Bore Me With Talent

For anonymity's sake, I'll call him "Dave." Not because he was a bad guy, he wasn't (despite what my mother may think) but because what I'm about to say about him will be, shall we say, rather one-dimensional. It's a hyper-focused profile of a guy that I truly did not get to know very well and, I doubt, anyone ever did.

Dave and I dated for, I'd say less than a month. Our dating (if you could call it that) started as a series of what I believed to be at the time "kismet", but when I look back on it, was only a set of coincidences that meant nothing when taken either together or apart. Y'see, even though he and I were three years apart in age, we both shared three classes. We also had in common an insatiable love of the English language, never missed a Twilight Zone marathon and our favorite food in the world was Chipwiches.

Coincidences all, and certainly nothing to sustain a relationship over. Especially when it was doomed to end before it even began.

Problem is, Dave was talented. Or rather, Dave was talented and he knew it and lawdy did he like to tell the world, or at least me, just how talented he was. Sure I was impressed that he had completed an entire novel by the time he was fourteen, but did he have to brag about it? Constantly? And the fact that he was the youngest member to perform at a prestigious piano recital? Or what about the time he won this award or that?

Hs wall, his shelves, his entire room was plastered with plaques, trophies, ribbons what have you from everything and anything he had ever won. Good on him I say and I commend him for working so hard for each and every one of them. Problem was, that's all he'd ever done. He spent so much time winning awards and finishing a novel that he hadn't gone out and lived life.

Which is why I found him completely and utterly dull. Pity really, when you consider all that he had accomplished by the time he was fourteen.