Cry of the Soul

Let me tell you a story. Talya and I were eating a kind of crappy meal at this lame pan-asian restaraunt across the street from my school: hot, rushed, too many toddlers, a million people on staff. Ok, we were just in and out of there, basically, but we were sitting next to this foursome who were definitely on some kind of double-date. They were in their early fourties or late thirties, none of them attractive, wearing some mishmash of Gap or J. Crew clothes, but really haphazardly and unflatteringly. And clearly they were not "catching up" in the sense of this going on all night, but they were probably going to see a movie after eating at this crappy, cheap place.

Anyways, Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl" comes on in the background. There's only one conversation to have, really: the awesome scene in Boogie Nights where they are trying to sell all this baking soda as cocaine, and the druglord insists that they reverentially listen to "Jesse's Girl." That is the conversation, ok? But instead, these douchebag dudes who are "old enough to remember when" just kind of gesture verbally towards some potential nostalgia or (you'll see) I don't know what.

- "Oh, hey...Rick Springfield..."
- "Jesse's Girl"
- "This was his one big song..."
[Not true. Rick Springfield may have only one song that made its way to 2007, but certainly for these old losers, Rick Springfield had several more hits during their teenage years.]
- "I still know all the words."
- "Of course...everybody does."

IMPORTANT MOMENT. So, after this last thing, the guy turns to his wife, who has not been in this conversation, and kind-of shimmys his eyebrows at her, suggestively.

Signalling, BEN'S MIND BLOWN.

What did this eyebrow-raising mean?
1) That he had just said something clever, and this was a call for acknowledgement of that.
2) That he was being sarcastic to the other guy's face, and this was a signal to her that something was going on under the surface.
[So, that something he had said was worth taking notice of. Which it precisely WASN'T.]
3) Vaguely, something like: hey, we're going to have sex later, so I'm sorry that I am leaving you out of this conversation.
[This is part of it, I think, but here's the real explanation]:
4) "Well, here we are. We have nothing better to talk about than this thing that none of us care about; we just ate some bad food and we still have a few hours to spend with these people, and with each other. And after we get home, I still am going to have to see you for the rest of my life, and you aren't getting any younger and neither am I. Not only did I not say something clever, but I have lost even the capability of being embarrassed about that, and these morons we are eating with didn't even notice." Basically, the gurgling sound of the disappearance of any irony towards one's own, now-unretrievably-worthless life being swallowed in the slime of hopelessness, disguised as a comment to his wife: "Like, we're in this together" never seemed so threatening.

They were very expressive eyebrows.