A Pretentious Portrait of Pretension

Fiction Writing class. The little room is stuffy, full of legal pads and enough decaying biographies on Shakespeare that you sort of want to wear a beret, smoke menthols, and compare the color of the table to Contemplation or Sorrow. But it's just blue.

A small girl with an angular face wears predictably unusual costume jewelry. She displays it by sitting up straight, never moving her whole head more than a centimeter, but constantly flickers her eyes beneath a furrowed brow, as if she's in a permanent state of deep, pained thought.

A large boy with an honest-to-God* handlebar mustache extracts a lot of pleasure out of looking down and mumbling to himself, though he would never admit to taking pleasure in anything at all. He wraps a bandanna around his unwashed long hair, too bitter and unsmiling to succumb to social norms for the sake of his fellow bitter and unsmiling students.

Clearing her throat theatrically, a girl in all black prepares to divulge her brilliant criticism about another Bard's new short story-- a tale of delicious misery, hurting so good, and how great it feels to feel awful. "I like that you chose this word," she says, pointing to one polysyllabic analogical archaic morpheme. Or some shit. "Not many people know this word," she adds. "But I read the dictionary, so."

I almost can't stop myself from chuckling this time. Honey. We all read the dictionary. We've all uttered that identical sentence before (accompanied by identical flicks of the hand) when we've felt our supreme pretentiousness was being challenged: "I read the dictionary, so." That's why we're here. That's why we're majoring in Creative Writing. Every single one of us is that person determined to never be part of a "them."

We're all so laughably similar in our attempts to be sickeningly different.


Chipotle burritos this year: 13
Subscribers: 27,042
Nail color: "Green with Envy," ORLY

*Extremely hardcore students of John Green's writing: See what I did there?