Reunion with Sir Isaac Newton

An ironic truth to university life is that everything is just so much easier without all the students around. Undergraduates are especially a nuisance because there are just so many of them, and they are both ubiquitous and ubi-quite-annoying. They are the ants on my campus picnic blanket. Finding a parking space is easier without them around; getting lunch in under an hour is definitely easier -- heck, even Newtonian Physics is easier without their presence. Had I known, for instance, that I would be challenged to demonstrate Newton's Second Law of Motion by stopping my 1/2-ton vehicle in a 1/2 foot of space by slamming the brake 1/2 way through the floorboard to avoid running down a handful of sorority girls on Wednesday morning, clearly I would have prepared beforehand. But returning to academic life runs the risk of the occasional pop quiz, so I suppose it's only fair.

As Sir Isaac would have wanted it, the force needed to halt my car was balanced by an equal but opposite force of all the oxygen leaving my lungs within that fractioned second. One might question the ability of such a small amount of air to counter such a sizeable kinetic opposition; but if you had heard the descriptive words that accompanied the oxygen depletion, you would rest assured that their mass alone would have been powerful enough to shock any moving body into stunned silence. * It wasn't quite total protonic reversal.** But it was close.

Before anyone worries too much, everyone emerged unscathed; and the sorority girls were none the wiser. (Not too surprising.) If anything, their interpretation of crosswalks as "suggestions" was validated. After all, the one closest to them at the time was a whole twenty feet away, which was so inconvenient. Why go all the way over to the designated pedestrian walkway when you can amble across the road at any ole place? Like it matters, like, you know?...

PS - I was a sorority girl, so I'm allowed to make fun. Totally.


* Just kidding. But I did think some very colorful words in their general direction.

** Definition: "All life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." Often referred to as "bad". See Ghostbusters.