Character Assassination

Assassin:  Any ruthless killer.

I took a lot of notes during the trip or, as LWSJ would call them: "Your book of lies."  He has no idea.

This was a curiosity to a number of travelers.  Sometimes I said I was a travel writer.   Sometimes I said I was a journalist.  Once I said I was David Foster Wallace.  I also might have mentioned that I was an all-league point guard for Penn back in the mid-70s.  The reception to this was surprisingly good.  Nobody knew who Wallace was so I was safe there but I bet one guy who cocked a skeptical eye to my basketball fame might have taken a look on google to see if the Penn roster was posted somewhere. 

There was a man on the boat that I kind of liked at first.  Then he threw a very public hissy fit during our last dinner, berating any employee within a hundred feet, culminating in a tete-a-tete with the maitre'd.  I didn't like him so much after that.  Plus, his wife was a total ditz.  She came back from the central market in Phnom Penh with a couple of IWatches that she paid $40 apiece for.  She was going to give them as gifts.  She was also quite boastful about the deal she got, apparently unaware that an actual IWatch is going to run about $400 on sale.  The market also had Rolexes available for under $10, a signal to the savvy shopper that maybe this was a place to heed the age old warning: Buyer Beware.  That would be the case, I guess, if you had the basic intelligence to realize a $40 Apple product was certainly not authentic.

Where was I going with this, anyway, before I lapsed into my hobby: character assassination?  Oh, yeah, this guy asked if I would send along my notes when I was finished as he had been too busy complaining about the heat and the rough road and the food and . . . there I go again. Anyway, I took his card and said that it would be my pleasure.  

When I got my notes cleaned up I sent him a friendly email.  I wanted him to be comfortable when a message with a name he might not recognize - containing a big Word document - popped into his in-box.  Like most people I have a totally mistaken perception of the effect I have on other people, proving the incontrovertible truth: "No one is thinking about me."  My email was forwarded by the man - who requested the notes - to his wife - who did not, unsurprisingly from someone who didn't appear to possess any advanced reading skills whatsoever -  with the internal note:"FYI."  This woman did respond with several cryptic references that indicated she had NO idea WHATSOEVER who I was, concluding by asking if I was going to go the Israeli PAC meeting in Washington, DC.  (I did like her big ending, I'll say that much).

I deleted the whole mess, of course.  I was not going to try to clear that up.  Not with a woman who is undoubtedly very busy checking data on one of her two, new, fully-functional IWatches.