Sunday, April 14, 2013

Charles captures my hand

So, yes, at a bar in New Haven, in Fall 2000. I was with law school friends--at that point I was about as big a BWOC as I'd ever been or would ever be, and the fall of 2L is a time when the few Friday nights you can go out drinking with your 2L friends are like hours snatched from the jaws of death. I'm not a woman who has ever acted particularly wild at bars, but that fall was an exception because of the tension that gripped all of us as we headed towards the crucial 2L make or break summer-associateship. I may have had too much to drink that night.

Charles was with classics friends. Now classicists have been known to drink a lot, and you will often hear them say that classicists can drink with the best of them. Indeed it's clear that when they're drunk they lose the slightest suspicion (which, sober, they have) that no one other than a classicist could ever be interested in what they have to say about Vergil. When drunk, therefore, they are positive that shouting offensive things about Camilla in the eleventh book of the Aeneid makes them some sort of Dionysiac demi-gods. Charles had had too much to drink, as well, and was shouting said things.


Here was I, barely aware (if that) that he had decided to return to school for an MA; even less aware that he had decided to do that in New Haven (he confesses, the darling, that knowing I would be there provided a strong nudge for his choice of grad school, as he thought about me, and Pisistratus butt-fucking the daughter of Megacles).
 . . .

For more about the "real" me, read the Companion! You'll find the rest of this post (and it's hot, I promise!) there.

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