Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Knavery, Gambols, Tampoors and Roguery

I've been grumpy lately. And when I get grumpy, I get destructive. The cause of my "grumptitude" has yet to be decided although I've got several prospective reasons.
Nothing I'm willing to divulge at this time.
Anyway, affecting how I spend my free time.
On Mondays I've got an hour-and-a-half in between my classes. The problem with having a free 90 minutes is that it's not enough time to do anything substantial. I can't go home nor can I take a worthwhile nap or rob a bank or anything.
Mostly, I just end up reading books.
Ironically, the books I read are about napping and robbing banks.
Anyway, sitting around the journalism department gives me ample opportunity to notice patterns in human nature. Having identified many of these patterns, I now exploite them for my own entertainment.

The Porcelain Gambol Most classes at Roosevelt last for two-and-a-half hours and have about 8-15 students enrolled in each. Within that span of time, the professors usually offer a 10-minute break somewhere near the halfway mark of each class. There are three Monday afternoon classes that break while I troll the hallways like Judd Nelson in "The Breakfast Club". When the bathroom break rolls around, my keen journalistic insincts have exrapolated the pattern of men that always seem to high-tail it to the bathroom.
Why it's always the same guys, I don't know. You'd have to ask them and their bladders.
There are three urinals in the 5th Floor bathroom. Lately, on my grumpy Mondays, I try to occupy a space in the hallway where I immediately notice the classes breaking. As the same two guys from each class jet toward the commode , I make sure I enter the bathroom right before them.
Once there, like a jerk, I park myself in the middle of the three stalls and pretend like I'm peeing (once I actually had to pee, so that time I didn't pretend).
I know what you're thinking, you're wondering what the entertainment value of this childish action could be.
1. The look on the guys' face when they calculate that I've broken the cardinal rule of urinal etiquette: NEVER PEE IN THE CENTERMOST URINAL IF OTHER URINALS ARE OPEN.
2. I enjoy tabulating how many dudes would rather be encased in a stall than stand anywhere near a man peeing.
You'd be surprised how often I pee alone, while the stalls are clogged with embarrassed dudes. I think that's why I do it.
I'm not judging them, I'd probably go for the stall too.

Staple Roguery The computer labs at Roosevelt allow you to print as many sheets of paper as you'd like, but dissallow any use of their staplers.
The staplers are for the lab assistants, which is a fancy name for "dude-paid-to-sit-in-the-lab-and-do-homework". Anyway, I've made it a game to use his stapler witout him noticing.
I stand close to his desk for a minute or two until he turns his back or reboots a computer or whatever and then I staple the crap out of my pages.
Sometimes, I staple twice on one page.

The Knavery of Names I've been making up adjectives when in conversation with people. Just last week I described a professor as being "really tampooric". I believe what I said was, "The professor in that class is real tampooric but if you study, you might fail."
Think about that sentence for a minute. What does it even mean? There was no way anyone could deduce what I possibly meant, even after taking into account my tone or inflection. But I said it to two classmates and they both acted as if they totally knew what I meant. Again, I'm not being smug. I'm not better than the urinal wizzers or the stapler guy or my classmates, I'd fall for all of this stuff too.

But if I did fall for it, I'd hope that whoever duped me was having as much of a giggle as I'm having.

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