Happy Hour Conversation

"Let me guess," he said. He'd been sitting next to us throughout most of happy hour, alone. At first, I thought he was going to try and hit on either me or my co-worker, but he'd mostly left us alone, so I'd given that up.

"You're 24, right?" he said, "and you just moved in with your boyfriend?"

I told him that, yes, I was in fact 24, and that since he'd obviously overheard us discussing how I'd recently moved in with my boyfriend, yes, that was also true.

He looked kind of smug.

"Did you have some other guesses about us?" I said, because I wasn't actually impressed by someone deducing my age. (Mildly insulted, but I have no idea why it was insulting -- I like being 24; it's a good age -- but I also don't want to be a cliche of 24, I guess.)

"Uh, no," he said. "But the living with your boyfriend, how's that going?" as if he expected a really long-winded and whiney answer.

"It's going well," I said.

"But...?"

"But he works crappy hours?" I offered, which was what I'd said to my co-worker as well when the subject came up. This has pretty much been an issue throughout the better part of our relationship, leading to a year-long breakup at one point. It is not easy, but also, I think working crappy hours is somewhat understandable in your 20s. "Being woken up every night at 3 or 4 or 5 does kind of suck when you work normal-person hours," I say. "But otherwise, I can't complain."

He nods and says he also just moved in with his girlfriend last month. "So why are you talking to us?" I want to ask, but I don't, because I'm not that good. Instead, I say, "Ahh, and so that's not going well, eh?"

He tells us, no, it has been, except for the last few nights, but fails to elaborate. He says she just moved here from North Carolina, but she's from Poughkeepsie originally, so moving here wasn't so strange.

"Oh, is that what she told everyone in North Carolina when she followed you here?" I ask, because I know she didn't really move to New York just because of its proximity to Poughkeepsie. People might move to Poughkeepsie because of its proximity to New York City, but nobody moves to New York City because of its proximity to Poughkeepsie.

People do, however, move to New York because they are following someone else there.

He laughed and pointed at me and said "Ahh -- you -- you're good..."

And I was at least mildly happy at having one-upped someone at the sizing-up game.