The Old College Roommate

I know it's been a little while since my last post. Life just hasn't been funny for a while. Until now.

I took an extended weekend to get away and visit the family in sunny Florida. And everyone knows what you find in sunny Florida. Old people. I guess it's doubly so when you visit your family in a retirement community.

In said retirement community, they have get-togethers at the "clubhouse" every month. Actually, I think they do it much more frequently... like every day. But they have a dinner party once a month. Maybe more. I don't actually care. As I'm sure you don't. Anyway, they had a pizza party last night. Sometimes they charge money for these events. But this one was free. So EVERYONE came. Don't get your panties in a bunch now. That's not the funny part.

I was sitting between my grandfather and my uncle, away from my sisters and my parents. And across from us was a very nice couple. She might have been a little cross-eyed, but we don't pick on people for how they look. Right now. I don't remember their names. I don't think I took note of them at all. It's not important anyway. What is important is the conversation between them and my aunt and uncle. It went something like this.

"How was your winter?"
"Oh, it was pretty good. My daughter and son came down to visit."
"Nice. We had a busy winter too. We had lots of visitors.... My grandson came down too. He brought his old college roommate."



Who do they think they're fooling? Who goes with their college roommate to visit his grandparents? Anybody? Anybody? Or maybe he was fooling them.

I wanted to bring my "college roommate" to Florida with me this time, but it wasn't the right visit for it. Next time.

Integral Humor... Just You Wait. You're gonna love it!

Oh, do I have a funny story for you today. This one comes from one of my classes. My professor was telling us about another mathematician. I don't remember his name. It's probably not that important. He went to City College way back in the 1930s. He was in his physics class, and he challenged the professor with a question.

"What exactly is a surface integral?"

The professor laughed a little and said, "That's MORONIC! It says right in the name... an integral along a surface."

To which the student (a future mathematician/professor) said, "Oh, I see. Just like a Riemann integral is an integral along a Riemann."


HAA!

An integral along a Riemann. Get it?

Fucking hilarious!

I love that math classes can be so funny. SO funny!

Columbia University

First and foremost, I would like to thank all of my devoted followers. And I hope that you won't be disappointed with the news that I have decided to change direction with this blog. From this point forward, I shall be posting the funny (at least to me) moments of my days.

So, I'll start by telling you a little story that happened today. As most of you (or perhaps I should say both of you) know, I tend to ramble. I'm not going to change that. I simply refuse. And today, I'm going to give a little backstory to my story as well.

Recently, I joined a tutoring service. You sign up online, and take tests, and then people write to you to be tutored. I took the necessary tests to tutor such subjects as algebra. geometry. calculus. algebra two. trigonometry. pre-algebra. precalculus. SAT math. (you probably get where I'm going here) and economics. I tricked you. Yes, I studied economics in undergrad. And by undergrad, I mean when I was in high school. I took several economics classes, both beginner, intermediate, and advanced level. And I passed the test on the tutoring site to prove that I knew it well enough to tutor it.

So, the way the website works, you have to wait for people to respond to your posting. Then you can tutor them. You can also go looking for people to tutor, but that involves search engines, and I'm not very mechanical. So, I sat, for minutes, hours, days even, watching my email to see if anyone would write to me. I was sure that some 14 year old girl in Brooklyn would need help with her pre-algebra homework. No such luck though.

Saturday night rolled around, and I needed a break from my email. So Kevin and I went out for a drink. Well, maybe a few drinks. At 4:00 am, I checked my email, and I had a message. A MESSAGE. Not just any message... a tutoring message. A student from Columbia wanted my help. For economics. For his midterm on Monday (the Monday that is in little more than 24 hours from this point). It's only been about fourteen years since I took an economics class, so I was sure I could help him out. Sure of it. I immediately responded.

Fast forward to today, 2:30 in the afternoon. I'm sitting on the 1 train, being serenaded by Jason Mraz. I make my way up to Columbia University. The Columbia University. The student, let's call him Student to protect the innocent, tells me, "You'll need to use my friend's ID to get into the library." I find it a little odd. NYU allows you to sign guests in. But this IS Columbia. So we walk in. He puts his ID on the scanner. I try to follow his lead. But nothing happens. No green light flashes for me. I fidget with it a little bit. Still flashing red. Student comes back out of the atrium and does it for me.


We start walking in, and the security guard stops us and asks us for our IDs. BUSTED!!! I won't go through the details of what transpired between the guard and Student. I will say that not only was Student's ID confiscated, his friend's was also. And it turns out, I don't know enough about Political Economy to help him anyway.

So I go home. And I stop to get a FastBreak for me and my babe on the way.

You may be asking yourself if this is really a funny story or not. Well, that's just it. It's funny to me. And maybe that's the funny part. You may also be saying, all that buildup, and we're let down with the conclusion. Well, I just say, stop being stupid. Find the humor already, and go read Maggie's Octopus.