One of my rules for keeping a blog is no writing about dating. The tricky thing about this is that most of the interesting stuff that happens to me is in that area of life. But it’s tough to write an interesting blog post about a funny date without making somebody look bad. Here I’m breaking my rule, but only because the only person who looks bad in the story is me.
A couple of months ago I went on an unsuccessful set-up. A couple of days after the date one of my friends was asking me why I had decided it was not going to work. I was having a hard time finding the best way to explain to him that I thought we were just too different in too many ways. He still looked confused so I picked an example:
Me: Like, she didn’t know who Mendelssohn was.
Jake: Who?
Me: Felix Mendelssohn…
Jake: Yeah, I have no idea who that is.
Me: Really? He’s like one of the top twenty classical composers of all time.
I should clarify that I don’t normally talk about classical composers on dates (not even top 20 classical composers), but we were at a choir concert and one of the pieces was by Mendelssohn.
I wasn’t too surprised that Jake wasn’t familiar with him; I just assumed that he didn’t know his classical composers very well. No big deal. Then I decided to take a poll from the rest of the table (like 6 or 7 dudes and one girl).
Me: Hey guys, do you know who Mendelssohn is?
Everyone: No idea.
Me: Really? Randy, you know who he is, right? (Randy is a really talented pianist)
Randy: Dude, I don’t know anything about football players.
Me: Felix Mendelssohn…
Randy:
Me: He’s a classical composer…
Randy: Oh, yeah I thought you were talking about football.
So while I had been wondering what planet the girl who didn’t know about some random music history was from, I was the one from a different planet—the planet of musical snobbery.
never heard of him.
ReplyDeleteThat was a fabulous post. I have heard of him but I couldn't identify anything he composed.
ReplyDeleteHow's this? I LIVED in the city where Mendelssohn lived. (Leipzig--Bach lived there too, and it was Mendelssohn who kind of revived Bach's music.)
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to picture Felix Mendelssohn playing football.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what's worse, the fact that you polled the table or the fact that we looked up the top 20 later, just to verify... and then tried to guess the other 19. He WAS on it, right?
Haha..like the post. :D
ReplyDelete