I am an idiot.
 |
|
Even if you don’t know what war this is from, your vote still manages to count the exact same as mine. That is what is wrong with America.
|
Granted, I’m not as huge an idiot as some people who have managed to drag themselves out of their idiotic miasmas everyday to attend classes at USC. For example, during a Philosophy lecture on Aristotle’s ethical viewpoints, I didn’t raise my hand and ask the professor “Wait, if how can Aristotle be talking about ethics and stuff like this, because they were like doing gladiator battles at the time. Isn’t that, like, being a hypocrite?”
For example, when asked to do a report on a cultural artifact of 9/11, at least I didn’t raise my hand and ask if I could “you know, maybe do firemen, and how everyone viewed them as like heroes after 9/11. Or, you know, could I do the president or something?”
For example, in response to the same assignment, I didn’t raise my hand and announce proudly to the class that I would “do that picture of the firemen raising the American flag over the rubble because it’s a lot like that other picture of the soldiers doing that flag raising. You know, during that one war. I forget which one it was.”
At least I am not as unfathomably stupid as these people. The first case was one of my experiences. The ever-vigilant Max Geiger experienced the latter two cases during a single class period – a veritable one-two punch of absolute ludicrous idiocy compacted into fifty minutes. Exposure to this degree of saturation of pure idiocy is so far above the maximum daily exposure limit that I’m surprised that Max’s isn’t babbling maniacally, rocking back and forth in his room, and drooling all over himself. The proximal effect of this amount of idiocy causes IQ points of those unlucky to be within earshot to drop and birds to bust themselves by flying straight into windows.
Nevertheless, I am still an idiot.
My idiotic habits can be linked to the class I take. I feel woefully, woefully underchallenged. Of course, I do not intend that to be read as “Hey, I’m so smart! Look at me! Mensa is just about falling over themselves, asking me to join!” but rather as an indication that Lakeside prepares you for college excruciatingly well. As such, I am bored to tears in half of my classes, and when you’re so bored you’re crying, you’re bound to start doing some stupid stuff.
Some may remember the fiasco back when I was taking the USC placement exams during the Pacific Northwest orientation session, in which I took the Chinese language placement test, which was full of the type of characters I had never learned. Nonetheless, I still managed to place into the 3rd level class, the last level needed to fulfill the major requirement, thus meaning I only have a single semester of Chinese to worry about.
At the time, I had believed that perhaps this placement was mere luck, because I didn’t even know what I was doing on the test, and that the class would be way over my head. And as time proves again and again, my initial assumption was so far off-base that it was all the way in the back of the stadium getting a hot dog.
During the first two months of class, much of the material consisted of things I already knew. This was the case for about half the class, with the other half desperately trying to figure out what the sounds coming out of the teacher’s mouth meant. This is perhaps due to the nature of the Chinese language, and the sheer variety of skill levels found among its students. Naturally the teacher has to teach to the low end, at the expense of the other students being simply bored out of their minds.
I had stupidly picked the Chinese class which met only twice a week, but for two hours at a time. These two hours would soon prove to be the longest two hours of my life. There is no clock in the room. Our cell phones had to be off. Time stopped, yeah, and wiggled with it in that room, and it was all you could do to not throw your desk out the window and take your chance with the two-story drop onto concrete. "Two broken legs for your sanity is a small price to pay," you’d think to yourself as you drag your shattered limbs across broken glass with a broad smile plastered across your face.
In high school, I spent several weeks of Chinese class learning how to cascade a quarter down my knuckles like the bad guys in movies. I also doodled all over my textbook. The latter was the activity I pursued to ensure my sanity, except this particular brand of textbook lent itself to hilarious comics, captions, and additions. In the past, one of my doodles in a high school Chinese textbook was so laugh out loud funny, that it famously got Jimmy Wong, who has the misfortune of receiving my marked up hand-me-down textbooks, in trouble for cracking up in the middle of class when he saw it. I hoped this tradition would continue when I sell my book used and itgets picked up the next year by an unwitting student.
The following is an example of my work, taken from two opposing pages. Read it sequentially. If you don’t find it funny in the least, try staring at static for two hours, and then reading it, so that you are in the proper mindset to receive it.
The title of this chapter is "Chapter 7: Boyfriends"
Besides goofing off during class in an institution that my parents pay forty thousand dollars a year for me to attend, I’ve also engaged in the vice of gambling with my fellow floor mates. Normally, this would only be idiotic if I lost a lot of money, or played with the folks on the business floor, where the buy-in is a scant $50 (and something about signing over something with your own blood).
No, these four-hour marathon sessions of poker are idiotic simply because our buy-ins are always less than five dollars. Less. Than. Five. Dollars. Even if you win it all, if you factor the amount of money you’re making an hour, you’re still not even approaching minimum wage. With up to two loads of laundry on the line, you’d think that people would take far more risks because less is at stake, but this is completely false. Everybody plays annoyingly coyly, and the hours drop like flies as each person greedily guards their massive stacks of chips that, if added up, would represent $1.84.
 |
|
Only complete idiots shoot pool in zero gravity!
|
But the worst, most idiotic activity I partake in is shooting pool.
