Major Breakthrough

So last night on MUNI, I ran into a girl I went to St. John's with. It was great, we did the catching up thing and the asking about people we knew thing, we even did the reliving the glory of Great Books by dead white men thing. All in all, a successful escapade all on its own. But we also went to a bar, Fishbowl, that turns out to be the secret lair of all the popular boys from high school. I sat and gawked for some time, marveling at the remarkably low-quality competition (in my opinion, we could take them any day of the week). Something is clearly amiss and may require futher investigation, but none of this was so compelling as the post-libation discussion with my compatriot (yes, St. John's is its own country). A gentleman had been expressing great interest in my friend, and she summed up his qualities as follows " sure, he's beautiful, and clearly fairly smart, even kind of sweet, but I find I can never get really into anyone who hasn't read the classics."

I am not alone. I haven't dated anyone since college, and have never dated anyone who can't read Attic Greek, but it has nothing to do with latent tendencies, I'm just over-educated. We talked for a bit about ways would-be suitors could waive the classics requirement and agreed that an avid predilection for mastery in one's chosen field is perfectly acceptable, so long as it is coupled with an openness to our obsession with dead poets, and a whole-hearted acknowledgement that one knows nothing of great literature. She recounted a dismal affair in which a boy tried to read her Shakespearean sonnets, but couldn't do it with the right meter, and she was permanently turned off. She thinks she's an elitist, but I say you can't help who lights your fire. Some people go for dark eyebrows on blondes (no matter what their age) and some of us just groove on dactylic hexameter. What can you do?