I Only Date Guys Who Wear Ascots

Smartly-dressed Jovial Man: Where's the men's clothing store in town?
Me: Actually, I don't believe there is one.
Jovial Man: What? How can that be?
Me: Erm...
Jovial Man: What has happened to Spearfish?!
Me: I don't recall there ever being -
Jovial Man: There was when I lived here! But that was before you were born.
Me: Ah. I see.
Jovial Man: Maybe there's one a way's up? Up on the hill?
Me: I don't think so...
Jovial Man: Huh. I would have thought, what with all the college students and all...

Yeah. Because when I think dress shirts and tasseled leather shoes, I think the men of Black Hills State. Seriously guys, stand up and fight.

Fight for your right to look like pretentious asshats.

But On the Bright Side, I No Longer Read Elizabeth Wurtzel

So my dad said that writing an entire blog entry about the word "obfuscate" was a tad pretentious. Which, okay, maybe he's got a point. (I really want that entry to become a huge controversy so I can refer to it as "Obfugate." Please, someone?)

The thing is, though, I know I've had my pretentious moments, and I do my best to own them. When I was fifteen, for example, I would lock myself in my room listening to Fiona Apple and pretending to read Kierkegaard. That was pretty pretentious, yeah? By the time I was eighteen and had my head too far up my ass to walk in a straight line, I had moved on to Leonard Cohen and Elizabeth Wurtzel, which...ugh. (God, I still can't believe Wurtzel wrote an entire book about herself, then had the audacity to name it Prozac Nation. Could her narcissism be any more apparent?) Also, I read a lot of Nietzsche. Until, that is, I broke up with a guy who happened to be borrowing my Nietzsche, and who never returned it because he is a great big asspanda. Ahem.

So I don't excuse myself from criticism. I criticize myself all the time. It burns calories. And I am definitely no stranger to pretension, as anyone who has spoken to me for longer than ten minutes can attest. I mean, let's face it: I'm an English major. Semi-colons are my dearest friends, and I love verbs. My personal library is pretentious, too - though not quite as pretentious as claiming to have a "personal library" - as is my pseudo-poetic love of black coffee. (It's black like my soul, y'see.)

I take great pride in accepting my pretentiousness. I like to think that it absolves it, somewhat. I mean, it probably doesn't, but it sure is pretty to think so. (Yes, the Hemingway reference was a deliberately pretentious move on my part.) And...um...what was my point again?

Oh, right. Obfuscate. Look, I will grant that, as a word, it is irreplacable. There is no other word which could do the job that obfuscate does. However, it sounds ugly, and in that sense it is the sports bra of my vocabulary. That is to say, it is effective, but horrendously unattractive. And I still prefer "elegiac."