Very Much Older Men

Coffee always turns my depression into an agitated state of violent unrest. When I’m caffeine’d out, I’m perfectly horrid company, unless I’m going to get screwed. I feel pissed, and get pissed; in general, my whole personality becomes pissy. There are only two states in which I am perfectly honest to myself: when I’m drunk or when I’m on coffee, and nothing beats the overly over-roasted variety.

Yesterday evening had been inordinately weird. I was sitting around in the café (as I seem to be doing a lot of lately) reading on how feelings are really a mental perception of a certain state of the body –can you see how sex would be paramount to romantic love and the whole idea of abstinence rather undesirable to your mental well-being?-

I was appallingly agitated from the double espresso and felt like hitting someone. There was no one about who looked like they wanted to be used as a punch bag, of course, but the guy sitting on the table next to mine kept on looking at me like I was an amusing fixture of the café. I couldn’t help it and had to stare back every time he stared at me.

Finally he asked me to come sit on the place across him, after asking me what the material I had been perusing for the last hour pertained to.

‘Social Science.’ I told him.

Then he said something about being rather good at it and if I wanted some help. I couldn’t help but feel that when he’d invited me to his table, he wasn’t so much as asking for my company as he was wanting some amusement to kill time till his next appointment.

He looked about 50, wasn’t particularly attractive, dressed in a Polo tee, slacks and sandals, and reminded me of my dad back when I was a little girl. Right down to the condescending attitude I had felt he had used on me.

‘All my stuff’s here, why don’t you come over?’ I said.

He looked at me like I was a little minx. Had I no idea he was much older and that little girls should always do as they are told? (Oh, I forgot to mention what I was wearing: Mini-cotton shorts and a cotton halter, both extremely junior high and belonging to my little sister. I looked all of 15). But he came over and sat across me anyway. We talked for awhile, and it soon became apparent he was perfectly disinterested in whatever I was reading.

He asked me weird questions about what I wanted to do in life, if I had any direction, and I told him I wanted to get married and do absolutely, nothing aside from whatever it was that pleased me. I was sick in believing in a future filled with educational degrees, corporate money and the constant need to succeed.

He said I was depressed, my boyfriend had probably just broken up with me, and I would get over it in no time and be back into desiring to climb the career ladder.

‘You are so young, you can’t possibly think you have no future.’

‘I don’t think I have no future, I just don’t care very much for it to let it dictate how I lived now.’

-Insert more chastising on how I was too young to know any better-

Then! He told me how he’d just arrived in the country and had not seen much of it, and would like to take me out for a drink sometime and have me show him around.

I got rather irritated at this. He felt like a pervert trying to be my dad.

‘Well, leave me your name card.’

‘Oh, I really don’t know about that. You’re too young for me.’

Excuse me? Did you not just ask me out for a drink?

‘Well, suit yourself.’

He looked at me with mild incredulity. ‘That’s was very polite of you.’

‘You were the one who said I was too young!’

He left in awhile, asking me to come by and meet him again the next evening at the café. And I felt rather amused at the perfectly pointless endeavor of having been rude to someone much, much older.

xoxox