Recently Lenore and Kim were commenting, in a delightfully snarky way, on how many lame internet dating guys claim they love reading by citing The Kite Runner as their favorite book.  Lenore and Kim both went on–being apparently nice, reasonable people–to say how they have nothing against the Kite Runner per se, great book, yadda yadda, it’s just . . .

I hate The Kite Runner.  I could go on and on about why, but you don’t care why.  (If you do, please comment cause I love talking about why.)  The point is, if there’s a book out there that touches everyone’s heart, I tend to think it’s drivel.  Not because I’m a poser, or at least I don’t think that’s why.  I’m not trying to pose, and I liked that guy’s other book, the Thousand Splendid Suns one.  I hated The Lovely Bones but I loved Sebold’s memoir Lucky.  Etc.

Still, I got to thinking.

Have you ever wondered if maybe you might actually be . . . you know, kind of an Asshole?Here are some things that have me worried that maybe I’m an Asshole disguised as a perfectly lovely, outgoing mother of 3:

1) I can’t remember anyone’s name.  Or face.  If you’ve met me before–especially if you’ve met me at a densely populated event like, say, the AWP Conference, and then a few months or a few years later you happen to see me again, I will act like I have never met you before.  Actually, it’s worse than that, because sometimes when somebody acts like they’ve never met you before you think maybe they’re just trying to be cool and noncommittal because they’re shy.  I will do the exact opposite of that.  If I already know your name, like say you’re a writer and you’ve submitted work to me at Other Voices in the past, I will get really visibly excited and do something like hug you and exclaim, “Oh my god, I’m so excited to finally meet you in person!”  At which point you will calmly inform me that we met last year at this same conference and I was so excited to meet you at that time that we went out for drinks and talked for an hour.  Which I, apparently, have completely forgotten.

I did this the second (or in my memory, the first) time I met my current boss, Dan Wickett of Dzanc Books.  We had known each other for 5 years over the internet; he had interviewed me for his website Emerging Writers Network.  We had met once at Printer’s Row book fair in Chicago, but when we met a couple of years later I didn’t recall that first meeting.  Dan is the nicest guy in the world and everyone loves him.  It was nothing against Dan; it was me.  When he called me on it (after my “so glad to finally meet you in person” line) I pretended I remembered having met him before at Printer’s Row, but really I didn’t.  I still don’t.  Later he became my boss when he acquired Other Voices Books as an imprint of Dzanc.  If he reads this, I’m fucked.  (Well, not really cause he isn’t an Asshole.)

Anyway, knowing this tendency in myself, I now never know what to do.  Do I hug the person and get excited to meet them, or do I act laissez-faire and unconcerned on the chance that we have met in the past–that maybe I just saw this person yesterday and acting too excited would now out me as not remembering?  I’m not sure what the answer is, but basically it now puts me in a position where neither option is that great.  What’s even worse is if I actually do know your face but can’t remember your name, or place how I know you.  This happens to me a lot.

Once I ran into my therapist of 8 months on the street of the small town where we both lived.  Because I was by myself, she went against the unwritten therapist code of pretending you don’t know your clients in public so as not to embarrass them, and said hello.  But because she was not in her usual office, in her usual chair, I could not place her at all.  I knew I knew her–she looked familiar to me–but I wasn’t sure where.  Seeing the confusion on my face (I may have stammered, trying to get out her name) she no doubt concluded she had traumatized me by speaking to me in public.  Probably she felt like the Asshole, when really it was me.

I’m sure she would never have in a million years imagined that I actually didn’t know who she was.  Because that would make me not an Asshole exactly but Clinically Retarded.  Which I don’t think I appear to be (though one can never tell.)  I was pursuing a graduate degree at the time.  I had published stories.  I was engaged to a PhD candidate with a NAASA fellowship.  These are not usually the signs of a developmental disability.

But they can easily be signs of an Asshole.

2) I hate all books about animals.  I hate to hear people talk about their pets.  Under all circumstances, for both things.  I don’t care how good the writing is; I don’t care if your pet can pee in a toilet or has grown an opposable thumb or is barfing.  I don’t want to hear about your pet.  Period.

Ironically I have had pets of my own, whom I have loved.  One dog and one cat.  I cried when they died.  I still miss my cat and keep his photo in my bedroom and some of his hair in a baggie in my underwear drawer.  I do not hate animals, but I hate HEARING about animals.  I don’t talk about them.  This, right here, is the most I have ever said, and already I am nervous that some other person who hates to hear about animals (a sign of sanity in my book) is now really annoyed by me.

3) I never have any money with me.

This is not because I’m poor.  Although I myself am poor (how many writers aren’t?), my husband has a normal job and makes a normal income.  We own a house.  I have an ATM card and a checkbook and a credit card.  But if you happen to be out with me somewhere, like say the long line of a University bookstore where I have just selected my entire term’s worth of books, it is a virtual guarantee that when we get to the cashier I will turn out not to have any money and you will have to pay the bill (or else waste all the time we have spent waiting in the line, the prospect of which is visibly upsetting me as you stand there being unsure what to do.)  Chances are, if you’re in a University bookstore with me you are also an underpaid graduate student or lecturer–in fact, maybe you’re a borderline junkie bartender who can barely afford your rent.  Or maybe we’re at a restaurant and you’re a single woman with a low-paying office job and going to this fancy joint was my idea and kind of out of your price range, but now I don’t have my wallet.  If the place in question only takes cash, forget about it altogether–I never, ever have cash.  Oh, I’ll pay you back, of course.  Really.  But if you’re smart, rather than reminding me four times, you will just tell my husband, who is my polar opposite in these ways and he will immediately write you a check.

4) I hate all of the following things to the point that I simply will not engage in them under any circumstances: university staff meetings; volunteering in my kids’ classrooms; baby shower games; Super Bowl parties; board games (or any kind of game for that matter, unless it is poker and then I have to be high); absolutely any kind of party where jewelry is sold or cookies are swapped; chain letters where people exchange recipes; any kind of social gathering that has to do with a religious affiliation.  My mind is clicking off more things on this list faster than I can type them.  If you invite me to any of these things–or require me to attend them as part of the contract of my job–I will get out of it.  I won’t care that other people have to go and suffer through.  I will convince myself that these rules do not apply to me.  If I for some insane reason happen to find myself at an occasion such as any of the above, I will possibly be disruptive, for example passing notes to the person next to me as though we are in the seventh grade and making them laugh at inappropriate times so that if we were indeed in seventh grade we would be asked if we would like to share with the rest of the class what’s so funny, and then be sent to the principal’s office.

If you happen to be my employer and are wondering why I never show my face at any staff meetings, this would be why.

I am probably fired now.

5) I have never taken out the garbage in my entire life.

Seriously.

A couple of times when my husband has been out of the country, I’ve bagged it up and lugged it down the stairs to the back hall of our house, but the buck stops there.  There it sits, until he gets home.

If he will be gone for a month, I’ll find an excuse to invite a male friend over (or a tall female friend will do) and after giving them a lot of wine I will convince them to do it for me.

In my defense, I live in Chicago and we have a lot of rats here.  I have seen them in my alley.  Lots of times.  I’m not going out there.  You can’t make me.

But I will let you go.

Crap.  The jury may in fact be in.

The problem with making a list about all the reasons you may be an Asshole is that it’s not the whole picture.

I mean, I cook, I clean, I buy my friends elaborate gifts like carpets from Morocco or classes in massage therapy (though the latter may be because I want to be the guinea pig.)  I will read your 500 page manuscript and mark it up for you like a motherfucker even if I have 10 other manuscripts on my desk and you are not in my writing group.  I may hate The Kite Runner but I will champion another writer who needs me more.  If you’ve broken up with your boyfriend I’ll talk to you on the phone for 3 hours even if I had somewhere I was supposed to be and the kids have homework and my house is a mess.  And then when you call me tomorrow and the next day to say all the exact same things, I will listen.  Again.  If you happen to be one of the people whose names and faces I can actually remember, I will drop everything for you.  I will remember what you told me 10 years ago that you don’t even remember saying–I will remember everything about your brothers and sisters and the guy you lost your virginity to and can psychoanalyze your mother as well as you can even if I’ve never met her because I listen.  If I like you, I am not judgmental.  I am the one who would help you bury the body.  I can keep a secret.

I am really, really good at keeping a secret.

Though I love to gossip.  They are not the same thing.

6) Yeah, I love to gossip.  Jesus, do I.  I first horrified my mother with this tendency in the fourth grade.  I have not stopped gossiping since.   As I see it, writers are gossips, liars and thieves.  I have to keep in practice.

If you like to gossip too, we should be friends.

The problem with being kind of an Asshole is that you probably don’t really want to change.  I mean, it’s important now and then to take a moral inventory of oneself.  But I’m not planning to take out the garbage tomorrow as a result or anything.

I mean, I may have a sense of shame–but there are still rats.