now this is coping with adversity

[dragonlady7]

Dave, as you all know by now, is much cooler than I am, and copes with adversity much better. Tragically, he is also a much pithier and wittier writer than I, which is UNFAIR because I am a writer and he is a computer scientist. I have been trying to convince him that he needs to publish flash fiction (short-short-shorts, typically under 1000 words, much in demand especially when humorous), but he is still convinced that he's a computer scientist. Bah.

Anyway. He is taking a distance-learning chemistry class. This means he has to watch four hours of tapes per week. These tapes are live recordings of an 8 am chemistry lecture taught by THE WORLD'S MOST BORING HUMAN. My lord. This man speaks indistinctly (so that Dave has to turn on the closed captioning to understand what he's saying-- which means that when he mixes chemicals, the results are invisible because they're obscured by the black block of closed captioning), pauses midsentence for no reason, repeats himself, makes irrelevant asides that have no conclusion, and tells the world's WORST jokes. I mean, they're not even funny.
And of course, he begins every lecture (it being 8 am) by asking: "How many of you got up this morning?" [Pause for inaudible grumbling] "How many of you didn't get up this morning?"
Groan.

So I present you with two contrasting short pieces of writing.

The first is one of the professor's jokes. Understand that this is one of many in the genre of "I was driving my car in the country and I hit a..." jokes. He seems to have... shudder... a collection.

I was driving my sports car one day in the country, on this nice windy road. I had the top down, the wind in my hair, all that. So I'm driving along and around the corner comes another sports car with the top down, with a woman driving it-- in my lane. I swerve, and get out of her way, and she speeds by and shouts, "Pig!" I'm offended by this, and am reflecting on how rude that was of her, given that she was in my lane, when all of a sudden I hit a pig.

[ed note: You only wish that were the punchline. It's NOT. Cower, ye wretches, for half an hour remains of this tape and you haven't even addressed stoichiometry yet. AUGH.]

So I get out of the car and go up to the door of the nearest farm house. "I need to use your phone," I say. "I just hit a pig out in the road."
"By all means," the farmer says. "Who are you going to call?"
"I was going to call the police to come and take care of it," I say.
"The police just arrived," the farmer says, pointing. I look out and sure enough, there's a patrol car.
I go back down to my car. "How did you know to come?" I ask.
The policeman looks at me, and says, "The pig squealed."

Aren't you sorry you read that?

Now imagine you had to listen to that four hours a week, without even the benefit of having it be IN PERSON so you could groan and know he heard it.

So this is Dave's response, posted to the class's online forum:

As indistinct as the events of that long, horrible night were, I can remember with photographic clarity what happened before, down to the ticking of the wall clock. I was lying on the floor, staring at the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The man on the television was mixing chemicals behind the closed captioning, but for all I cared he could have been mixing cement. A moth fluttered around the room. Though the drone of the television sounded a million miles away, the words made their way through the static of indifference: 'I was driving my car through the country one day...' But not this day. This day it was going to be different. My fists tightened. My pulse quickened. 'Wait for it,' I heard myself say. The clock slowed. The moth flirted with the light bulb. The pig squealed.

I don't remember what happened next. I woke up in a clearing in the woods, surrounded by broken bits of printed circuit board, my knuckles bloodied. The battered corpse of my VCR was hanging from a tree like the rotting remains of a medieval highway robber. A broken videocasette lay on the far side of the clearing, the tape pulled out and trailing off through the forest. I followed the tape back to my house, my living room, my television — oh God, my television — surrounded by broken glass, with the aluminum baseball bat still sticking out of its cathode-ray tube. On the floor nearby lay a dead moth, its wings singed.

How many furry animals must die before it's over? How many bad one-liners must I endure before I don't get up in the morning?

How many, indeed?
It infuriates me that he writes better than me. See my fury!!
But I don't have to watch those tapes. i've watched two with him, out of boredom, but I left the room both times. HORRIBLE. Ugh.