An Abundance of Thoughts about an Abundance of Katherines: Chapter Seven

[Frank Leigh Grace]

            I never knew Franz Ferdinand married for love.  Sounds beautiful.  Sounds like life was pretty good for Franz and Sophie.  Sounds like he got what he wanted out of his life.  A hole in your middle is nothing when you’ve got love.  But when the hole in your middle is lack of love, then you’ve got a problem.

            Why does Colin see this so differently compared to how I see it?  Ferdinand has no heavy burden—he was dead before people started dying.  He didn’t know.  And Colin’s projecting himself and his problems, so is seeing the tactlessness and nerdiness and whininess and love-obsessiveness of himself because that’s all he’s thinking about.  The Archduke didn’t have those problems Colin says he has: 1) Sophie sure gave a shit about him and 2) he simply died when a piece was taken out of his middle.  So stop trying to compare yourself to him, Colin, but yeah, go ahead and talk about your Eureka ‘cause that shit’s interesting.  I want the world to be safer for Dumpees like me.  But you’ll matter anyway, Colin.  You don’t have to do anything to matter.

            This whole “what’s our story” exchange between Hassan and Colin just makes me think of that time in How I Met Your Mother when Barney and Ted pretend to be out-of-towners and end up following a couple of New Jersey girls into the Bronx and getting mugged.

            Eww.  The moment TOC is described I already can’t stand him.  As I said, my type is definitely NOT jock.

            Ew, Katrina.  And look at this.  While Colin says it’s his “least favorite way of being hot,” he still says she’s hot.  Whereas Lindsey is simply “interesting-looking.”  But with a good smile.  Grumble.

            Amour aime aimer amour.  I would like to learn how to pronounce this.  What is it in Spanish?  Amor ama amar amor, I believe.  But amor is a very particular type of love, a deep one like for one’s God, I think, so I’m not sure if that sentence actually makes sense.  Like, even love for another person you generally use the verb querer, even though that also means “to want.”  To be in love with is enamorarse.

            So it looks, from that little exchange between Lindsey and TOC, that Lindsey’s the Dumpee here.  There was this presentation I listened to this one time; I forget his name, but he was talking about relationships and told us a lot of useful things.  But the thing with which I just made a connection was related to which person holds the reins in the relationship.  The person who holds the reins in the relationship, holds “power” for lack of a better term, is the person who cares less about the relationship.  I’m pretty sure that’s TOC here.  It’s also every single Katherine.  And for me it’s always the guy.  Because Colin and I, we’re desperate.  Which likely is a large part of why we are such Dumpees.

            Haha, Hollis with her dog.  “The more boys I meet, the more I love my dog!”

            You know what?  It’s page 55, and I think somebody’s going to die.  Colin is convinced that Gil Stabel is the CEO of Fortiscom.  And Hassan corrects him because Stabel is dead.  I have a feeling Colin is going to fail to account for unexpected death in his theorem.  Who’s going to die?  Lindsey?  Hollis?  My prediction for now is Lindsey.

            Hey, I get called Linds, too.  And Lindsey-kinz.  And Rindsery.  And Lin.  And sister and daughter-of-my-youth and Frank.

            Poor Hassan.  It would suck to feel the need to constantly tell people, “I’m not a terrorist.”  Interesting, particularly in light of the recent shooting at that poor Sikh temple.  Racism is sad.

            Colin’s not sure what to think about Lindsey because she’s teasing him.  I always try to tease people.  I have no idea how else to speak to a guy unless I’m working with him.  It’s a problem.

            At least she knows TOC is sometimes a dick.

            Languages are VERY useful.  Oh yeah, Russian I want to learn, too.

            So Lindsey knows German.  How?  Do they really teach German down in Gutshot or is she self-taught?  My school was suburban and relatively wealthy, and somewhat large, and we still had to get rid of German because there wasn’t enough of a demand for it and there was more of a demand for Mandarin.  We had Spanish, French, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin, and ASL.  ASL’s another I’d like to learn.  I think we used to have Hebrew but it got cut. I could be wrong.

            “I don’t need money.  I need my life, which is good and which is here.”  Just like I only need my B.S. and a job in industry.  David would probably be horrified by the idea of not going to college because you’re content with where you are.  Complacency is a bit of a dirty word for him.  But there are different kinds of knowledge, and many of them don’t involve academia.

            David and complacency is an interesting story.  He probably knows what that word means, now, but he didn’t always.  He knew, probably from context from a book, that it was something he didn’t like; interestingly, the meaning his brain gave it was similar to “melancholy.”  It makes sense for David, because all he wants to do is make himself more, make himself better.  Complacency is like stagnation for him, which is the opposite of what he wants, so of course he associates the word complacency with a depressive state of mind, a state of mind in which the progress he relies on is reluctant to occur, a state of mind in which he is unhappy.

