Wednesday, August 29, 2007

That explains the weird conversations

There's a tall blond guy who sits most days in the linguistics library and studies. He always seems to be there, no matter what time of day. Now and then I see him in the tearoom too, making himself a drink. Sometimes I try to have a brief chat, though this seems to fluster him a little. Simple observations like, "You were working late last night," or questions like "Have you recovered from that cold you had last week?" often receive confused replies.

He seems very industrious: the student I wished I'd been as an undergraduate, doing extra readings, writing up his notes, reading multiple perspectives on each topic, preparing assiduously for tutorials. He arrives before me in the morning and leaves later at night.

Today I walked into the tearoom and did a double take. He was in there. Standing next to himself.

It turns out there are two of them, similar enough to pass for twins. Suddenly all is clear. (And he's only half as industrious as I had thought.)

6 Comments:

Arbitrista said...

That would freak me out. But what a great story you have now!!

The History Enthusiast said...

LOL! That sounds like something that would happen to me....

Nicola said...

"... the student I wished I'd been as an undergraduate, doing extra readings, writing up his notes, reading multiple perspectives on each topic, preparing assiduously for tutorials"

Come on! That *was* what you were like as an undergrad... weren't you? (How would you describe yourself as an undergrad, if not like that?)

AS said...

LOL! Too funny. :o)

Anonymous said...

hilarious!!

StyleyGeek said...

No, that wasn't me. There were two sorts of classes that I did more than the bare minimum for. One was classes where studying was so much fun that it didn't feel like work at all (e.g. syntax), and the other was the occasional class where I needed to study hard in order to get an A (calculus, philosophy). For most of the rest, I always planned to do and wanted to do more than the bare minimum, but two weeks into the semester, when I missed a reading, or came to a tute unprepared, and nothing happened (no one noticed, it didn't affect my marks), I got into bad habits.