I'm haunted by insincerity.

This may be evidence of a psychological problem, but it can't be too crazy to think that people are often selfish, to think that they often have motives beyond genuine concern or interest. Just because you're paranoid…

I'm often insincere, usually out of boredom, and I find it horrifyingly easy to imagine how others, with better motives than I, could be doing the same.

I watch as people completely change their behavior to suit their company.

I narrow my eyes at most compliments, doubting.

Mark it down in the big book as a failure to communicate. We've gone from phatic words like "like" to phatic sentences, phatic conversations. We apologize when we're not sorry, just because we feel obligated. We enthuse when we're not excited. We praise because it's easy.

Next year, thousands of college students will praise works they hate. Not everyone gets Gertrude Stein, but next year, every English student with an essay to write will pretend to.

I am pretty paranoid about this, and my chronic distrust for large swaths of the human population is reason number six why I find it so hard to interact with them.

(A drunken Our Bold Hero, in the spirit of in vino veritas, will readily and repeately contend that everyone is patronizing him.)

And how can I learn to trust people? Cultivate some more insincerity of my own, become a dances-for-nickels guy with an infinitely maleable (and equally fake) persona. Be all things to all people, and only half of them will despise you for it.

Ah, but I don't have the urge to go that far, and I certainly don't have the energy. I'll stick to quibbling about small duplicities.

Which leads me, naturally enough, to the English picnic, held yesterday in Colman.

I like the Annual English Department Picnic; it's an oppurtunity to mingle with majors, minors, undecided Freshmen, old-school professors, new-school professors… all the various denizens of our departmental world.

I can't trust the (young) new-school Professors. I love talking to them, but their enthusiasm for activities like this is pretty suspect. And it will always be, until they get tenure and can be as rude as they dare.

(Which won't be far. Also, I like the idea of measuring out rudeness like that, as a distance.)

I tried to talk to Prof Bloom, my feminist Shakespeare professor, but her inveterate niceness is too much. Who really cares what a frequently-late student like myself is doing this summer?

She does, apparently. But only apparently, I think. But she's nice so maybe she does… well, that was too much of a metaphysical dilemma. I sidled next to Prof Hoffman and The American Scholar.

I work with The American Scholar at the Writing Lab, but Prof Hoffmann I only know from my frequent attempts to meet with my advisor. I can never remember his hours, so Prof Hoffmann sees me knocking at his door about three times a day, sometimes.

Prof Hoffmann disengaged while The American Scholar and I were chatting. The professors and the students seemed to seperate as time passed, though some senior English majors congregated outside with the Prof Dintenfass, Prof Goldgar, and Prof Fritzell.

After some inter-student mingling, Representative Man, the Lawrentian's best editorialist, turned to me.

"Let's go outside."

I agreed and we joined the old-school professors outside. Someone was passing around a paper plate with summer reading suggestions. I looked over the list and added Reader's Block, the book I've had a love-hate relationship with for about a year now.

Best moment: bashing Eggers and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and having Fritzell agree. Validation!