Cottleston Pie

Comment by KDJ

2005/4/20 @ 5:24 pm

Um, hello, you are cruel! You delighted in her ineptitude. All you had to do was glance over and give her the courtesy of your knowledge.
Also, what is that male comment all about, “no, not like that”??? Just what do you expect your audience to presume? I ascertained from the comment, “she blew my mind,” that she did something even more stupid. Which she did. What was I supposed to assume, praytell? That she fixed it with her magic? Or that she blew your mind?
Really, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say that you were commenting on a gender difference in intelligence.
ho-hum.

Comment by Travis

2005/4/20 @ 7:05 pm

Heh. I’ve the impression that “she blew my mind,” is a stock phrase when a man says it about a woman, and that it indicates that he finds her amazingly fantastic. It’s a significant compliment in that usage. So, I used the phrase and then indicated that that meaning doesn’t apply. I guess there’s room for confusion if one is unfamiliar with the stock phrase as I understand it.
Yes, I did find her ineptitude amusing. No apologies for laughing internally while enduring the monotony of using exercise equipment. I didn’t indicate to her at all that I found her behavior humorous.
Cruel? Cruelty requires some object (in the grammatical sense) to undergo some sort of pain or suffering or be otherwise abused by my lack of leniency. It also usually implies some intentional infliction of the harm. My seeing what might be suffering (a stretch here…) and then my not imposing upon her by offering unlooked-for advice hardly rises to cruelty. Did you miss where I said she didn’t glance in my direction. She didn’t. At all. At any point. I originally wrote something like, “she didn’t glance even remotely in my direction,” which while true, seemed over-stressed. I’m not one to say (to someone who might pointedly not be looking my way), “Hey…[wait until/if she acknowledges], that machine is broken!” unless there’s a more serious issue than a few wasted minutes. (It might be that my discomfort at offering such advice in that manner is greater than her discomfort at trying to use a broken machine.) If the machine had been dangerous, I would have taken immediate action to prevent her trying to use it.
Yes, I recognized when I wrote this entry that the first person being female and the second male might create the false impression of a gender contrast. And I decided to ignore what felt like overly-PC inclinations to sanitize it and just told you what happened. The first person was a woman. The second a man. If it has been otherwise, then the gender of the characters in the story would have been different. That’s all.