            “It makes jobs.”  Factories are good at that.  I’ve got a job in a manufacturing plant.  I’m pretty excited about it.  It’s my second job ever; my one when I’m at school is in a dining court.  I like that job, but it doesn’t require much from my brain.  Which makes it good for school because it gives me a break FROM school.  But at the plant I won’t be at school, so it’s good that I’ll have to use my brain.

            Well, how else do you think we’d remove them, Colin?

            Another David story:  I had a car and he didn’t, so I took him to the store a few times.  The first time I kind of needed pads but didn’t want to get them with him there and didn’t need them that badly, so I didn’t get them.  But later we went again and I did need to get them.  I figured I should warn him, since guys generally aren’t too comfortable with anything to do with menstruation, so we were talking about embarrassment and I told him I was embarrassed that I had to buy pads in front of him.  He was immediately like, Lindsey, that’s something you choose not to say.  And I was like, but they’re going to be in the cart.  I wanted to warn you.  He said that I should have said nothing, just put them in the cart, and let him ignore them.

            I can never do anything right.  I tried.  I really did.

            Oh, Lordy.  Being a suburban girl myself, the idea of a sprawling country home isn’t that weird to me, but I just realized Colin lives in an apartment in Chicago/near Chicago.  That’s a big difference.

            Why does Colin know about movie stars?  That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d care to learn.

            …I’m not even sure what Blink-182 is.  I think it’s a band.  I also could not have more apathy for the subject.

            AWKWARD.  I know, right?  Green beans are the best.  We’ll get back to the Goth picture when Lindsey talks to Colin about it.

            Theorem time!  Yay!  Okay so 0 is extreme Dumpee; all of my differentials will be positive because the guy will be less of a Dumpee than me.  Got it.

            I love this.  There’s this romantic little idea often encouraged by Hollywood that geniuses come by their greatest work in flashes of insight, i.e. how House always has wrong idea after wrong idea until he sees a teddy bear at the end of the episode and suddenly knows what’s ailing his patient.  Life isn’t like that.  Advances in ideas and technology don’t happen in moments—they take hours upon hours of time, they take dedication and commitment.  So I’m glad that John shows this, Colin laboring for hours upon hours to see if his idea could actually come to fruition.

            But why is he trying to get K-19 back with it?  She’s gone; she’s left.  It’s over, Colin.  Focus on the next Katherine; focus on how to get the next Katherine to stay with you.

            Oooh it’s appendix time!  I like the appendix.  ‘Tis good fun.

 

(the appendix)

 

            Okay, so we’ve got some info here, Daniel says a “fairly typical Colin-Katherine affair” can be a mere day long.  I haven’t gotten that far, but I guess that makes sense knowing The Great One was three minutes and K-12 was the first to wear a bra.  That’s a lot of Katherines to run through in a very short amount of time.  So I guess the brevity of most of these relationships helps explain how Colin could have been dumped nineteen times, but I still don’t understand how he’s met so many Katherines and has been able to date so many of them for however brief a time.

            Gorgeous story, Daniel.  But I wonder if it really has to be that the line only crosses the x-axis twice.  I mean, take Justin and David.  These boys noticed me before I noticed them, pursued me before I pursued them.  As a result, at the beginning of my getting-to-know them (I can’t say at the beginning of dating them because technically David and I never ended up dating L), they cared more.  However, at some point in dating Justin and very quickly while, uh, seeing? David, I overtook them in how-much-I-cared.  I lost “power;” I handed it to them.  I would think, then, that the relationships (if you can call the thing with David a “relationship;” for simplicity’s sake I shall) started above the x-axis, but then fell below the x-axis when I became the one who cared more.  That is, my relationships with Justin and David were cubic, not quadratic, with the middle crossing of the x-axis marking the point in which I gave the other party power.

            Let’s skip past the “here’s how to graph shit” part and the “hey look, a function” bit until we get back to Colin’s theorem.  And immediately I see a problem.  Maybe they said it before; I think they did, but I failed to notice it.  The graph crosses the x-axis for the first time at the first kiss.  Now if that’s going to be the judge of whether a relationship is a “relationship,” then it turns out the only relationship I’ve ever been in was the summer I was 19, for about two weeks.  This is blatantly false.  The only relationship I’ve been in was the fall I was 15, for about two months.  David and I NEVER DATED.  Justin and I did, but we NEVER KISSED.  So I guess I disagree with Colin’s way of determining the start of a relationship.  For me, I measure dating Justin from our first date (September 15^th) until the day he dumped me (November 18^th).  It could be argued that it actually began September 6^th, when he asked me to the Homecoming dance, but I’ve always measured it from the first date, mostly because Justin asked me once what our one-month-versary would be, and we decided to go a month from our first date.  David I told I liked him on July 4^th (well, 5^th, really), and we had our first kiss the same night, but all the while he was on the fence about whether he actually wanted to date me.  I kissed him a few days later, to which he did not respond favorably, and when we finally had an “us” conversation (July 19^th (well, 20^th, really)), he said for sure that he didn’t want to date me.  So you see, David and I never dated.  Justin and I did.

