Alas, I’m still very much online. Rotten habit. But this week featured an encounter of the strange kind that seemed notable enough, so here goes: Elle and I were sitting on the outside patio of a local coffee shop (not Starbucks, for a change), eating gelato and discussing relationships in Gilmore Girls, specifically those between Rory and Logan and between Lorelai and Christopher. For anybody who might have casually listened or overheard us and who was not familiar with the show, it might have sounded as if we were discussing actual relationships, real people. At the only other occupied table on the patio, a woman and a girl were playing a board game. When they packed up and left, the woman turned to our table and said, “this guy keeps texting me.” She said it completely out of the blue, and it wasn’t until after she’d left (while I just sat there like an idiot, Elle was enough on her toes to give some kind of reply) that I realized that the woman had probably thought we were talking about real people, perhaps even friends or coworkers, and now expected some kind of advice or input from us. I can’t really blame her–except for a few references to “plot” and “narrative structure” and maybe “dialogue,” it likely did sound as if we were talking about real people. English majors are weird like that.
