Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (13 page)

They keep their pizza boxes in the kitchenette, which is also where they keep their food supply, which is an open jar containing a wad of peanut butter as hard as a bowling ball. You may be wondering: “What happens if a burglar breaks into the kitchenette and steals their pizza
boxes?” Do not worry. They keep a reserve supply of pizza boxes in the living room, and if a burglar tried to get
those
, he’d trip over the cord that stretches across the room from the TV to the video-game controller held by a young man who is permanently installed on the sofa. This young man is not one of my son’s roommates; for all I know, he’s not even a student. But he is stationed in the living room 24 hours a day, focused on the video game, although he always gives you a polite “Hi” when you walk through the room and step over his cord. I’m not familiar with the game he’s playing, but I noticed, as I stepped over the cord, that the screen said: “YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED EIGHT THUNDERS.” Maybe this has something to do with world hunger.

After passing through the living room, I stuck my head into my son’s bedroom. I was reluctant to enter, because then I’d have been walking on my son’s clothes. He keeps them on the floor, right next to the bureau. (I don’t know what he keeps in the bureau. My guess is: pizza boxes.) My son assured me that, even though his garments appear to be one big intertwined pile, he knows which are clean and which are dirty.

“Like, this one is clean,” he said, picking a garment off the floor, “and this one is clean, and this one is … never mind.”

There were no sheets on my son’s bed. Asked about this, he explained (this was the entire explanation): “They came off a couple of weeks ago.”

I’m not complaining about my son’s housekeeping. He is Martha Stewart compared with the student who occupied his bedroom last year. According to true campus legend, when this student moved out, his laundry was so far beyond human control that he simply abandoned it. As a kind of tribute, his roommates took a pair of his briefs outside, climbed a lamppost, and stretched the briefs over the lamp. They remain there today, a monument to the courage and dedication it takes to put underpants on a lamppost. I was gazing up at them in admiration when a student said to me: “That’s the cleanest they’ve ever been.”

Not all student rooms look like my son’s. Some are occupied by females. If you stand outside the building, you notice that those rooms have curtains and pictures on the walls; whereas the males’ rooms have all been painstakingly decorated with: nothing. The only designer touches are lines of bottles, and the occasional tendril of laundry peeking coyly over a windowsill. We stood outside my son’s building one evening, noting this difference; my son, looking at a tasteful, female-occupied room, said, with genuine wonder in his voice: “I think they vacuum and stuff.”

Speaking of which: During Parents Weekend, I took my son shopping, and we bought, among other things, a small vacuum cleaner. When we got back to his room, one of his roommates opened the box and held up the vacuum cleaner. We all looked at it, and then at the room. Then we enjoyed a hearty laugh. Then the roommate set the vacuum cleaner down on the floor, where it will be swallowed by laundry and never seen again. This is fine. These kids are not in college to do housework: They are there to learn. Because they are our Hope for the Future. And that future is going to smell like socks.

R
ecently I received a phone call from my son, Rob. It was a phone call that every parent dreads.

That’s right: My son told me that the universe does not exist. Or at least it does not in any way resemble my concept of it. According to Rob, I understand the universe about as well as a barnacle understands a nuclear aircraft carrier.

I blame college. That’s where Rob is getting these ideas, which have to do with the Theory of Relativity and something called “quantum physics.” Rob and his roommate, Hal, stay up all night discussing Deep Questions and figuring out the universe, and when they have it nailed down—The Rob and Hal Theory of Everything—Rob calls me up, all excited, and starts talking about time travel, the Fifth Dimension, the Big Bang, etc. I try to follow him, but I am hampered by a brain that for decades has firmly believed that the Fifth Dimension is the musical group that sang “Up, Up and Away.” So I quickly become confused and testy, and Rob gets frustrated and says, “Don’t you understand? THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TIME!” And I’ll say, “YES THERE IS, AND RIGHT NOW IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING!”

(At one point—I swear this is true—we got into a bitter argument about whether people in Minneapolis age at the same rate as people in Miami.)

