Embarrassing! Girl Walks Down Locust Talking to Her Mom in English and Not a Glamorous Foreign Language

Claire Johnson (E ’20) seemed to be simply minding her own business on her walk from “Gregory” to the “Engineering Quad” last Tuesday. Wait, does anyone actually know where those two places are? Or that they even definitively exist? Okay, cool, neither do we.

Claire called her mom, a lovely homemaker who dabbles in needlepoint and Chardonnay, for her weekly check-in. Alright, “weekly” is a strong word. Perhaps “tri-weekly” and “whenever she tries making any autonomous decision by herself” are better-suiting. She and her mom were discussing how neither of them were to even touch a crockpot again after Claire’s recent This is Us binge.

Claire’s Midwestern accent includes exaggerated elongated vowels and no shortage of filler words such as “um” and “like.” Soon after, Claire saw a couple cool-looking people smoking cigs outside of VP shoot her dark looks across The Button. That’s when she realized her major faux-pas. “I’m such an idiot. I know that being seen speaking English on the phone while on Locust is such a freshman move. Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead spitting my native tongue. I really don’t know what came onto me.”

“Sure, my Eastern European family hasn’t spoken anything other than English since my great-grandpa immigrated, but I really hate them for raising me in an English-speaking home. Do they not understand how lame I look talking to my mom on the phone on Locust in English instead of Spanish or Russian or Portuguese? It’s hard enough to seem cool here, let alone when I only speak one language with my family. This is so embarrassing.”

At press time, Claire was purchasing Rosetta Stone for Mandarin for her family. She said she was eager to lead lessons over the break.