Eight Balls and Apple Jacks

I used to spend time in apartment full of boys who had a white board that took up an entire wall in their kitchen. They covered it with numbers--equations to stump each other. Sometimes the same problem would be there for days.

They talked about math for fun. They wore those big black watches with built-in calculators. When we watched basketball they discussed the arc of the 3-pointers. During executive billiards, they'd talk trajectories until the 8 ball slipped into the corner pocket. They epitomized cool nerd.* No matter the activity, any time I crossed the threshold into their apartment, all I could think about was the fact that the pictures in their apartment were hung about 8" too high.

Half of them are now engineers, the other half dentists. Perhaps if I had paid more attention during their number wars (made slightly more bearable by the occasional bowl of Apple Jacks) I might be able to finish my physics homework.

*There's such a thing, you know.