You Want A Piece of Me?

I read this on A Girl Walks Into A Bar, and realized that it beautifully illustrates another sign that you might be studying for the bar: you crave confrontation. Granted, in GG's case, a brick to the head of the offender might be more tempting than most confrontations would, even were it not for the bar, but the point is still the same.

Used to be that if I was studying somewhere, and people were talking too loudly or something, I'd just kinda shrug it off and bitch about it later. Everytime I'm studying now in my library, if someone starts talking too loudly a little part of me, more and more everyday, really hopes that a confrontation can somehow evolve of it - most of the time, the confrontation seems preferable to having them just talk quieter - just to give me an excuse to emasculate or otherwise humiliate someone.

And then the other day it happened. I was hip deep in sellers' remedies, when these two fat fucking pieces of shit started just yammering away in right the middle of the designated reading area. Now, ordinarily I'm a pretty nice guy, and I wouldn't ordinarily resort to petty name calling and juvenile labeling of people... but the way I see it, if you're gonna make a public spectacle of yourself, then you invite any ridicule imaginable from those you're annoying.

So anyway, normally, all I would have to do in this situation is lift my head and sigh or something like that, and a normal person that was talking too loud would realize that he was talking too loud, and talk quieter or move somewhere else. That didn't work this time. So I began to leer, wating for one of them to sense it and see me. And they did, but they didn't stop. So I looked back into my notes and did the "those-fucking-morons-who-do-they-think-they-are" disapproving head shake. That they saw. Please, please, please come over here and try to confront me, is all I could think. And this they obliged.

"Excuse me," Tweedle-ton said as she approached my table. "Do you have a problem with something?"

"Well it's just that this is the reading section of the library, and I doubt that you talk that loud even outside of the library, so I don't understand why you would talk that loud here." It was at that point than something else became very obvious: You know you you talk about "pushing peoples' buttons," sometimes? Well this lady's buttons all blinked in bright colors and made cool noises... you couldn't them.

"Listen to me, you," she said. "I am not a child, and if I want to -"

"Oh, I know you're not a child... a child would know better than to stand in the middle of the library, shouting like the rescue ship was flying overhead."

Kool-Aid stared blankly for about a second and then said the worst thing anybody could say in a confrontation with a student studying for the bar. "This is America," and I already knew where she was going with this one, "and if I want to talk, I have a right to -"

"HEY! Take a lot at these books on my table, and realize that I know far more about your rights than you do. I'm not asking you not to talk, I'm not even asking you to talk quieter. You came over here and confronted me. I was content imagining this confrontation, but you came over here and provoked it. Now I'm sorry if you thought this was gonna be an easy fight for you, but when you think about it, this is really the least embarassing way that this could have happened to you. If you talked that loud in any other library around here, you'd have been in a school, and you'd have been 'shushed' by a child."

So anyway, her friend pulled her away from my table and out of the reading section and that was all that happened. Does anybody else wanna fight like this all the time now? I was so f'n proud of myself, and this was such a huge acomplishment to me, that I was certain that if I went outside and started running, all the townspeople I passed on my route would join me on my run.

Gonna fly now...