Yesterday night, I had coffee at a café with a math student I hadn’t seen since the school year. As the evening wound down, we had the following, rather ackward exchange:
‘Phil, can I ask you a question?’
Taken aback by the seriousness of her tone, I wondered whether it was going to be something embarrassing like, ‘When was the last time you saw another man naked?’ It wasn’t.
snapshot
You see, Snapshot is a bit of a celebrity among math students at Carleton University – we call him that because he likes to stand up in class with his little pocket camera and take pictures of the board, much to the annoyance of his fellow classmates.
‘Have you ever noticed how weird math people are?’
I frowned and took a sip of my Latté. I never thought we were weird. Maybe a little bit eccentric but it came with the territory.
‘Erm. No, I can’t say I have. Why would you say that?’
‘Oh come off it,’ she said, exasperated, ‘think of our Game Theory class. Everyone in that class was either weird-acting, weird-looking, or worse, both. Remember Snapshot?’
We both laughed like idiots.
You see, Snapshot is a bit of a celebrity among math students at Carleton University – we call him that because he likes to stand up in class with his little pocket camera and take pictures of the board, much to the annoyance of his fellow classmates. If that wasn’t enough he wears the dirtiest, most raggedy t-shirts in public, prides himself for sporting a swanky fanny pack, lugs around an enormous gym bag, and absolutely loves to fill his pants with the strangest objects, including a digital camera, a pencil case, a calculator, a few dozen pens, and packets of candy.
If you had ever seen a dirty, fat, annoying Russian with enormous hips, boxlike and inflated from the sheer number of objects he delighted in stuffing into his own trousers, there’s a very good chance you knew Snapshot.
‘See, it’s not just him I’m talking about,’ she continued unphased, ‘there’s that 60 year old lady with the short gray hair and the thick English accent.’
‘Sleepy Jeff,’ I murmured, finding a contribution of my own, ‘who works at night and sleeps in class.’
‘Tim’, she added, ‘or was it Tom? The guy who’s always so hopped up on espressos, he can’t stop stuttering. And what is up with the man’s hair?’
‘It’s Tim.’ I answered, helpfully. ‘Those six Chinese students who huddle together because they can only speak Mandarin?’
‘Oh. I think they’re getting better at English now. Then there’s Anthony. Do you remember him?’
‘That’s the old grad student with the tics and the fake nails right?’
Our conversation was a verbal tennis match. She: firing examples of typical math oddity at me. Me: clumsily batting back one of my own.
‘Andrew, the Goth in the trench coat.’
‘Olga, the Russian. I heard she’s dating the Analysis prof.’
‘Ew. Tiny Adam, who wears the giant, DJ-style headphones in class.’
‘Lane, the totally beefy blonde who scares all her tutorial students.’
‘God, I hate her. Hiba, the Lebanese woman with the four kids.’
‘That guy with the blue hair who walks like his feet are four sizes too large.’
We stopped and sat there in silence, slightly out of breath. Fine, she had a point, I grudgingly admitted. Our math classes are always a potpourri of oddness.
‘And let’s not forget about you, Phil.’
‘Well, what about me?’
‘You’re the worst one of all.’
‘What the fuck!’
‘Phil, think about it,’ she began slowly, ‘you’re a 20 year old grad student who started studying at 18.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious’, I said quickly getting on the defensive.
‘People think you stumble into our math classes by accident, having taken a wrong turn from the gym.’
‘So I’m a bit more defined. So I have, uh, contours. There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘You don’t sleep. You work 17 hours a day. You live on coffee. You live on math. You’d rather work on campus when everyone’s in bed than during the day.’
‘It’s more quiet that way,’ I explained helpfully, ‘I get the entire campus to myself.’
She ignored me. ‘And let’s not get into your tastes. What kind of 20 year old likes classical music and listens to the opera?’
I was beginning to crumble. ‘You’ll find that I’m simply a bit more refined than the average hoodlum.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Phil, if you were any more refined, you’d have a senior citizen’s discount at the local Shoppers. Now, I’m saying this as a friend: You’re one of the best examples of why math students are freaks of the academic world. You’re the cherry on top.’
‘Oh god. What should I do?’
‘Just don’t fight it. It’ll go down a helluva lot easier. Besides, I hear Snapshot needs a friend.’
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