Posts tagged ‘Professor Heart Attack’
Excerpt from “Who Wants to Marry a Savant?”
Oozing with insecurity
I couldn’t live in the moment,
Couldn’t embrace my own divinity
I burst into tears
When he compared me to a statue at the Louvre.
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Excerpt from “Who Wants to Marry a Savant?”
Professor Heart Attack (again, not to be confused with Professor Heartache) took me to a super fancy restaurant (I forget the name, but it was the kind of place where you can’t wipe your own hands in the bathroom — as he called it, “Zagat rated”) the first night we were in Atlanta. He ordered for me, which I surprisingly liked. (“The lady would like . . . “) I forget what he ordered. Something with truffles, but I hardly had a chance to eat.
And I had absolutely no chance to digest.
“Is it okay if I have a glass of wine? I must say, I don’t feel as sharp when I drink, but the setting seems right.”
“Sure. But I’ll actually have an espresso. I could use a jolt after traveling all morning.” I thought it was sweet he asked my permission to drink, not like I would have ever taken issue with it.
“At two and a half hours, the flight was just long enough to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
“How was that? I fell asleep 15 minutes in.” I had absolutely no interest in seeing yet another blockbuster with Angelina Jolie running in slow motion with her tits bouncing dangerously close to her chin.
“It was palatable.”
“Glad to be reassured. I wouldn’t want to miss the next American Beauty.”
“Speaking of reassurance,” Professor Heart Attack pulled his briefcase onto his lap and popped it open. “I want to show you something.” He pulled out a stack of papers about an inch thick.
My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I didn’t need to know the content of the papers to know that a JD/PhD could only produce one of two things from his briefcase in that moment.
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Excerpt from “Safe Mode”
Professor Heart Attack (not to be confused with Professor Heartache) used to always tell me that the future—and the now (then)—was all about information sharing and social networks. He had a bit of an obsession with Mark Zuckerberg (and, incidentally, with me). He used to tell me things like, “If I were Mark’s father, I’d tell him to marry you.”
It just so happened that I was a freshman at Princeton when Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman at Harvard. (No, I don’t know him personally. I know a handful of people who went to Exeter with him, but whatever. It doesn’t matter.) When I joined Facebook my sophomore (or was it junior?) year in college, back when it was called “The Facebook,” I had no idea what a key role it would play in my undoing.
I used to resent that Professor Heart Attack, more than 30 years my senior and (last time I heard) without a cell phone or personal email account, was so ahead of my time. He was seemingly compassionate, extremely intelligent, not at all attractive, cosmopolitan, wealthy, and—it turns out—deeply insecure and duplicitous. It seemed cruelly ironic that he—of all people—appeared to escape the disaster when most of us had our worlds ripped out from under us.
Of course, he hadn’t anticipated the ultimate irony. Neither had I.
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The Lollygabber 
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