wasn’t exactly faceless. I remember that he wore glasses, had almost colourless skin that fit his facial bones with definite signs of middle age sag. He was fairly tall and medium-skinny, and he was smirking.

          I’ve never had tolerance for smirking. It’s probably the result of associating it with the facial expression favoured by the people who’d bullied and tormented and otherwise abused me when I was a kid.

          The asshole in the restaurant didn’t wait for any break in our conversation, or politely try to attract our attention. He just butted in over something Ruth had been saying:

          ‘What part of the States are you from?’ Boom. Twangy voice overriding ours for volume.

          I have a vague mashup of an accent, but people always focus on differences rather than similarities.

          The last place where I resided in the Evil Empire was South Texas. The first thing that boring, narrow people in Texas asked upon meeting me was where I was from. I resided there for twelve years. Add that to my then-13 or -14 years here in the Waikato, and the world’s oversupply of boring, narrow people, and by then my patience with that shit was nonexistent, even if they were polite about it, which he obviously wasn’t.

          It’s not a topic of conversation that interests me at all.

          I considered finding some object on the table and using it to smash the smirk off his face, but then I also considered Ruth’s sensibilities and the tedious amount of paperwork that might result from such a response, however righteously justified.

          All I did, therefore, was give him the evil eye for a count of about ten before responding, with as much cold hostility as I could manage, ‘My daughter and I were enjoying a conversation about things that interest us both before you intruded with your inexcusably rude interruption.’

          I must admit that I did enjoy watching his smirk transmogrify, although it was just into something of an abashed but hopeful-for-friendship grin. No blood stained any clothing in the process but, hey, we can’t have everything.

          Now, he could have pulled himself up with some semblance of dignity, huff, turn, and stalk off, but he was, unfortunately, no quitter. ‘Well,’ he quavered – a bit of added sniffling would have gone well here, but he missed his chance, ‘I didn’t mean to, y’know …’, thereby drawing the intrusion out.

          I pointedly ignored him and asked Ruth to repeat what she’d been saying.

          I often wonder about the origins – the causative factors – of that sort of behaviour. I don’t know what makes people feel entitled to ask total strangers intrusive questions based on some obvious superficiality that makes them a minority locally. I mean, it would never occur to me to approach a stranger and ask, or to ask people when first meeting them, ‘Do I notice that your eyes kinda have that shape? Hmm? Are you part Japanese or part Chinese?’

          Considering the number of new people we all encounter daily, from supermarket check-out personnel to old friends’ sisters, it seems to be obvious to me that non-standard-issue people might want to discuss other shit. It seems as if they think that we wake up every morning and say, ‘Oh boy, I hope I get to talk about (a) my accent, (b) the shape of my eyes, (c) the texture of my hair (d) my freckles, or (e) any other glaringly obvious and irrelevant superficialities – at least five times today!’

          Of course, I realise that I’m not like other people.

          Some combination of DNA and childhood home environment moulded that Thai restaurant intruder into someone with an ego so outsized and unidimensional that he just naturally assumes that other people only exist in regard to him, that they aren’t complete organisms such as himself. He didn’t mean to – no thought about what we were doing there.

          In a way it’s like viewing life as a movie.

          Now, I think that viewing life as a movie has its interesting aspects, and can be a bit of fun sometimes, but it creates problems when the starring role is that of an asshole who thinks he’s a hero and considers all the other principal characters in the movie to be two-dimensional objects, who exist solely to move his plot along, and all those with small walk-on parts and extras to be nothing more than scenery that eats.

          Tedious.