Humor and my Left Kidney*

2006-02-01T00:30:00.001-05:00

Physics Apnea: Why I’m so Proud to be a College Student

Are you proud to be a college student? What I mean is, Do you wake up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat, scratching yourself in various unsanitary places, wondering where you are and smelling like a pizza/vodka smoothie? And who IS that in my bed?

Well, I am, and for a few reasons. We, as a caste, are known and renowned throughout the world for many significant achievements, one of which is our rampant, though entirely unsuccessful reproductive activity. The fertility rate of the average college male is approximately on the order of some very very small number below pi, according to a well-researched article in a journal somewhere. At college you learn these types of things. You learn about imaginary numbers like pi that never end in calculus class, why these numbers are so important for keeping crazy people occupied trying to memorize them and away from productive members of society in psychology class, and how to cite your sources in cites class. This is why I’m so proud to be a college student.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot about college I don’t like. For one, I don’t like physics. In fact, I hate physics so much that I’ve recently been having second thoughts about being physical. Right now, we’re learning about Gaussian surfaces and Coulomb’s Law, two terms that make so little sense to me that they actually shut down my brain stem and I stop breathing.

I was having a conversation about this with a friend of mine the other day, Jeremy Novich. At first he didn’t understand what I was saying, but he caught on rather quickly. It went like this:

RAFI: Jeremy, I think I’m going to die of physics apnea.
JEREMY: What’s physics apnea?
RAFI: It’s like sleep apnea. You know, you go to sleep and then you just stop breathing for a minute? Well, you go to physics, and then you stop breathing for 40.
JEREMY: Oh. That happened yesterday to my professor.

There are only certain keywords that trigger the condition. “Gaussian” does it. “Coulomb” comes close, but the fact that Coulomb was probably French is just entertaining enough to keep me breathing at a rate just fast enough to maintain consciousness. “Electric flux,” another thing we’re learning about, keeps the breathing rate up and regular, since my brain is forced into loop of imagining the professor

Teach me, teach me, teach me,
He’ll teach me the Electric Flux.

Then he does the dance and we all breathe along, slowly, in rhythm. Then the loop replays itself until he says “Gaussian,” and I wake up on the floor 40 minutes later gasping for air.

Oh, there’s always the occasional exciting moment when the professor tells a joke and you can’t help but breathe a little. Once he told a joke about how the standard kilogram was invented. I remember it to this day, which is obvious, since I’m writing about it now.

PROFESSOR: Well, these two guys took a chunk of metal, one looked at the other and said, “Does that look like a standard kilogram to you?” And he said, “Sure, what about you?” And he said, “Yup, that’s a standard kilogram.”

We all laughed, which is surprising, because that requires a lot of inhaling.

The other thing about college that I don’t like is the fact that once you’re done, you have to find a job. This is what I’m trying to do right now. I’ve developed the unique strategy of composing really…interesting cover letters to famous people, hoping they’ll figure out that I’m famous, too, for Pete’s sake, and I should be paid extravagant sums of money for it already, for the love of God, etc.

This is an example of something I actually wrote to a famous person recently:

“My name is Rafi, I’m from Miami, right now I’m a senior at one of those colleges in Boston or thereabouts, and I am a pretend journalist. I decided that I wanted to be a pretend journalist ever since I started writing excruciatingly boring stories for my university newspaper while wondering to myself if anybody who wasn’t missing several essential internal organs and a frontal lobe could ever possibly care about anything I was writing. I certainly didn’t, which is why, generally, I sat at the interview table slowly drooling with a blank stare for an average of 15 minutes after the interview was over, thinking that whoever was talking to me was still there and that I should start jotting down quotes. This would go on until, inevitably, a janitor, thinking me catatonic, would jab me in the ribs with the end of his mop.

“I would then collapse from journalism apnea. This was a year and a half ago.
“Then a rival newspaper opened up and was on the lookout for writers, so on a whim (I get a lot of whims) I decided to write an article about student government, which I entitled “Student Government Body Goes to the Weight Room.” Now I make things up at random without collapsing from lack of brain activity. This was very encouraging for me.

“I have collected 12 of my best articles, carefully selected at random, for you to look at. If you can give me some feedback, a recommendation letter to a newspaper, a job, advice on how to get one, a really giant apple (I love those), or my missing car keys, I will put them in a safe, lock it, and forget the combination. That way I can never take them out, and never lose them again.”

