I recently posted about a trip that I had taken to a combination Chinese restaurant/sleaze lounge/volleyball court.

It popped back into my head this morning.

I was thinking about a particular girl who was there, and who said something that, even now, blows my mind in terms of her ability to have been simultaneously the snobbiest and pettiest person in the entire establishment.

Allow me, then, to describe the scene.

My friend Felix, and I, were sitting in one corner of the sleaze lounge in which the band was playing. Because the band's drummer didn't show up, the band passed a bag around that was filled with percussive instruments, and audience members were expected to remove an item from the bag and then attempt to play it for the duration of the show.

Which was fine.

Because Felix knows more about music than anybody, even the person who invented it, he decided to play two instruments at once. He took a tambourine out of the bag, dipped his hand in again, and brought it out holding onto a recorder.

Felix has a strong desire to be "correct" when he plays music, which is to say that he has a preference for playing in the key of the song, and often in time with the other musicians. With an instrument like a recorder, you are just going to have to hope that a few songs will fall into its key. It isn't like a piano where you can dance about happily from one key to the next, covering the gamut across several octaves. The recorder is an extremely simple instrument, and you're just going to have to work with what you've got when playing one.

So, Felix asked a question.

"Hey," he said. "What key is this recorder in?"

Neither band member got a chance to respond. The honor was usurped by someone sitting to our left. She had six-inch platform boots on (which, combined with her uber-mean attitude, made me afraid of her (seriously)), and what I can only call "infinite cleavage."

"It's in C," she snarled.

Snarled. That word wasn't a mistake - It's right in line with what I wanted.

"Oh," responded Felix. "I wasn't sure."

"A recorder of that size," hissed the large pair of breasts with a small woman attached, "is always going to be in C."

Wow. I mean.

Wow.

How ultra petty do you have to be in order to get mad at someone about the default key for a recorder? These are the things you use to teach small children how to play "Hot Cross Buns." Felix just wanted to make sure he was playing in tune.

Just how petty and nasty a person would you have to be? Argh.

It makes sense, though. She's currently attending my old college, where pretension was an art form, and 9 out of 10 students took to it like Michelangelo took to painting chapel ceilings.

Come to think of it, though, how petty does one have to be in order to write about something like this?