There is nothing more obnoxious than faking a smile. I just hate the facial frustration that occurs at those moments. Like your brain is saying act humane, but midway between that synapse and the following through of a smile, (somewhere, perhaps, around the eyebrows) your human soul, (depending on its coloring; black, in this case) adds in its two cents about the whole interaction. This is where the major portion of frustration exudes from the face, causing a hallowing of that smile; a colossal shrink in genuine feeling. And you wind up with a half-developed grimace of awkward "I don't know how to interact normally with you, you are too annoying, but too nice and it is causing a half a$$ grimace display on my head" sort of expression.
"Why are you being a lunatic about facial expressions Kathleen? That is so trivial."
Yes, human reader, I know. But at this point, you should just already know the flow of my twisted brain matter.
One such frenzier of my face is this crazy woman in my English class. One of those semi-crazy 40 year old ladies coming back to school. I'm hating English class more and more everyday because of her eye-twitching presence. The first day of class I was riding the social anxiety train as usual, so I sat in this lowly crevice against the wall on the 4th row back. She was in the very back row, behind me.
So there we are, talking about good ol' Harrison Bergeron and how being the "same" isn't necessarily "equal" and all that dystopian truth hullabaloo. And my professor is making this analogy with glasses, and how if we all wore glasses, we'd be the "same" but our eyesight isn't "equal" cuz them bless-ed peeps with 20/20 would have whacked up vision and all.
And crazy lady is all, "Well ACTUALLY, it's really more about distance, because if I sit closer to the board, like, *MOVES UP TO THE EFFING 4TH ROW WHERE MY SOCIAL ANXIETY TRAIN IS STATIONED* if I sit here it's better than back there. So it's probably more to do with that than glasses."
Oooohhhkay Miss Crazy...#1 None of that made any sense, nor was it relevant #2 We're not discussing optic science. #3 WHY MUST YOU SIT NEXT TO ME. Not even a chair in between.
Row #4:
aisle || X || X || CRAZY WOMAN || ME || wall.
why.
And OF COURSE the seating chart thing is being passed around so now this is the permanent situation. My luck is ridiculous, I tell you.
So now she's always leaning over, asking me super dumb, super random questions. And the evil black sludge of my soul is constantly itching to burst through that fake smile of mine.
One day, perhaps, I'll master it, for the benefit of society. For now I must simply exercise it in order to survive English 2020. Lord help me.
