Bitchell: The Christ Church Student vs. A Meth Addicted Homeless Bum

Weigh up the world according to the views of Starbucks’ keenest clientele

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Last Thursday, I went to Starbucks on High Street. Yeah, the tea sucks (it’s American), and other coffee shops sell better pastries, but Starbucks offers consistent mediocrity at every storefront on the planet. It’s a brand you can trust to let you down.

Unfortunately, just as the Long Island Starbucks caters to silicon inflated suburban housewives and their entourage of nannies, the High Street Starbucks attracts society’s high and low: Christ Church students and homeless meth addicts.

In a back corner, a loud Christ Church student with pigtails and cowboy boots that screamed “I think I look really authentic and real” was explaining the difference between GAP sweaters and Christ Church sweaters to a visiting Chinese family.

Pompous and proud?

The Chinese family explained that they bought luxury brands to show to the world that they had paved their own commercial path out of poverty. The student berated them:

“It’s immoral to let a company use your chest as a walking advertisement,” she said. “Wearing Christ Church sweatpants shows pride.”

She annoyed me because she failed to realize that Christ Church is the oldest brand on earth after the Vatican, and the only reason the family agreed with her was because she had access to a brand more luxurious than Louis Vuitton.

It’s a really big label…

Of course, there’s a possibility she worked her ass off at a state school to score a ticket to Oxford, but considering she managed to casually mention that her sister worked in India’s art market, her family heritage probably scored her a pair of Christ Church sweatpants.

I related more to the visiting family than Little Miss Christ Church: my immigrant mother took pride in purchasing a BMW and briefly belonging to the 1% during the Clinton Era, without ever attending college, so, of course I did.

But hailing from trailer park people that made their own money also instilled me with self-awareness.

This’ll help you self-reflect

 

Although my mother prefers BMWs and Little Miss Christ Church idolizes her formal dinners and sweatpants, their preferences are both absurd. Superiority breeds insanity, but the visiting family saw Little Miss Christ Church as more serious than themselves—not that this meant they didn’t insult her pride.

“I love Chemistry,” she blurted out for no reason.

“Most Chinese science students study in America.”

“Why?” Little Miss Christ Church asked.

“Because they have better science jobs there.”

A homeless guy with missing teeth and what may or may not have been meth scars sat on the couch across from me.

“I just want to interrupt those people,” he said. “They’re such dumb mother fuckers.”

“Truth,” I said back, not lifting my head from my kindle.

“You’re American?” he asked. “You know that means you’re a septic tank? You’re made of shit, I hope you know that.”

I ignored him, because I’ve been in England long enough to know that Brits use their language superiority to override the fact that the United States overstepped them as a world power seventy years ago, and I’ve grown bored with using my bitchiness to overcompensate for the fact that the Brits have history and tradition the Americans lack. Yet the homeless man wanted to keep talking to me.

“What do you study?” he asked.

“English.”

“How can you study English when you’re an American? You bastardized my language. You can’t even read. Do you know why they don’t want the people to read? Do you know why they don’t teach Latin to everyone anymore? You’ll probably call it a conspiracy theory!”

“So they can control the people.”

“For a septic tank, you know what’s going on. Where are you studying?”

“Wadham.”

“Oh. That’s one of the small pussy colleges. No wonder you study English there.”

I continued reading, because I’ve taken enough shit in the last few weeks, and I really didn’t need to be ‘America-bashed’ by a guy that lived under a bridge.

“I was kicked out of the library today!” he confessed.

“Which one?”

“DON’T BE A MOTHER FUCKER. YOU KNOW IT WAS THE COUNTY LIBRARY.”

His shouts made him look crazy, but he also made a point. I lived as much inside a bubble as all the other mother fuckers.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like—”

“I’m just either a sociopath, schizophrenic,or moral hazard.” He looked at Christ Church’s personal Pippi Longstockings. “At least that’s what they say.”

“How did you end up here?” I asked.

“I’ve always loved knowledge. A friend told me I should come here. ‘They have knowledge there.’ All the libraries you could ask for, but they never let me in the libraries. That was thirteen years ago. Funny thing about Oxford: there’s a group of mother fuckers that hate guys like me. They pass the laws. They run the world. They hate guys like me, yet somehow I’m stuck in the place that breeds those mother fuckers.”