Put your makeup on, fix your hair all pretty/ And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

~The Boss, Bruce Springsteen

An international student swept into my office this morning in a fog of Drakkar Noir that was tasted rather than smelled and threw himself clumsily onto one of my fancy, day-glo green office chairs and sighed dismissively. OK, douche, I thought, bring it. As I'd anticipated, he was about as prepared for the meeting as one might be for an extraterrestrial anal probe, and as my mouse pointer lingered for a sweet moment on the "Transfer Out [To a New School]" button while he hastily filled out his forms, I noticed that he had listed as his place of birth Bhopal, India.

Now, should you not remember the significance of Bhopal, go here. I, in my apparently infinite ability to retain minutia about dreadful things, knew it instantaneously.

In an attempt to chat it up with the chap, I asked him if Bhopal was, indeed, his place of birth. "Yeah", he responded with a heavy sigh. "It's a nasty place, but at least it's better than New Jersey, right?"

{!!!!!!!!}

My first knee-jerk instinct was to close my door and gut him like a trout, but since I relish my job and seem to be getting better at it as the days go by, I thought that I might like to keep it and not finish my days under heavy surveilance without even a conjugal visit to which I could look forward. As he lowered his head with a filthy smirk still pasted on his face, I had to evaluate the two reasons I envisioned why he'd say a thing like that.

1) Above my desk there are large, metal storage bins, and I have taken to purchasing magnets for them so they don't look so... uh... post-soviet. A particular series of these magnets are state magnets, and I'd taken care to purchase magnets of states where I'd spent more than a month of my life. Among them are Utah, where I soundlessly, and to my mother's attestation, painlessly entered the world to the sound of trumpets from the heavens, West Virginia, North Carolina, California, Nevada, Indiana, Maine, and New Jersey. Had he seen the magnet? Did he know that I spent fourteen years growing up in the most mocked state in the Union, a state whose honor I protect even though I haven't lived there in more than eleven years? He couldn't have known, and I moved hastily to Reason Two.

2) The student is a barf-bag.

The above transaction took less than twenty seconds by my calculation, and allowed me to utilize the element of surprise. "Uh, I grew up in New Jersey", I said deliberately, making full eye contact with him. By "full eye contact" I mean "my eyes were open so wide that they resembled ping-pong balls cut in half over each socket" and by "deliberately" I mean "with an edge implying dire consequences for a wrong move at this point." He stopped scribbling and looked up at me.

"Oh", he said.

"Oh", I thought. OH? I decided that it was best at that point to drop it and move on with the appointment; it was the better part of me that commanded me to do this. Part of it was because of personal inquiry into why I felt the need to be so defensive in the first place. If he had been to New Jersey, chances are that - like most people's - his experience was only of the heavily industrialized portion that abuts New York City. He hadn't see the lush fecundity of my hometown - the broad, tree-lined streets, the verdant mountains - nor had he experienced growing up in a small New Jersey town where kids were safe to walk home from school and where most people knew your name. It wasn't perfection, but I'm glad to have grown up there. It's the memory of that - a reflection of the past, and not necessarily the present - that I defend.

I have a feeling, though, that if he'd ventured to slander Maine I would have been washing his effluent off my clothes for weeks.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic