Cool, Calm & Contentious by Merrill Markoe

Author:Merrill Markoe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345518934
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-01T10:00:00+00:00

How to Spot an Asshole

I WAS IN THE SHOWER WHEN I HEARD THE PHONE RING AND THE answering machine pick up. Over the whoosh of the running water, I could just make out a deep, flat voice leaving a lengthy message. Concerned that some kind of an emergency was unfolding, I wrapped myself in a towel and stood dripping wet in the hallway to hear the details. It scared me that I didn’t recognize the voice. Was it a wrong number? A dangerous interloper? When he hung up, I played the whole thing back.

Slowly it dawned on me that the voice belonged to a guy I had met a few nights before at a dinner party. Apparently he had gotten my number from mutual friends and decided to call. The content of the message, when I boiled it all down, was basically that he thought it would be a good idea for us to spend some time together. Nothing scary there.

The bloodcurdling part, however, was in the way he chose to express that thought to me. Here is the actual transcript: “Hello, Merrill? I’d like to see you sometime, the earlier the better. Right now would be perfect. If you’re in the mood to do something tonight, that would be good. Because my moods shift so dramatically these days that it’s easier for me to go on impulse than to make a date with someone and then realize when the time comes that I am not really in the mood to do anything. So that’s kind of the way I want to operate.”

He might as well have said: “Hey, Merrill … if you have a ton of free time and would like to babysit a self-absorbed, needy, demanding middle-aged adult who is only interested in using you as a sounding board for his neurotic problems, you can look long and hard but I doubt you’ll find anyone better than me.”

His words were immediately filed for posterity in my very special pantheon of unintentionally revealing statements, right next to those of the seemingly nice woman I met at a job who told me that she spoke with her shrink every day on the phone and then went on to ask, “Can I have your phone number? I love to talk on the phone, but I wore a lot of my old friends out.”

One of the prime achievements of my adult life, right up there with owning my own washer and dryer, has been learning to read the warning signs broadcast by an asshole. With all the social networking going on, the importance of watching and listening for pernicious symptoms when you first meet someone is more important than ever, because these days the lines have become so blurred that it’s easy to find out you are “friends” with all kinds of people you simply have no reason to trust, beyond a stated appreciation of Radiohead.

Somewhere between our Neanderthal beginnings and the twenty-first century, the instructional software that was supposed to be

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