The slightly-overdramatic juris doctor has been waging a campaign to get me to take his class. And more recently, to take all of his classes. I didn't... miss it, exactly, I just doubted my perception of causality. 

To now get too far into the amateur psych profiling, he is surprisingly rule-based. I think most people just think he's super on top of everything, and highly self-critical when he does miss something, but it also comes out in socialization, and I suspect is a lot of the reason he comes off as eccentric. I accidentally instantiated a rule about answering my emails with emails and not randomly in person next time he saw me. It was only relevant once, when the office wanted a written confirmation of something, but it's stuck very, very hard for several months now. I have to interpret him for my smart-but-normal coworker a lot. He has this schtick where he borrows the staff to come in for the last five minutes of his classes to watch the choreo and give feedback to his students; he specifically asks about it, every single week for literally a year now, and my coworker could not for the life of her figure out why he never defaulted to just assuming we knew the drill. I told her that clearly, at some point someone sat him down and told him he was being Kind Of A Lot and he couldn't just presume that everyone was going to care about his thing as hard as he did, so now he is going to check. Every. Single. Time.

Dude clearly takes feedback to heart, I figure. I don't make it a habit to say things I don't mean, but I did curb the hyperbole a little, just in case. I thought it was rather odd when a different coworker, also subject to his requests for an audience, said she didn't see the point because she didn't think he was even paying attention to the opinions he asked for. The SOJD is the only person I deal with on a regular basis who consistently listens to words the first time. I've said several things that clearly went in through his ear, then into his brain, then stayed there. Often they produce behavioral changes. It's entirely possible he just thinks I say a lot of smart things, because I do, but there are occasions when I wonder whether I'm even living on the same planet as other people.

There is an Instagram for the class, because of course there is, and because half of the students are young enough to be my children, this is the only place anyone bothers to post announcements. I had to re-download the app to follow the account, because I'm old and I don't communicate well in social media rebus. People keep bugging me to "engage more" and I draw the line at joining the youngs' WhatsApp group, so I left a generic joke comment about having missed something by skipping the beginner class on one of the choreo videos. I expected zero acknowledgement from any of my classmates, in accordance with my theory that Kids These Days can't see text that doesn't contain at least three emojis.

Unexpectedly, got a response from the SOJD, 'That's what the other class is for!' Next time I showed up to my class, he made a point of telling everyone that it was totally a thing to take the basic and advanced class concurrently, you can absolutely do that, really. Not the first time I got the feeling I had possibly, I don't know, reminded him of something he thought he should be saying anyway? The last time it happened, he ended class by thanking everybody for 'sharing [their] vulnerability'. Admittedly a broadly artist-y thing to say which is entirely congruent with the 'slightly-overdramatic' part of his personality, but I was the only one bent over double, hanging on to a barre, trying not to have an asthma attack at the time. I err on the side of assuming that anything that doesn't have my name in it isn't directed at me, but sometimes there's an internal argument involved.

I picked up an extra shift at the desk last week and discovered that he had in fact added a third class section! Made me a bit nervous, to be honest. I like seeing him, but he's not the only one who's been told he's a much of a muchness sometimes, so I try to keep a lid on it. I'm not stalking the poor man, I was just there for the studio credit, but there he was coming up the front stairs again anyhow. He looked fine with this situation, so, y'know, okay.

He asked if I was coming to class that evening. 

—No, I have the desk shift that runs through the whole thing.

—But that's only this week, right?

—Yes, although next week I have a studio block that runs right up to the start time, and might be pretty dead.

—Oh.

That sounded very disappointed, I thought. 

You ever have one of those moments of serious cognitive dissonance, where you understand how much something looks like one thing, despite knowing that it's only a massive comedy-of-errors coincidence? I know exactly what all this goddamn looks like, and it isn't, because the SOJD is very, very gay. Literally, in the sense of that is how he identifies both in person and in every third hashtag on his Insta, and culturally, in the sense of once stopping off to impulse-buy a rainbow sweatshirt in the hundred-foot walk between his parking spot and our building, and also in that I have never received an email from this man that was not somehow typed entirely in a tone I can only describe as 'sparkly pink heartmark emoji'. He once told me he soooooo appreciated me, with all six Os.

I realize that there is a cap on the number of times per week people want to see my shining face. My interests are odd, I don't know how to do things casually, I'm pathologically observant and it weirds people out. There's a reason I do most of my work alone. The SOJD's level of tolerance seems to be 'greater than twice'. He clearly does not give two shits whether I am paying for any of this, since he pre-emptively loses almost all of the comp slips I give him for the workstudy slot he doesn't have to hold for me. I'm not stupid, I promise, just very paranoid about overstepping and making life awkward for someone who has to see me at work for the foreseeable future.

I shuffled some things around and told him I could make at least a few extra weekday classes. He shouted YES! so loudly it echoed in the stairwell. His assistant just about died laughing. The enthusiasm is not making me feel less like I'm somehow being setup for a hilarious sitcom-style misunderstanding. The office staff is already stopping me to tell me what's happening with his classes, on the assumption that if he needs something I'll just handle it when I'm in there anyway.

Why I am so beloved of so many tremendously gay men, I will never know. One of my other friends says it's because I'm "ninety pounds of pure sass and dancing skill", but his guess at my weight is a solid 35 lbs short, so I question the accuracy of the rest.

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