... go see my girlfriend read her poems at a poetry reading.
she is a very nervous person, and she was put between two really funny guys.
One of them just comes up and starts screaming in Spanish, lots of curses and yelling, and at the end he just pauses for half a second and the goes "oh, so like a year ago I was reading this really racist Pat Buchanan piece about Sonia Sotomayor, and as a hispanic man, I thought to myself, am I that threatening? Am I like, this radicalized threatening presence? So then I wrote this poem where I cuss at Pat Buchanan."
It was very funny.
And then my cute, nervous girlfriend came up and said something that I recognized as "I am incredibly nervous and trying to make excuses for my work," but which came across as "this poem is going to have long words you don't know, because you are stupid" and then some other really pretentious-seeming things.
She definitely takes her work a lot more seriously than any of those other people, which was sure... something.