Danger

Being a poser can be dangerous because, if you're really good at it, members of the community that you are mocking will come forward and try to be your friend. This happens to me a lot, but once over the summer I saw it happen to someone else.

After an evening of passion, Susan and a new lover and his brother-like friend went out for burritos in Williamsburg. On the other side of town, Jenny had slept over my apartment in Bushwick, and then we headed into Williamsburg to eat and maybe sell some clothes. Walking down Havemeyer we ran into our friend, who had left her date and his friend in the restaurant in search of an automated teller machine. We invited ourselves to juevos rancheros with them.

Because of her precise drawings and Twiggy figure, Susan can easily lay every soft-spoken, visual artists on the eastern seaboard. These kind of dudes tend to use their exceptionally-nerdy pasts to make jokes that only one or two people can hear. Unfortunately, they are rarely fond of me because I'm too loud and funny, often disproving the two fundamental truths by which they live: that a, they are the funniest person at the table, and b, people who have a lot of friends have limited cultural knowledge or significance. I see where she's coming from on these guys, though; they're usually hot and wearing funny things.

So we were eating, and the guys were talking about Star Wars: Episode II but not loud of enough for Jenny and me to really hear, since we were imposing, so I just started yelling and getting hyper.The guy who had originally been a 3rd wheel to burrito breakfast, until Jenny and I came along, went to the counter to order some lemonade. He was wearing a shirt with the Aztec Calendar on it, and when the man who was manning the register saw it, he got so excited that he turned around, bent over slightly, and pulled up his shirt, revealing a tattoo that took up most of his back of the Aztec Calendar.

There are a lot of emotions that are easy to feign, but surprised and excited aren't two of them. The kid smiled blankly and quietly made a remark about the coincidence. He told the man at the register that he had never been to Mexico, but that his friend had, and he had gotten the shirt for him. To some extent, he admitted to the man that he didn't really know what the design meant. I stopped spying at that point, and went back to yelling. I knew that awkwardness all too well... [more on that soon]