Self-absorbed white women are the bane of my existence.

I realized today when I was studying at a coffee shop that self-absorbed white women are the bane of my existence, when this older white woman in black with a subduedly colorful scarf talked for 45min. to two acolytes about some past drama that she still remembered in detail and found absorbing, and since she had no sense of her own volume, I could hear her way over at my table, even though her head was in the other direction.

Plus, she kept talking in italics --

"So then..."

"He said..."

"But that isn't the way that we did it..."

I find it interesting that though some of these women are older and some younger, a good half of them are Jewish, and they seem uncomfortable, esp. the younger ones, and are prone to straining to make jokes. The younger Jewish ones tend to be on the fat side, too, and have ecletic wardrobes and big dangly earrings.

In fact, the last one I ran into was this fat, eclectically-dressed, dangly-earringed girl undergrad originally from New York who had yet for some reason transferred here from some worse school in New York, but kept talking about how much she liked New York better, and about how her parents were worried she wouldn't go into school in the first place, since she had taken time off to go to circus school and had gone around the world managing circuses.

(Hipsters are so predictable - circuses, freaks, burlesque performers - that's all they're interested in, and romanticize.)

The other young ones are bleached blonde barbies who talk too loud on cell phones, like one who was next to me on the elliptical at the gym last night. I turned and asked her to take her phone call elsewhere, and she didn't even look at me, she just held up her hand.

It was funny, when I went to write my comment card asking about the cell phone policy and if it could be posted, I started writing, "I hit a rude girl with a cell phone today," using the colloquial meaning of "hit" like "run into someone I don't know" (as in my mom might say if my dad asked her about her day at the library, and she'd be like, "You wouldn't believe it honey, I hit some real assholes today"), but I realized that sounded like I was violent, so I scratched out the start of the sentence and was like, "A rude person next to me talked on her cellphone loudly for a long time."