You Think It, I'll Say It

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“It’s not that you’re wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable.”

After Rae and Isaac and I became best friends, it occurred to me only occasionally to wonder whom we were replacing. Who had been Rae’s previous best friends?

as a freshman, I had found the term boot and rally so anthropologically interesting that I’d shared it with my parents, thereby disturbing my mother.

What does it mean?

Jason himself seemed perfectly relaxed—he pretty much always does, which is one of his best qualities, except when it’s infuriating.

Or maybe you’d just want to sit on your couch and balance your checkbook and not hear another person breathing while they read the newspaper five feet away and looked over every ten or fifteen minutes so that you had to smile back—about nothing!—and periodically utter a term of endearment.

“You believe that people are watching you go through your life,” I said. “That if you use a big vocabulary word, someone will be impressed, or if you make a joke, someone will laugh, or that you’re scoring points by buying glitter for underprivileged children. But no one cares. Do you understand that? No one gives a shit what you do. And everyone can see how desperate and pathetic you are, so you might as well just stop pretending that you—”