My little sister recently signed my guestbook jokingly asking me if I had been taking tips from Jerry Seinfeld lately, and this reminded me of something. In my life, there is only one thing I can truly count on: At 2:30am every night, a crazy student will perform his impersonation of Jerry Seinfeld as loud as possible from a window somewhere on the third floor of my Residence Hall. It’s insane how not kidding I am. And he’s very punctual—you could set your watch to this guy. “Oh, there goes the crazy Jerry Seinfeld guy. It must be 2:30 in the fucking morning again.”
Usually he’ll just say, “Who are these people?” at the top of his voice over and over again, but sometimes he’ll mix it up a bit. “What’s the deal with corn nuts? Is it a corn, or is it a nut? What’s the deal with corn nuts? Who are these people?” Since it’s 2:30 in the morning, you’d think that I’d get really pissed off, but I can’t help but laugh. I mean, on the one hand, I’m prevented from going to sleep and will consequently end up being tired come class time the next day, but on the other hand, this guy is doing a goddamned impression of Jerry Seinfeld for no reason. That’s too weird to piss me off.
On an unrelated thought, the greatest part about used text books is following the markings of the book’s previous owners. It’s always the same story: The first chapter will have been neatly overlaid with multicolored highlighters, a rainbow of studiousness, with detailed notes in the paragraph margins and the answers to the chapter’s summary questions completely penciled out. Then all of a sudden, halfway through chapter two, the book becomes cleansed of any educational graffiti whatsoever, as if the student just went, “Alright, fuck this.” Then on page fifty or so, there’s usually an indecipherable message that causes me to stop reading the book and begin a long and unrewarding mental quest to attempt to figure out what the hell they’re talking about. “‘Victor’s cat needs 28%’? What the hell does that mean? What’s the deal with that? Who are these people?”
Funny, my textbooks only ever have giant dicks scrawled all over in pencil that somehow escaped inspection the year before, thereby making it my responsibility to either pay for the book or attempt to erase every one of the 1000-some pages. I’ve come to the conclusion that they send these books to the classrooms of fidgety 4th graders for testing to ensure they don’t pose a choking hazard, on the grounds that fidgety 4th graders choke on things pretty regularly anyway and textbooks generally have a much higher weight-to-price ratio than other educational toys.