Steve liked my mind.
And that meant we spent several hours at a weekly farmer’s market talking about Karl Marx, free market enterprise, and general tenets of post-modernism rather than exploring cool booths and being among jolly people.
Steve and I had met via the online dating website I was using. He contacted me and we struck up a simple conversation. After he discovered I had a master of art’s degree in communication studies, he started asking me intellectual questions and began telling me about what books he read.
He also asked me about various theories and what areas I had examined as a scholar.
Karl Marx. Probably missing out on the farmer’s market too
I was wrapping up a recent boyfriend-girlfriend relationship and thus it took a few weeks before I agreed to meet him in person. In the meantime, I did a rare thing for me: I gave him my cell phone number.
Every once in a while, I’d receive a clever sardonic text message regarding topics including poststructuralism. That’s the group of theories whose central concern is the opposition of certain meaning or truth in discourse. Discourse is the message structure in communication.
Steve and I finally agreed to meet one Sunday morning at an outdoor shopping center’s weekly farmer’s market. Although my goal for setting up sip and goes was still meeting new people and having a chat, I was kind of looking forward to this sip and go. I had never been to this popular market and could spend the morning outside in very nice weather looking at handmade items and locally grown produce.
We met near a booth with spiced nuts, exchanged pleasantries, and I started to say, “Shall we walk around?” But he lept into my sentence and said, “Let’s go into the lobby of the hotel here and talk.”
I was crestfallen to leave the perfect temperature of the outdoors, the hustle and bustle of the visitors and the vendors. It was a lively venue with nice energy.
We went into the dark lobby and sat on a large couch.
“Is Marxism dead?” Steve asked. And thus the conversation began.
Critical Theory is more popular in Europe than the United States. Why?
Foucault. Yay or nay.
A couple hours slipped by and I finally said I should do my errands. Sunday afternoon tended to be my grocery shopping day.
We left the hotel lobby, walked in the general direction of our cars.
“So never really answered. Are we really in a post-modern era? Or no?” He asked as we got closer to my car.
“Hard to say. Thank you so much Steve. I’ll look you up on Facebook,” I replied simply.
I didn’t take comprehensive exams at the end of my graduate program. I had opted for the thesis so I could research and write. My sip and go with Steve solidified that decision for me.
