Sunday, May 20, 2012

There are times when what others “brag” about astounds me.  Case in point, I was out with friends last night, having our own conversation when the distinct voice of another woman resonated above others, causing me to pay attention.  Her voice evoked a feeling that what she was going to share would be of importance.   Her tone conjured a mental image of a proud peacock, fanning his plume of tail feathers—all self-assuredness.

Though I still remained involved in our own conversation, I paid close attention to the other woman.  What came out of her mouth, however, surprised me.  Not that what she said was surprising or hard to comprehend, though there was a level of disbelief attached.  But what got me was that she was bragging about what she shared.  As if it was something of which she should be proud.  And the way she told it, she was sure others would be impressed.  I wasn’t, and those around us, as did I, had a hard time keeping the look of utter surprise off our faces.

The woman, though in her early thirties and should’ve known better, bragged about how she finished her first year of college, back when she was eighteen, with a .8 GPA—a .8…!  Then, as if she feared we’d miss the significance of just what an “effort” it took to achieve that GPA, she continued with her bragging, telling how she’d failed or gotten Ds in all her classes. 

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  Not the part that she’d flunked out of her first year of college—plenty of young students do the same.  But that she was bragging about it—proud of her “accomplishment.”  Later, a few of us discussed what the woman had shared, how if any of us had flunked out of our first year of college, we certainly wouldn’t have bragged about it and especially not when we were in our thirties.  None of us could come up with a plausible reason why the woman would think what she shared was worth bragging about.  And so, we let the topic lay, astounded more by the bragging than by what had been revealed.