Our dorm lobby happens to have a table, so Max and I, at the beginning of the year, decided we’d become hustlers and get bitchin’ good at pool, and take everybody’s money. As the cash rolled in, so would the fly hunnies, until we would eventually become the baddest of the bad asses on the USC campus. We’d enter the dining hall, and the room would hush. Food would be given to us for free. Grades would be all but assured. All this because of our legendary pool skill, and our propensity to hold the cues suggestively around our crotches, subliminally suggesting to all passers-by that these two guys are, well… you know.
To this end, Max and I each blew fifty dollars (or more than forty poker hours) for pool cues and cases. The day the shipment arrived, we giddily ripped open the package and assembled our cues. After a moment, I noted “These don’t look like they have tips…” Indeed, they lacked the little white plastic tube and leather tip present on most cues. “Aww, shit,” Max said. We had spent, or rather invested, all this time and money, and we still wouldn’t be able to shoot. I fired off an email to the customer service, and we unscrewed our cues and put them away shamefully. We spoke nothing of our folly that day.
The reply the following day basically said, “They do have tips. You guys are just huge idiots.” Closer inspection revealed that, lo and behold, those little nubs at the end of the cue were cue tips! The initial rush of glee was soon replaced by a deep sickening feeling. “How are we going to become hustlers,” I thought, “if I can’t even tell that my cue has a tip on it?” Slightly shaken, we checked out the dorm’s set of balls and started our long journey towards pool mastery.
 |
|
Max sinking the 8-ball, caught on film, a rarity ranking with the likes of Bigfoot and Nessie.
|
Both Max and I have family who played. Max’s grandfather was an honest-to-goodness pool shark, and one of my uncles competed in a national tournament held in China. Skills, unfortunately, did not translate down the generations as we soon found out. Max and I were laughably bad at pool, and in may ways, still are. Shots went in by luck, attempts to look cool with behind the back shots or one-handed shots ended in tragedy or injury. Several times, balls have flown from the table and narrowly avoided shattering the large glass window by the table. When we play pool, it’s hazardous for everyone’s health. To this day, I am thankful that I have managed to survive serious harm to both my body and my social life.
Well, check that about the "social life." While most kids are off getting wasted, getting prepared to get wasted, or getting prepared to get prepared to get wasted on a Friday or Saturday night, Max and I are usually found in the lobby trying to comprehend the nature of spherical physics. This activity has afforded us an interesting view on the social habits of the typical college frat boy. They parade around the halls with their shirts off, lowering their voice, and flexing their muscles in a feeble attempt to attract members of the opposite sex. Unbelievably, this behavior manages to attract an occasionall stray female (likely with a terrible home life), which only serves to encourage their ape-like mating calls. Noted observer of ape behavior Jane Goodall was at USC giving a speech, but I was unable to ask her about this, and why frat boys seem to think it’s effective. To anybody else, their attempts are funny and pathetic, like a crippled bunny rabbit asking its daddy if it will ever hop as high as the other bunnies. Father Bunny lowers his Wall Street Journal, takes his pipe out of his mouth, thinks for a moment, and replies "Hell no."
 |
|
The break. The blur makes it more impressive than it usually is.
|
After practicing for a few months, I had the opportunity to demonstrate my skills to great effect when we were approached by a group of drunken frat boys. I racked up the balls, and one member of the group declared loudly “Hey if you make two balls on the break, I’ll give this guy here a blow job.” Max and I looked at each other. I was on fire that night, I had sunk two or more balls on the break on several occasions. I picked up the cue, lined up the shot, and let loose a massive drive at the rack. The balls exploded, and the guy who made the wager looked very worried for a moment. But as they settled, they remained all on the table. There would be no oral sex, no embarrassing pictures posted on the internet, and no sudden inflow of blackmail money that night. I had failed the only test of my skill since we started this idiotic crusade. Of course, I could very well argue that it was a damn good thing I had failed it. But on principle alone, it was a great disappointment.
One of the other reasons for pursuing pool mastery is so that I can face Ryan, the noted pool master of our class, and soundly beat up on him. This goal of mine is becoming ever more unlikely, because based on my recollection of Ryan, he’s damn good, and way better than I am now. He can position the ball, and make almost all the shots he attempts. In my case, many of the shots I make are because there is a slight downward slope on the table, which basically guides balls into a corner pocket as long as they are hit lightly. I speculate this sight depression in the table can be attributed to a fat girl I saw sitting on the table’s edge during a football game. Ryan can think several shots ahead, while I am lucky if the cue ball doesn’t fly up and hit somebody in the crotch. It’s going to take a whole lot more pool playing if I’m going to even begin to fantasize about winning.
Perhaps the most idiotic thing about our pool playing is that it leaves us mentally exhausted afterwards. Very tired. So exhausted, that I forget things. Important things I try to get back.
And depending on how things go, next week’s post might prove to be the most interesting I’ve ever written…
-f.w.