The famous person, who we’ll call Dave Barry, has not yet gotten back to me. I have a few theories as to why. Theory #1 is that he is genuinely busy. This, though, is highly unlikely in my opinion. Famous people generally have way too much time on their hands, which they spend doing nothing important, like book tours, which are designed to make you MORE famous so people will realize that hey, you DO exist and hence buy your book. Theory #2 is physics apnea. Somebody must have called him up and said Gaussi…

*THUD*

2006-01-31T11:13:00.000-05:00

Contact Your Local Poison Control Center Immediately

I am a college student – you know, a member of the segment of the human population most renowned for its rampant, though hopefully unsuccessful reproductive activity. That aside, once you actually start going to a college, you begin to realize that there are more egregious biological issues on campus than simple infertility. One of those issues is toilet paper quality. All the time, questions appear in my inbox that sound sort of like this: Why, Rafi, does our university insist on stocking the bathrooms with toilet paper so thin that it disintegrates at the flatulence of a bacterium and you have to fold it in half in excess of 84 times before attempting use? Some days I get so many toilet paper related questions that I don’t even have time to skip class.

I would like to share with you one of said questions today because I think it might have a profound effect on someone, somewhere, maybe, in some indeterminate and fabricated way. The question, brought to my attention by some guy that I am too lazy to make up a name for, is this: “Rafi, why do you pretend that people ask you questions about toilet paper all the time? Do you think we’re stupid or something?”

The short answer is “no.” The long answer is “yes.” Granted, it’s only a one-letter difference in length, but in journalism you learn that sometimes one letter can go a long way. For example, BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB. See? That one took up an entire line.

Since we’re done answering that question, we can delve right into more important topics such as college dating.

One of the perks of being a humor columnist is that, short of inciting a race riot, yelling “FIRE!” really loudly in a crowded theater full of deaf people in sign language, or sending encoded messages to terrorists, I can write a whole slew of crazy stuff, and it doesn’t even have to make any sense. So today I would like to share with you the craziest thing I can think of that makes absolutely no sense at all. The thing is, as of yesterday, I have actually managed to keep a female sedated enough to be with me for an entire year without her lowering an eyebrow in one of those how-exactly-does-your-brain-work looks and I’m-about-to-cut-and-run-in-fear postures. I get those a lot, but surprisingly not from her.

How exactly did I do this? You may think it was through bountiful amounts of powerful over-the-counter analgesics. You know those massive dosages that the box tells you to “contact your local Poison Control Center immediately” for, such as when you wake up at 5:00am for a 7:00am flight and you’re so tired that you mistake the Nyquil® for the coffee and by the time you realize it you’re fumbling around the kitchen mostly uncoordinated, heart rate slowing to that of an excited cadaver, trying to think of the last time you ever took a stroll over to your local “Poison Control Center?” It’s only then that you realize you’ve never actually SEEN a real live “Poison Control Center,” start questioning the label for requiring you to get on your computer under the influence of enough depressants to kill you and do a Google search for some amorphous place that in all likelihood doesn’t exist instead of just giving you the number for the place, and finally decide that you better start writing your will before the excited cadaver in your chest starts getting tired.

Well, it wasn’t that. You may choose not to believe me, but I never drugged her twice.

So what did it? The honest-to-God incredible truth is that I have absolutely no idea. And THAT is the key to maintaining a healthy relationship.

Oh, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Having absolutely no idea how you did something requires a lot of hard work. Dedication, consistency, and periodic drunkenness are only the first steps. To keep a college romance going these days, you need to be daring and original, willing to do what it takes, the seemingly impossible, including, but not limited to:

Smiling and nodding,
Long blank stares,
An undying commitment to each other that nothing but a really REALLY good TV show can break,
Drinking lots of soymilk.

That last one might not be applicable to all relationships, but it certainly is to mine. Soymilk supposedly has calcium, which is a metal that you need for bone density and strength, or so she tells me. There are two ways to check if you’ve been getting enough calcium. The first is to dash in front of a speeding car and see if your legs break on impact. If they don’t, you’re fine. The second is to see if magnets stick to your thighs. If they don’t, take more calcium.

Anyway, the female in question has taken such an intense personal interest in my bone density that you’d think the fate of the free world hung in the balance of my femur. Currently, I have something over 250 Citrical® calcium tablets “designed for maximum absorption,” 100 Viactiv® calcium chews of “active nutrition for women by women,” and 94 Solgar® Calcium Magnesium Plus Zinc tablets “in case of accidental overdose contact your local Poison Control Center immediately” all on my dresser right now. It’s true. There’s also an old bottle of multivitamins that’s been there since August that I don’t use because they taste like laundry detergent. This is because there’s laundry detergent in them. It’s left over from the big Laundry Detergent in Luggage Explosion of ’05. This is the only valid excuse I have not to take a multivitamin. I treasure it. This is why I still have the bottle.

At this point I feel that now would be a good time for a short quiz. Question 1: If your girlfriend accosts you with a shattered look on her face and asks you, “Yes or no—have you been having an affair with the director of the local Poison Control Center?” You—

Smile and nod
Initiate a long blank stare
Drink lots of soymilk
Contact your local Poison Control Center immediately
All of the above

It is now that I will break with journalistic humor columnist protocol and incite a race riot.

OK! First one to riot gets five bucks! READY! 3…2…1…

GO!

Happy anniversary pretty one.