Mirror, mirror, next table over...

They sat in the cafeteria at the next table over. Both moved slowly, although she was more ponderous, taking her time to stagger across the floor, each step looking like the first stage of a nasty fall from which she only caught herself with difficulty. Her purse dragged the ground and her shirt draped around her like a bedsheet.

I only noticed them when she spoke.

"These damn Adventists. I don't understand this cafeteria system. They can eat meat, you know, just not pork. It doesn't make any sense that they would only have vegetarian food here. It's so stupid that they let their religion leak into their food choices. And we have to suffer for it."

I lifted my head to look, surprised and a little irked. I couldn't tell you why, although the fact that she looked like she had never suffered for lack of food a day in her life might have had something to do with it. She continued.

"Now look at what you've done. You went and left your chimichanga in the serving line. No, don't tell me you didn't! I had to go and get it while you were galavanting around in the halls like a fool. Don't you even think to tell me I didn't have to go get it." Her voice was bitter and harassing, deeply disppointed and scornful. Over the next half hour, it never changed.

At this point, I took a hard look at the man with her. He looked normal, heavyset, about the same age, and infinitely good-tempered, perhaps on the simple side. I never actually heard him speak the entire time we sat there. She would pause, occasionally, and there might have been a small frission of sound in his vicinity, to which she would reply, "You think? That's ridiculous. PA's shouldn't be allowed to practice in hospitals. The last time we were here, one almost made you overdose on your medication before I caught him. And I told the MD that he didn't know crap and shouldn't be allowed inside the doors."

A few minutes later, her voice rose again. "And that idiot physician only had half of the lab report, and if he'd taken the time to do his research he would have realized that there was nothing wrong with her mitral valve. I tell you, this hospital  could use with a little shaking up. I'm going to make a stink about it. I think there's a place you can do recording, and I'm going to record our conversations and prove that they don't know what the hell they're talking about. I'm going to put it in the newspaper. Not knowing a mitral valve was normal! I knew about it before they did."

At this point, I almost couldn't concentrate on my PDX notes. The hospital wireless is too slow to stream music, so I couldn't drown her out with my headphones, and I was indignant. Where did this woman come off? "Uneducated" was the kindest description I could think of.

I keep writing this in the past tense, but I'm still sitting here, and so are they, and I'm having a hard time studying. She keeps getting louder, and by now, she knows more than all the specialists in this hospital. They're all stupid, little better than techs, who know less than nothing, in her liberal opinion. I'm a bit angry.

I think that I am not going to medical school for four years, and through residency for another handful, and paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars, for people like this to think they know more than I do. Or even have more common sense than I.

But that leads me to the real problem, which is not the obese lady with the loud opinions.

I think I must be very arrogant. I think I must pretend I'm not better than other people. Because sitting here, listening to her, I feel like I am.

Ugh. That's ugly. Much worse than her tone of voice.

If she'd grown up in my place, with my family, privileges, education, what would she be like? If I were her, where would I have come from, and how would it have changed the way I think, and speak, and see the world? An entirely different worldview, completely independent of any inherent fault or virtue.

I could be her. So easily. And yet I think I'm better than she is, as if through some intrinsic goodness.

That's utterly ridiculous. Appalling.

I don't like seeing my flaws.