Vignettes #24

(Budi Ubrux: Happy Tea Time)

On some occasions you are confronted with sensitive information you never needed or wanted to know about.

I was once invited to a birthday party at my neighbor's place who lived just one story below my apartment, in fact our apartments were identical in their set-up of rooms. I was friends with the couple who lived there, and she had her birthday.

They were both professional academics, while I was still a student, and the majority of their friends and those they had invited were academics, too. There were about a dozen guests, and most of them I had never met before.

So I felt quite uncomfortable at the party, partly because I was still a very shy young man, but also because I did not really like these kind of people. I guess you could generally call them pseudo intellectuals, but that's probably the same term they use to distinguish themselves from others. Mostly the talk would be about some 'serious' topic, but often interspersed by some irony or even cynical remarks, always a bit condescending to the uninitiated, and if any self-criticism found its way into the round, it was always somehow whiny.

There was one quite pretty young woman at this party, and at a certain point during the evening she started complaining about her boyfriend she was living together with (and who obviously was not present). The two of them had some kind of bedside problem (I forgot what it was), and her boyfriend had asked a close female friend of his for advice. He was even so honest to tell his girlfriend that he had done so, but she was completely angry about this and used the rudest words to condemn him for having passed on such sensitive information which was only their own personal business.

I admit I was at that age socially quite inexperienced, but I did have to butt in. I told her that all he had done was trust a good friend, while she had just disclosed the whole 'secret' to a dozen people at this party including some complete strangers like me.

From that instant on I was persona non grata at the party and was shunned by everybody present, so that I quietly left early. And my neighbor friends never invited me again and went out of their ways to avoid me.