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Let me describe this situation. There is this absolutely gorgeous Indian
girl in my education class that just so happens to be from New Jersey.
Sounds like the cards are all Aces my way, right? We've got he East coast
connection, right? No question. Of course, as the first step of protocol of
love in the 1990s, I ran this proposition by a friend of mine who kind of
knows her, and he tells me that she might be seeing someone else but I
should go for it anyway. Well, the other day I gathered enough guts
together to go up and ask her for her number, using the excuse that I was
getting a little homesick and I wanted to talk a little "east coast" with
her. This works -- she gives me her number, and, even better yet, she takes
mine down. Next, as the third step of protocol, I wait the required three
days before calling her (a little tip I gathered from the increasingly
popular movie "Swingers," a pretty good movie available for rent). I called
her yesterday (Sunday) afternoon and she wasn't there, so I told her
roommate I'd call back later. Oops! I forgot to leave my name! But I knew
I mustn't call right back because that would seem like an act of desperation
and/or make me seem like an absent-minded loser with a distinct lack of
social grace, so I waited until about six o'clock to call back and leave my
name. Big mistake. Later that night I went down to my friend's room, where
he asked me if I had called Laura twice, and I said yes, and he simply
shook his head. "She didn't like that," he said.
"What?" I begged. "She freaked out when you called her twice in the same day. She started asking me all these questions about why you were calling and said that if you're calling because you like her she wants me to tell you she just wants to be friends." What the hell!? I got the "lets just be friends" pink slip without ever even holding a conversation with the girl. Man, I must've really screwed up by calling back to say my name. I can see where this is leading, though. Eventually, men are going to have to learn a secret handshake before they are allowed to approach women. Then, those who don't know the handshake will not be able to reproduce and therefore will not be able to pass their genes on to the next generation, and we'll have a new species of humans which is born knowing the handshake, and then we'll have it -- cultural natural selection as the driving force for human evolution. Right now, I can hear a car alarm going off outside. I used to call them goddamn car alarms, but now there whoops and beeps and honks are rather comforting. Sometimes, when an alarm that I recognize comes on, I sing along to it. Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo dee, weeooweeooweeooweeoo, oooooooooup! ooooooooooup!, na eee na eee na eee na eee, honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk (repeat six hundred times) I was thinking about writing lyrics. The song would be about a little boy who lost his kitten, and finds it sleeping on railroad tracks right as a train is coming, and the little boy would leap and save the kitten but his pants would get stuck on the tracks and he'd lose one of his legs and he'd be bleeding to death and then the kitten would go and get help and the boy would live and through a miracle the doctors would be able to sew his leg back on and he'd make a full recovery and become a world class distance runner and eventually win the Boston Marathon, which you could go see, because you're pretty close to Boston, right? The whole song would be set to the soothing sounds of a car alarm. I'd be hailed as a musical genius and I'd get all this money, which would hopefully exempt me from having to learn the secret handshake. My math teacher is a riot, too. For those of you that remember, I used to write down all of the stupid and funny things Mrs. Johnson would say in 11th grade honors Chemistry. For the whole year, I had like sixty quotes. As a going away present for her when I left Wiss, I color-copied them from my notebook and warpped them up and gave them to her. Well, this guy just lets 'em fly like fur in a petting zoo. Here are a few samples, with the Indian accent included. One is poor, five is excellent: | 
A very, very tiny map of Berkeley. 
An even tinier map of Berkeley. Psst... you know that's Berkeley in the background, right? It's Berkeley from very far away. |
