Visitors from afar, day 1.

The names in this account have been changed to protect the innocent, and cover my own ass.

This past weekend, my wife's best friend Jan, who lives out of state, came to stay with us for a visit. Jan was her maid of honor at her wedding, and is a very happy, enjoyable person to be around.

With Jan comes her adorable 20 month-old child, Cameron. Very cute kid. Oh, and her husband, Ted, also came along.

Jan orginally met Ted when my wife and I were dating, while he was getting his PhD at a local university. After he graduated, they moved to the Carolinas for a couple years and got married before he got a job teaching at the college level in Arizona.

Let me describe Ted for you. He is a man-mountain, a thick 6'10", and not fat, but big-boned. He is a fairly quiet person. And, he also has no concept of consideration for certain other people, especially, oh let's see - EVERYONE. Ted is a self-absorbed academic.

Now I don't like to categorize people and prejudge them based on stereotypes, but some stereotypes exist because there is at least some shred of truth to them. For instance, when I was taking engineering in college, and subsequently got a job at a major aerospace firm, my father commented to me that he couldn't picture me working there because I had "too much personality" to be an engineer. Stereotype through and through, I know. Engineers are dull and techno-centric, who alienate all other people by their intense focus on technical details. But as I began working there, I did find that about half of the engineers there personified this stereotype. It was eye-opening to me that half were actually very cool people with interesting personalities that were a pleasure to talk with.

But Ted is an academic that fits the profile that I myself have witnessed throughout my college and brief grad-school experience. Many academics are academics because they enjoy the recognition and attention that they receive for understanding something better than everyone else, and deploy a certain bit o smugness about it. Further, I believe that not all, but many academics secretly loathe teaching, not because they do not have a passion for their field of expertise, but because down deep they are very insecure, and secretly afraid that if they explained the essence of their field in a manner that was understandable to anyone else, then their command of the subject matter would no longer be unique, and they would no longer be special. I believe that Ted fits this rash generalization. Ted's field is Intertextualism in Spanish Literature.

Can you guess where this is going? My wife's best friend is in town. The ladies chat to catch up with each other, talk about mothering, children, yadda yadda yadda, and the men are left in the family room to watch TV and talk about men things.

The conversation on Spanish Intertextualism lasts about 30 seconds, since that's about as long as I could even pretend to give a shit about it.

Being a good host, I yield the remote control to Ted. Baseball? Nah. Racing? Sports? Nah. How about some nice Mexican Novelas or news program. OK, now I'm bored in my own house. In front of my own big-screen television.

Well, we could talk about other aspects of work that have to do with beauracracy or other administrivia, you know, the common-denominator sort of stuff that happens in just about any office. So he launches in on how he has been discriminated against at work because he is a white male. A few years ago, his department head apparently came in and gave blanket raises to everyone except the white males, because, if you listen to Ted, white males were making too much more money than the non-whites and non-males in the department. I guess that's injustice, I'll grant him that. The bottom line is that he spearheaded the effort to take the case to court, and his group of white guys had just won a decision. No money yet, but an important victory.

So he asked if he could use my computer to search the web about news stories on it, since this story about how he was dissed by the man ought to be front-page news on the Washington Post or something. Yes, of course, please be my guest, have at it. I don't want to be rude, and this was pretty important, to him anyway. So he goes off to my office upstairs for an hour or so, and I get to watch the ball game. Ah, at least I get sit in my chair for an hour or so while the boor is keeping himself busy.

To be continued...