Monday, November 22, 2004

Pseudointellectual Nineteen-Year-Old Pipe Smokers

I have a stereotype in my mind, for those pseudointellectual often-students who spout seemingly postmodernistic crap without knowing what they're talking about.

There's the densely-haired bloke who smokes a pipe, 'not that it's any big deal' that he smokes a pipe. He's only nineteen, it turns out. He smokes a pipe. And is sometimes seen reading his books in the coffee bar (really just a smallish cafeteria on campus). Possibly with his pipe.

Perhaps I am making more of his pipe-smoking than there really is to be made, but it does seem that he actually does place a lot of stock in how his pipe-smoking is 'no big deal'. Naturally, it turns out that the whole thing is a metaphor for postmodernism, but I'm just not interested in how or what exactly. It's just exceedingly irritating that he has this arrogance to smoke a pipe as if to enlighten others as to how there is no enlightenment. That's, supposedly, what he means by his pipe-smoking being 'no big deal'.

Well, I can beat that. I'm a smoker, of cigarettes, because it would've been stupid for me to stub them out on myself without smoking them first! Beat that!

Then there's the woman who obviously has deep-seated, and deeply-buried, 'issues'. This is manifested in her actually-condescending - though you wouldn't notice it at the time - attitude towards you. There's something somehow seemingly patronising about how she tells you things - about yourself. There's something that you can't quite put your finger on about her. Something that she's managing to pull-off that the nineteen-year-old pipe-smoker never manages to achieve. And something about the way she dresses! It just confirms the aura of clouded darkness.

Her attitude towards you, of course, is her projection of how she has 'issues' onto you. She is 'sorted', or so her dark fantasy goes, and she's seeing how you've got progress to make, lessons to learn in your life, but it'll all come in time. At least, that's what her atmosphere of 'knowingness' suggests.

Naturally, these two characters refer to each other, each expressing the view that the other hasn't understood something rather fundamental. Of course, it's the woman who is the more formidable of the two, as the nineteen-year-old pipe-smoker is obviously just a jerk. She is much more formidable.

But you agree with her wholeheartedly when she quips about his pipe.

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