Hanging Out

It’s registration day, which is rather lazy, and there are no regular classes and students file in according to alphabetically rearranged blocs in order to receive their schedules and be recruited for various other activities or schedule modifications. One of the early arrivals is Hugh, a Vietnamese sophomore, who has been always eager and bright, although he’s still a little young, and tends to stick out his tongue a little bit between his lips when he’s surprised or amused. The anecdote I’ve been shopping around about him is long ago I noticed this medallion he wore around his neck, a skull with some sort of radial compass design—I’m Asian too, but I figured this might be some sort of sacred Vietnamese relic, some touchstone of his culture which I should be sensitive toward not stepping over. One day, however, the conversation turns toward it, and I ask him what it means. Hugh says, ‘You know Pirates of the Caribbean? This is the medal from there.” I too am a fan…

Anyway, Hugh shows up early (he’s a ‘T’), and sits down at the table. We chat. I give him a math problem—which integers can be expressed as the sum of (more than one) consecutive integer? I help him through some examples, pose some pointed problems, go over some of the vocabulary, clarify how many integers can be in the list, and he makes some headway, but doesn’t get as far as a general solution. He doesn’t have any books on him, so I show him the Ed Policy book of the week, Political Spectacle. At this point, his friend Ado shows up, and we read the first line together, “Sometimes, the book writes you.” I proceed with my set piece about Yakov Smirnov: "In America, you watch television; in Soviet Russia, television watches you!” We try to come up with more jokes like this, but it is difficult—we get as far as analyzing how “book writes you” is an example of this antimetabolic schema. I go as far as to tell the joke about that one time at math camp when one of our delinquents decided to microwave a watch. This incident led to the joke, “What’s the difference between Derrick Gurdy and a person making popcorn?” A person making popcorn watches the microwave, but Derrick Gurdy microwaves watches. After some thought, this is funny.

So Hugh (who’s changing his name to something more ‘American’) eventually tires of this educative humor and excuses himself to register before all of his choices are completely exhausted—his number is almost up.