Ai-Yeah, Paella!

There's some old Chinese adage that says something about staring at the wall and waiting for death. I'm pretty sure that was not the best translation, and I might even be missing the point, but staring at the wall and waiting for death was what the past five hours felted like. To illustrate how painful it was, I present a very long rant-- so reading this will feel as excruciating for you as tonight was for me.

Tonight, I had dinner with my pre-orientation host parents from four years ago, along with the girl who was my roommate on the trip. I have hardly said two sentences to these people in four years, but thought, yeah, whatever. It was a very nice gesture on their part, and the dinner was lovely. The orange sherbet for dessert was a bit scary. But there was paella. Paella was pretty much the only high point of the night. Though, as my stomach has just groaned to me, it wasn't that high of a point.

The rest of the night was spent talking. And talking. And talking. Or rather, they did the talking and we did the listening, listening, and listening. Who knew old people could stay up so late? Or have so much to say? I thought all this time that they wanted to have us over after all these years so I could boost my ego and talk about my past four years. But no. We heard about their parents and great uncles and children and grandchildren (Rory does lacrosse, Nora does soccer, there's another one that's lame and plays guitar) and children's friends who were like their own children and doing yoga and the lovely ladies that paint and wallpaper their new house and other students they've hosted and what it's like to have Parkinson's and dear Lord, I was so bored that three hours into the slow grind of the evening I realized that I had to entertain myself somehow as they talked so I started counting. Just counting with the hope that eventually, the evening would somehow end --I would either count until I reach infinity or Christ would return-- whatever happened, I just faithfully counted and smiled at their stories. I counted until 28,963. It would have been a lot higher but I lost count a few when I spoke up for my obligatory sentence every fifteen minutes.

I know geriatrics is a growing medical field and it's going to be mad lucrative, but as I've realized tonight, it's not a field for me. It's not that I'm cold hearted and hate old people. I love them, I really do, especially the ones that aren't racist. (That's another thing, other than my parents' counseling professor in seminary, Dr. Frieder, every non-racist old white person I've met has been patronizing, which isn't that much better.) The evening was so painful that, to borrow a phrase from Creegan, I would have rather eaten my foot with a hot knife than sat through another ten minutes of their talking.