Isn't it always funny how wrong you can be about people? You see a snippet of someone's life, two or three times a week, and you think you can actually sum up their personality/behavior/lifestyle? Don't think you know, because you don't. People will always sneak up and surprise you.
This evening, S and I went to go hang out at our former professor's house for a drink. I don't know how this happened, but I got the invite about an hour or so before we arrived at the Prof's front door. Already, I have never been to a professor's house just for a drink around ten. Weirder still was his house. It was nothing as I had expected. It had no chairs. Just a rug on the floor with some pillows (small ones), and then a flatscreen satelile TV in the middle of it all.
He said he just never got into chairs.
Walking home, S and I had the following conversation:
Me: God, I really hadn't pictured him to live in a house with no chairs. That was quite a surprise. I mean, I don't know why, but by the way he carries himself, and the way he dresses, and his job...I just figured...I just figured...
S: Yeah, he wears really nice, super snazy suits and stuff. With classy hats.
L: Yeah. The two just don't correspond at all. I had been expecting steamlined, metal-type...you know....::flailing hands around aimlessly while trying to find the words to describe the furniture I had expected:::...
S: You mean nicer, more modern Ikea?
L: Exactly. That is exactly what I meant.
First, it was uncanny how well S pinned that one. That really was exactly what I had pictured. Lots of high-tech computer equipment on a big high-tech piece of furniture that was very sleak and classy and new and shiny. But original, too. Not like Ikea where it's often pretty obvious that it's from Ikea (I am, by the way, not dissing Ikea. If I had the money or the means, I would go a-runnin' to that store and shove my little euros into their Swedish corporate hands). To get more precise: let's say, oh, for those that are in the decorating know, we'll call this style simply Habitat, because that what it comes down to in the end.
Really. So when you are expecting nicer, more modern Ikea, or Habitat, as the case may be - a lack of chairs, a plethora of African masks, and smuggled-in Serbian bootleg liquor come as quite a surprise.
This from a guy in his late 40's(?) who regularly wears three-piece suits (white ones, at that) and smokes a pipe.