When I was in college, during the ’60s, there was no such thing as “quantum physics.” Or, if there was, nobody told ME about it. Back then, when we stayed up all night, we were not trying to figure out the universe: We were trying to figure out how to operate the phone, so we could order pizza. (Note to young people: Phones were MUCH more complicated in the ’60s.)

I was an English major, and when we English majors thought about physics, we were trying to solve problems like: “You are required to turn in a 15-page paper on
The Brothers Karamazov
. You have written a grand total of 311 words on this topic. How big do you have to make your margins to make these words stretch over 15 pages? Do you think the professor will notice that your ‘paper’ is a little anorexic worm of type running between margins wide enough to land an airplane on? Do you think that anybody in history has ever actually read all the way to the end of
The Brothers Karamazov
? Why?”

This is not to say that I know nothing about physics. I studied physics for an ENTIRE YEAR in Pleasantville High School under the legendary Mr. Heideman. We learned that there are five simple machines: the lever, the pulley, the doorbell, the hammer, and the toaster. We learned that the most powerful force in the universe is static electricity, which Mr. Heideman demonstrated by getting a volunteer to place his or her hand on a generator, which caused the volunteer’s hair to stand on end, unless the volunteer was a girl with the popular early ’60s “beehive” hairstyle held rigidly in place by the other most powerful force in the universe, hair spray. Presumably, if Mr. Heideman had cranked the power up enough, the static electricity buildup would have caused the volunteer’s head to explode, and we would finally have found out if—as widely rumored—many “beehive” hairstyles contained nests of baby spiders.

Thanks to my high-school training, I believed I had a solid grasp of physics. So when Rob was growing up, I was able to answer his questions about the universe, such as “What is a star?” (Answer: a big ball of static electricity that has caught on fire because of friction with
comets) or “What is gravity?” (Answer: a powerful type of static electricity that sucks you toward the ground, especially after you eat Italian food).

These answers satisfied my son until he started reaching that snotty, know-it-all age when kids start losing all respect for authority (18 months). And now he’s calling me from college and telling me that the universe is NOTHING like my concept of it. The stuff he talks about is pretty complex, but I will try to summarize the main points, as I understand them:

• Point One: Whatever you think about anything is wrong.
  
• Point Two: There is no such thing as Point One. You THINK there is a Point One, but that just shows what a physics moron you are.
  
• Point Three: If there are identical twins, and one of them gets on a spacecraft going at nearly the speed of light, then one of them will grow old much faster than the other, and that one will retire to Miami.
  
• Point Three: There is an infinite number of possible Point Threes, and they are all equally true, and you will never understand ANY of them.
  

OK? Is that clear to everybody? Good! To prove you really understand, I want you all to write me a 15-page paper on how the universe works and send it backward through time to me in 1964, c/o Mr. Heideman’s class. OK, I got it. Thanks.

H
ow would you like to make BIG MONEY while sitting at home in your bathrobe eating cake frosting straight from the can whenever you felt like it?

If this sounds like the ideal career to you, then you should get into “online trading,” which means getting rich by buying and selling stocks on the Internet, a worldwide network of computers operated by magic.

I assume you are on the Internet. If you are not, then pardon my French, but
vous êtes un big loser
. Today EVERYBODY is on the Internet, including the primitive Mud People of the Amazon rain forest. In the old days, when the Mud People needed food, they had to manually throw spears at wild boars; whereas today they simply get on the Internet, go to www.spear-a-boar.com and click their mouse a few times (the Mud People use actual mice). Within three business days, a large box is delivered to them by a UPS driver, whom they eat.

So you, too, need to get online, and it could not be easier! Signing up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) takes only a few minutes, after which you will immediately start enjoying all the benefits of having a fee charged to your credit card every month until the end of time. If you wish to cancel your account for any reason, such as your death, all you have to do is contact your ISP, fill out a simple form, then climb into a big tank and fight Rex, the Customer Service Death Squid.

But you won’t have to worry about monthly fees once you’re making “big money” as an online trader! Of course financial experts recommend that, before you make any investment decision, you should carefully read a “Q&A”-type column written by a trained English major. Here it is: