When I got to college, I decided I would carry around Euros in the hope that this would happen:
I think maybe it happened once, and I probably looked mentally deficient, if not transparently affected. Luckily it was first year, which is just a trail-run for your personality. In your second year, you can easily drop all your first-year friends and commit to new, more carefully considered elements of your persona.
Tell me, dear readers, what funny affectations have you tried out in your time? Did you “wake with the dawn,” or pretend to be an orphan? Did you quote Leibniz, or wear scarves? Tell us all!
your friend and confidant,
maggie
I left my door open constantly as a desperate move to make friends. Little did I know at the time, the only people who stop to talk to strangers with their doors open are the people you probably don’t want to be friends with… (Though there were some exceptions.)
Yeah, another one of my affectations was definitely being too cool to talk to anyone with their door hanging open.
I used to close my eyes and cross my legs randomly so that when someone asked me what I was doing, I could say I was meditating. It was so dumb, and one time I even tried it when I was at a basketball game with a group of people.
I keep cracking up, imagining that. That’s a memory you can treasure forever.
I still cringe thinking about it!
I always keep a copy of the Star Wars soundtrack in my car, and it’s never backfired. There are few ice-breakers better than “Hey, guess what?”, turning on the stereo and having the opening notes of the Star Wars theme blast into the car.
Eventually, you’ll find yourself in a full vehicle, windows wide open and volume cranked, “The Imperial March” playing to the road while you and your buddies try your hardest to keep a straight face.
Someone’s gonna ask questions, but it’s worth it.
I once spent a day and night pretending to be Belgian while drunk at Oktoberfest in Munich. Being American was so mundane. Ended up spending the night with a bunch of Irishmen at their rented room, and discussing world politics in an affected French accent. Woke the next morning and turned into a ZZ Top song–“When you wake up in the morning and the light hurts your head…the first thing you do, when get up outta bed…is hit the streets a runnin’ and try to beat the masses–and go and get yourself some cheap sunglasses”
I thought this was so classically funny when I read it first, something I would probably do. The next week, when my boyfriend was getting money out, I found out that he had several dollars of some sort of Caribbean currency permanently stored in his wallet. It didn’t make him seem sophisticated, it just made me giggle because of the similarity to this…. Maybe he keeps it as a conversation starter? haha
HA! That’s really funny. Caribbean currency- that’s a great idea. Because the Caribbean is synonymous with ADVENTURE and being shirtless, as opposed to Europe which is all cappuccinos and being overeducated.