CONCEPTS OF LOVE

With GRE Flashcards in My Waitress Apron

4:30pm

When I realized was when I beamed, “I don’t want to be intractable about it!” which I’d already told the paper placemats and napkins, crouched with my head in the cabinet to, practicing. He laughed loudly, putting some non-visible part of me at ease, and said grouchily, “Well, you are,” or maybe even “Well, you are being it.” Worsening, he clarified, “Nah, no, I’m just kidding.” Maybe his recant intended an apology to my face betraying nervous disappointment as I realized he didn’t know what else to say. That he didn't understand. Rather, my face would have betrayed my nervous disappointment in him, if he was more perceptive.

4:15pm

“Intractable means stubbornly obnoxiousness,” I told him, even though the folded paper in my apron pocket listed its definition as “stubborn, not easily disciplined.” I defied it because I sought arduously to rectify our blundered previous encounter and was trying to say something heavy to bury it under. He lost count of how many placemats he had in his hand and started again. "What?" I said, “Another word means stubbornly obnoxious. It’s intractable.” Dissatisfying my desire to speak proportionately less than him during our conversations, feeling pedantic, in my head defining pedantic as pretentiously erudite, derisively didactic and mockingly pedagogical before internally conciliating to the listed definition, emphasizing minutiae or form in scholarship or teaching, and realizing I overshot the word’s negative connotation while executing the When Aesthetic is Pedantic  Invite-only Meeting of the Minds Evening back when I lived in Ithaca, I added, “We don’t have to play this game anymore.”

4:00pm

Having successfully initiated an intellectual quiz, a hallway banter we could play into endlessly without exceeding quick exchanges, I passed him at the placemats and barked, "recalcitrant!" First he said, “Hold on a sec,” and I thought, oh no, I’m annoying. I went on to quiz him for many repetitions of “recalcitrant” longer than was appropriate, having missed his immediate acquiescence because it came so much sooner than expected. I withheld the solution to my lustful vocabulary test, lording it over him, pedantic in the bad, aesthetic way, before mistakenly answering his vacuous plea with “stubbornly obnoxious” many times. Maybe two. He even said, “stubbornly what?” Oh crap, it means stubbornly rebellious. "Stubbornly rebellious."

3:45pm

The game started at the counter by the up sheet where we make currency of work shifts, when I whirled my list out of my pocket, ebullient about leaning against the same part of the counter as him at the same time. I wanted to choose one good word for him to learn. “Say it again?” I did. “Stubbornly what?” And I forgot, and we shared a moment of head levelness while I looked again at the sheet. “Rebellious.”

Our heads were level also when he said he’d heard of the word iconoclast but was unsure of the meaning, and I said, “I know, me too!”

3:30pm

Glowing with pretentious eruditeness, I explained how the word ellipsis could refer to either the dots or to the chunk of words missing. I said, “You know how an ellipsis is those three dots?” and he said, “No.” I suspected he wasn’t following when I drew in the air to describe quoting two disparate segments of a block of text, and thought he figured I was stupid for being unable to explain laconically why it’s cool that some words can be used as verbs as well as adjectives. I tipped the level and his head rolled off the scale.

Our heads were on the level when we admitted to each other our preoccupation with hair management on such nights as we were currently surrounded, by swelter.