Writing Retreat, Day 3

I am a terrible, terrible person. And so is C.

That's the only preface i will give to the following bits of dialogue, with accompanying commentary by myself and C, overheard at breakfast on day 3. T is a morbidly obese sophomore, and A, M, and J are her three male friends.

On Words:
T: "That was rhetorical!"
C: "Does she know what that word means?"
Me: "I think that, whenever she says something and doesn't get the reaction she was hoping for, she just covers by saying that it was a joke or rhetorical."


On Identity and Relationships:
T: "That's because I'm a different species. I'm more highly evolved than you."

T: "If you ever talked to a girl the way you're talking to me, she'd kill you."
A: " . . . you are a girl."
C: "No, she's a different species."
Me: "And a more highly evolved one, at that."


T (on being reprimanded for asking for the loan of a pocket knife to peel her orange, and being told that she should carry her own knife): "I don't want to be needy. I'll just be friends with boys who carry pocket knives."

A: "I don't know if I want to be friends with someone who just beats me up (verbally) all the time. If our whole relationship is about fighting, why are we even friends?"
T: "That's not what our whole relationship is about! And I don't beat you up!"
M: "Take the way you argue, and imagine that it was made physical. It would be a fistfight."
T: "No, because A wouldn't hit a girl."
Me: "I thought you weren't a girl?"


A: "You make me feel awful!"
T: "Yeah, that's the point."

A: "Okay, Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. So, I do not consent to you making me feel bad and beating me up verbally."
T: "You're the one who makes me feel bad!"
A: "Okay, what do I do? And why do you consent to it?"
T: "You just don't do the things I want you to."

T (to A): "I was adding that to why I want to beat you up: because I don't like the way you think."

T: "I'd have a better chance with pretty much all of the freshmen."
C: "A better chance of what? Dating them? Eating them?"
Me: "C! That is a terrible thing to say! T would never eat a freshman! She is a vegetarian!"


On Identity and Fetishes:
A: "Why did you smell that (orange peel)?"
T: "It's like a creepy fetish thing."

T: ". . . you'd go through my trash and sell it on eBay. That's a violation of my personal space."
A: "But J does it all the time!"
T: "Yeah, well, I'm used to it from him. I'm not used to it from you."

T (as J was pretending to pour syrup on her): "I do NOT look like a waffle. (to A) You're the waffle. I'm more like spaghetti."
A: "You don't look like spaghetti. You look more like a waffle."

On Power Animals:
T: "A might be a flamingo, because I feel like he gets confused very often."

T: "No. A triceratops is not a real animal."

T: "Maybe (the unicorns) are all in Atlantis and you just can't find them!"
J: "Atlantis is underwater."
T: "So? Maybe unicorns can breathe underwater!"
J, A, and M: "No, they can't."
T: "How do you know? Have you ever seen a unicorn breathing underwater? No, you haven't. So you can't prove that they can't."

T: "I'm an education major, so therefore I'm right."