HUMOR
If You’re Only As Old As You Feel, I Am Dead
Welcome to the land of aging long before your time
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English 101 is a big batch of unlucky.
You have the dangerously-bright students, kids too bored to slay the college entrance exam and skip 101. These are business and finance majors to a fault, future Moby Dicks of capitalism. They ache for the deep end of the free market where they will seize America’s balls and strangle out a fortune.
And you have the students who desperately need 101. Educational castaways. Crustaceans without the crust: vulnerable, clueless, slimy, and pissed.
I teach this unlucky mix of souls by asking questions that are off-topic and riveting.
The questions baffle the Dicks and the pissed, momentarily disturbing their balance. While they totter, trying to answer, I sneak in a pinch of education.
Unless their answers trouble me so much I forget to educate.
This happened yesterday…
MY QUESTION
Select an age at which you’d like to stop aging. If you pick 25, you’ll never age a day beyond 25. Then choose a length of life. If you pick 500 years, for example, you’ll look and feel 25 until your 500th birthday. The night after your party, you’ll die peacefully in your sleep. What are your numbers and why?
A fog of aggressive silence choked the room, so I volunteered a grouchy boy to speak, and he said, “Twenty-one and twenty-one.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Nineteen.”
“Impressive.”
