Very odd coincidence...

One of my undergrad roomies is this redhead kid from Harvard who studies the Classics, seems slightly gay, and is a raging asshole...

The priest had a minimum age of 23 when he did the class in Rome, but I think he lifted it for Milwaukee since American kids won't go as hog wild here, and also because he's re-starting the class after his absence of a year, and because like 5 undergrads wrote him and did really well on the tests.

Overall, of the 5 undergrads, 2 are nice but don't study esp. hard (but then again, neither do a lot of the older people); 2 are very very intense in a young way, but they're really engaged in the material, which is great; and then there's this kid.

Twice like the second day of class, when I asked the priest a question on a complicated point of grammar I didn't understand, he shook his head no because he thought the question was misguided...

He did the same thing the other week, when the priest asked me for to state the translation I had done on my homework, and I declined, saying I had made a mistake where I thought this one word used the dative and had done so throughout my entire homework (it takes the accusative; I had looked it up, but had misread an example given in the dictionary entry).

This kid also reads incredibly incredibly fast whenever it's his turn to translate and then quickly translates into English, since it's like a challenge to him to do that, though no one else can follow along (most other people when sight-reading try to read the text in sense units, so everyone can try to understand it as it comes).

He also knows a shitload of words, like "distaff", and the names of types of woods and plants.

And, when he makes a mistake in translating and the priest gently corrects him, he says shit like, "I knew that," or, "I meant to say that."

Which, all in all, shows you that the basic assumption in his academic interactions is to show that he knows more and is better than everyone... Really, it's a very Classics-y ethos; the whole idea of the ancient Classics education system was to know the literature and be able to catch references and make them and know obscure words and talk in difficult grammatical constructions, and this kid buys into the values of cultural superiority and exaggerates it to an extreme degree...

He also never looks at anyone in the class except the priest, and when he does, it's with this incredibly sexual look, like someone leering at someone else in a bar, and it makes him look like a total starfucker, only it's kind of like a Tom Ripley thing, since he not only wants to fuck the priest, but he also wants to be him too.

He ended up moving into my apt., and I don't even say hello to him. Since, if he means to be an asshole (which I don't think he does), why would I want to interact with him, and if he doesn't mean to be an asshole, why would I want to be friendly or acquaintances with a person who's an asshole without even realizing it?... He's picked up on this, and if I have the fridge door open and I'm getting shit out and it's blocking his way, he doesn't even ask me to close it, but he just waits for me to finish before he passes.

Anyhow, he sits around the apartment a lot, and he always reads classics - either English ones in translation, or dialogues of Plato in Greek with English academic commentaries - which is kind of like how I used to read, I think, before I realized that memoirs were better literature than most things ever written.

I also wonder if I have ever behaved like him in class, with that self-focused behavior.

It's like looking into a twisted mirror image of me... He even wears Harvard shirts everywhere, something I've never ever done except in select on-campus circumstances, since I don't want to set myself apart from people (which seems to be the one thing he wants to do more than anything else).

Me and this other guy in class who has great Latin (he's a high school teacher, I go to him for help and he guides me through things in a very nice way) were talking about classmates the other day and he doesn't like the kid either.

"But he has mad skills, though," he was like, and he brought up how he sight-read the word for 'distaff'.

"That may be true," I was like, "But I can look shit up in a dictionary, and not being an asshole is a skill too," and I said that there's always people who are better than you at shit, and something you have to develop in academia is cordial relationships with people who can cover your blindspots, and if this redheaded little fuck continues to behave like this, I highly doubt anyone ever would want to check a translation of his or some bullshit.