Random Memory
Back in 1991, I had my greatest high school-era experience — I attended the Duke Young Writers Camp at Duke University. It was the summer before my Senior year, and my first glimpse of what college would be like. To say that I changed my outlook on life in the two week session, would be an understatement.
There was this kid there from Falls Church, VA named Mark. Mark was a real dick to me, knowing that I was from Hagerstown, and was quick to discount my claim that I lived near D.C. He was also one of those guys, who seems untouchable, morally superior and right about everything. He was always quick to condemn me and my friends (who, in retrospect, weren’t probably the best people for me to have aligned myself with, but I was only 16), and made himself out to be this great paragon of honesty and virtue.
Yet, for some reason I remember seeing Mark running through the quad with his girlfriend’s bra on, and how she cried because of the embarassment and humiliation. She was slightly overweight and her bra was enormous. It was classically juvenile and cruel, and did completely broke the illusion of Mark as the “good guy.” My friends were dicks, but they didn’t do things like that.
The lesson, of course, is that everyone — even the most morally upstanding like Mark — has the capacity to be a great douche bag.
I don’t know why I thought of this, but it flashed in my head while on the way to work this morning. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story that was on NPR, which was about Charles Darwin.
