That sort of person
Sep. 7th, 2025 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narahtI had a visitor this week: a very earnest German Shakespeare scholar and teacher who I met last year on a writing retreat. She was swinging through Oxford to attend a conference and stayed in my guest room for a few nights.
When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"
"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.
No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)
Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?
When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"
"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.
No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)
Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?
