Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Professor Poopansuch leaned back into his leather chair and sighed contentedly. He had just returned from class and, if he did say so himself, had delivered a stunning lecture. Not once but twice did he notice two co-eds gaze coyly at him from the third row. And was that really so hard to fathom? He did, after all, hold his collegiate audience spellbound for a precious eighty minutes every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, dispensing gems of knowledge in every breath.

And his hair! He chuckled softly as he ran his fingers through his field of pomade, all the while admiring himself in a conveniently placed full-body mirror. That exact same motion–sweeping his digits jauntily through his hair–no doubt impressed his students and made him seem youthful.

“It’s a very…devil-may-hair gesture, as it were,” he exclaimed to himself. He made sure to utter his witticism loud enough so that his colleague across the hall could catch it. He also hoped that some students would hear it wafting through the hallway as he held office hours. Off came his spectacles, and he chewed furiously on an earpiece–such activity indicated thoughtful anxiety, naturally.

Minutes passed, however, and alas, no students dropped by.

“My dear, dear students!” the Professor muttered to himself. “So very contemplative, yet so very shy. They’re probably pondering the great thoughts I planted into them earlier today.”

He whipped off his spectacles once again, winked at the grinning specimen in the mirror, then rose from his chair and paced around the room with furrowed brow and pursed lips. The clutter in his office demanded rearrangement, so he set about opening books, closing others, taking notes from bygone lectures and wrinkling them before strewing them about the floor.

“Much better,” he sighed.

It was an hour shy of dinnertime, and the Professor planned on dining at Chez Shanghai–a new restaurant promising a Sino-Franco fusion of food–for two reasons: he wanted to sample the cuisine, to be sure, and the restaurant was also very popular with the student body. Ergo, he reasoned, he could “hang” and “keep it fresh” with his knowledge receptacles.

“Ah, fostering the ol’ community. Or communititty,” he chortled to himself.

He fetched his tweed jacket and wrapped it imperiously around himself, collected his wallet and his keys, and stepped out into the fading sunlight and the crisp autumn evening.