What is WRONG WITH ME that I hadn’t read The Secret History until this week? Bad life decision all around. Sidenote: I was so engrossed in the book this morning that I almost got hit by a biker and then a paleta pusher. The latter muttered in Spanish, “Watch it! These damn white girls, always with their noses in a book. Never paying attention.” I wanted to tell him that I understood every word, but when I realized I was reading a novel about Dionysian tragedy at an elite New England college bathed in references to Greek and Roman mythology, my leg to stand on felt hobbled.
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Bunny had an uncanny ability to ferret out topics of conversation that made his listener uneasy and to dwell upon them with ferocity once he had. In all the months I’d known him he’d never ceased to tease me, for instance, about that jacket I’d worn to lunch with him that first day, and about what he saw as my flimsy and tasteless Californian style of dress. To an impartial eye, my clothes were in fact not at all dissimilar from his own but his snide remarks upon the subject were so inexhaustible and tireless, I think, because in spite of my good-natured laughter he must have been dimly aware that he was touching a nerve, that I was in fact incredibly self-conscious about these virtually imperceptible differences of dress and of the rather less imperceptible differences of manner and bearing between myself and the rest of them. I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu – you’ve never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student – but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.
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