            I disagree also with the footnote on page 225.  Wasn’t it obvious from the moment Colin gave us an explanation that he was trying to use a function to determine when/whether any prospective Dumper would dump him?  It’s really pretty simple, idea-wise—the complicated part is coming up with a robust formula for it all.

            Immediately I looked at that formula, f(x) = D^3x^2-D, and wondered, what happens when D = 0, when the two parties are exactly the same on the Dumper/Dumpee curve?  You get a line y=0, so while there’s no wow-this-relationship-is-going-awesomely, there’s no clear breakup.  But as Daniel points out on the following page, there’s no way to tell if the relationship has started or ended, leading to an interesting question:  is it possible that two people of the exact same Dumper/Dumpee number would simply never ask each other out?  And then I thought, is it even possible for two people to have a differential equaling zero?  It can approach zero, but be zero?  As D approaches zero, we see the function lengthen out so that the relationship is almost infinitely long, so that death might be required for the end.  Hmm.

            Also there’s the whole relationships-are-complicated thing.  Because whether a person is a Dumper or a Dumpee is by no means the only reason a relationship ends.  David said we’re “not compatible.”  I wish I’d asked him in what ways.

            One other thing before we return to the story.  I think Colin is missing something with his Dumper/Dumpee idea.  Because there are reasons behind Dumpers and Dumpees.  A Dumpee might be a Dumpee because he/she is easygoing, committed, desperate, clingy, a combination of these, or entirely other reasons.  A Dumper might be picky, independent, non-committal, a combination, or something else.  An independent Dumper will likely get along well with an easygoing Dumpee, but not so much with a clingy one.  The reasons behind one’s tendency to be a Dumper or a Dumpee can have a significant impact on the nature (and duration) of the relationship.

            Okay.  So.  Back to chapter seven!

 

(seven (continued))

 

            Yeah, people like Hassan are amazing, the way they interact with people.  My dad’s one, and so are my friends Mark and Jason.  They are everyone’s immediate friend.  They don’t seem to understand the concept of “stranger.”  It’s a beautiful thing.

            Haha Colin.  Granted, I’d probably be a little weirded out by having to remove birdshot from my mouth as I ate.  But I’d do it, and I’d probably find the bird quite tasty.

            Was the opponent on KranialKidz also a Katherine?  It reminds him of K-19, so maybe.  Also, Colin’s pi sentence is ridiculous but awesome.  I want to memorize his sentence.

            I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a conversation with just body language.  I mean, there have been knowing-looks exchanged (ahh, how I miss my first-semester engineering team’s “WTF stare”), or the time one of my best friends said, “Hey, you know the thing with the thing with the things?” and another said, “Oh, you mean MathCounts?” and the first one said, “Yeah,” but I’ve never had an entire inaudible conversation.

            Yeah, Colin would destroy at Scrabble.  Smartypants.

            Oh my God, Lindsey, thank you for being like me with the whole obsessive-over-analysis thing!  Colin and Hassan couldn’t care less about why she was dressed Goth-ish in that picture!  But this is totally the same sort of thing I worry about.  This also annoyed the crap out of David.

            “So I was ugly.”  Yeah, we know:  Colin told us.  It sucks being female.  And if you were anything like me, you were at your ugliest around seventh grade.  Of course, I did have zits, and still do.  But I cover them up as best I can, now.  And I don’t pick at them all day.  Ew.  Seventh-grade-me was revolting.

            So Lindsey was hated and then decided to be liked.  And changed herself to be popular.

            Oddly, there really wasn’t a whole lot of popularity at my high school.  I mean, there wasn’t like, a particular group of people who were super-cool and super-assholes to everybody the way Hollywood always says.  Why, I sat at the same lunch table as the homecoming king and queen senior year (the homecoming king had a total of forty votes, out of a class size of nearly five hundred—most people just didn’t care, and all of the nominees got close to the same number of votes), and I was a complete nerd.  There were only like three people in the entire school that I tended to hang out with outside of school, and that was generally only for birthday and end-of-exam celebrations.  I stayed home and did homework and daydreamed and obeyed my parents and was a nerd.  The people at my school that I’d consider “popular” were the ones who were both smart AND social.  The ones who were in the student council, who wore some makeup but not tons, who were a bit artsy but not that much.  I wasn’t one of them, but I didn’t care because I was there to learn and be friends with my friends and obsess over Aaron II.  I couldn’t care less about popularity.  Because I had friends who were as nerdy as I am.  As I said, I’m truly blessed in that area of life.

            Colin really is quite open.  He met Lindsey today, and yet, he’s telling her everything.  I’m like that, too.  It’s something I like about myself, my willingness to share things about myself.  And yes, Colin’s definitely concerned with popularity, and yes, he has difficulty in telling stories.  I go on tangents, too; my sister makes fun of me for it.  Usually, though, the problem is that I’m telling a pointless story.

 

The End (of the Beginning)

 

“He figured he was in love.”  Aww little-kid Colin is so adorable.  “The coming and the seeing and the conquering and the returning home.”