“Super-ladies, they’re always trying
to tell you their secret identity. Think it’ll strengthen the relationship or
something like that. I said, ‘Girl, I don’t want to know about your
mild-mannered alter-ego or anything like that. I mean, you tell me you’re a
super-mega-ultra-lightning-babe, that’s all right with me. I’m good. I’m good.’”
The
Incredibles (2004)1
 |
| See, I tend to be oblivious of my surroundings when reading even if the book is not directly in front of my face. Thanks to stockimages at freedigitialphotos.net. |
Who would you be as a superhero?
Sometimes I think everyone should
have a daft pretend superhuman alter-ego. I call mine Captain Oblivious,2
because my ability to remain completely ignorant of things that are right in
front of me and that any ordinary person would undoubtedly notice really is
quite uncanny. How I gained my powers is a mystery, but their existence and extent
is regularly made manifest in my everyday life. I could provide endless
examples of my ability to tune out any ongoing noises within earshot if I’m
getting on with something at least a bit interesting; of the frustration other people
meet with when trying to garner my attention (particularly, as anyone who’s
ever lived with me will testify, when I have my headphones on3); of my
accidental blanking of people I know well who attempt to greet me in public
while I pootle along on autopilot thinking about something else, or perhaps
absorbed in a conversation with another friend (who is usually good enough to
enlighten me of my unintentional rudeness so that I can do something to rectify
it). Still, the most amusing of Captain Oblivious’ adventures are surely found
in my total failure to recognise the nature of comments which I am later
informed were obviously intended romantically. The details of the following conversation
are heavily fictionalised (for my ease and your entertainment), but I would
consider the overall substance and gist of it an accurate representation of some
real conversations that I’ve had to this effect; I hope they prove vaguely
amusing while you consider the nature of the silly secret identity to which
your own traits might most readily lend themselves.
“You know, everybody seems to have
stories about awful guys who have approached her in the club and tried to get
with her, but that’s never happened to me.”
“Never?”
“Well, it probably helps that I don’t
go clubbing very often at all. I mean, I think about three or four guys came up
to me in the club on graduation night, but they were all wanting to
congratulate me on having won the department prize, so…”
“Well, that’s quite nice.”
“Yeah, it was really nice actually. I
think the only time a guy I didn’t know at all has come up and spoken to me in
the club, he was asking me what drink I was getting at the bar. Which was a bit
weird – I mean, why did he care?”
“…”
“What?”
“He asked what drink you were getting
at the bar?”
“Yeah – weird, right?”
“Anne, he clearly wanted to buy you a
drink. That’s why he was asking what you were getting, so he could offer to pay
for it.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Um. Yes. Most definitely.”
“Well, how the kerfluffle was I
supposed to know that?”
“Oh no … what did you say?”
“Well, I was getting water, because
that’s always what I’m getting when I’m in the club…”
“Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.”
“So, you know, I said, ‘water’. And
he said, ‘well, that’s a bit boring’.”
“And you said…”
“I said, ‘yeah, but, you know, yay
hydration!’”
“You did not.”
“I did.”
“Oh my goodness, I am experiencing so
much secondhand cringe right now. ‘Yay hydration’?!”
“Hydration is great. Hydration is always
a big concern of mine when I’m clubbing.”
“So you brutally rejected this guy
with the incredibly smooth line ‘yay hydration’?”
“Hey, I didn’t know I was brutally
rejecting him!”
“Well, he doesn’t know you didn’t
know. You might have destroyed his confidence for life.”
“Look, if he wanted to buy me a
drink, why didn’t he just say so?”
“Anne, he basically did. Only
you could possibly have failed to recognise that.”
“Oops.”
“Oops indeed. Still, I suppose you
can always console yourself with your lovely department prize.”
“Yeah, I was quite proud of winning
the department prize actually. I mean, yeah, the fact that there was no
consistent capping policy for language exams did massively inflate my overall
grade, but it still feels pretty gratifying to have done that well considering
I started without the requisite Latin A-level.4 Like, I hadn’t even
done any prose comp5 before I came to uni. Which, come to think of
it, makes it rather strange…”
“What?”
“Well, there was this guy in my halls
in first year who also did Classics and used to come by my room to borrow my Latin
prose comps, but, what with me being such a beginner, I can’t imagine they were
particularly better than his.”
“…”
“What?”
“Anne, did the possibility not even
cross your oh-so-brilliant mind that this guy might have been asking to borrow
your admittedly mediocre prose comps just as an excuse to stop by your room?”
“What? No – why on earth would he do
that?”
“Um, maybe because he was interested
in you?”
“Ha, yeah, I don’t think so. Although…”
“Although what?”
“Well, it occurs to me that there was
one time when he was giving a prose comp back that he said he owed me a drink
at the next Classics Society social.”6
“And it still didn’t cross
your mind?!”
“Well. No.”
“Are you kidding me?! What did
you say?”
“Well, I actually hadn’t got
particularly involved with the Classics Society yet, so, I, er, told him that I
actually hadn’t got particularly involved with the Classics Society yet.”
“You did not!”
“I did. I mean, it was only fair to
let him know that he’d probably have some trouble making good his promise,
right?”
“So you brutally rejected him too!”
“But I didn’t even know I was doing
it! That entire communication took place on a whole different plane of which I
had no awareness!”
“That doesn’t make any difference,
Anne. It still happened.”
Although actually, even now, I’m not altogether
convinced it did. Maybe this guy wasn’t interested in me at all. Maybe he was
just really bad at Latin prose comp. In any case, the moral of the story is
that the only reliable way to make one’s true intentions clear to Captain
Oblivious is to state them explicitly – having first made certain that I’m
actually paying attention, of course.
Well, hopefully that little anecdote
has given you some time to ponder your own remarkable abilities, O Undoubtedly
Remarkable Reader, and the consequent nature and name of your own daft pretend
superhuman alter-ego. Do leave a comment if you’ve come up with a good one…
Footnotes
1 Thanks to BaD_BURN for posting the film transcript
here: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Incredibles,-The.html.
2 A housemate of mine remarked that this name works
particularly well on the grounds that it sounds a bit like ‘Captain Oblivion’,
which one could imagine being the name of an actual, not-daft superhero.
Interestingly, both ‘oblivious’ and ‘oblivion’ derive from the Latin obliuiscor,
meaning to forget: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=obliuiscor&la=la.
3 I’m sure I’ve recommended my lovely, sustainably-produced,
possessing-fabulously-good-noise-cancelling headphones in another post, but
since they’re currently on sale on the manufacturer’s website, http://www.thehouseofmarley.co.uk/headphones/on-ear-headphones/positive-vibration-on-ear-headphones-dubwise.html,
it seemed opportune to do so again.
4 Strictly speaking, I was on the Classical Studies course,
for which no previous study of Latin or Greek was required, but had chosen to
take, as one of my optional modules, Latin at the level intended for those who
did have an A-level, and I subsequently transferred onto the straight Classics
course for which a Latin or Greek A-level would indeed have been requisite –
as, indeed, it still is, although I was sure I’d heard to the contrary: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/undergraduate/degrees/classics/classics/.
Still, that was all a bit complicated to explain in the main text, and what,
after all, are footnotes for?
5 That is, prose composition, a term which for all
practical purposes refers to translation into the target language.
6 My university has so many societies. Check it out: https://www.exeterguild.org/societies/.
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