2001-09-20 � hot

There is some kind of problem with the air conditioning at my school. This problem has required them to take all means of ventilation offline. They say this problem will be fixed by the weekend, but we're to suffer with the interior conditions throughout the week. We're having nice fallish weather outside. Inside, it's another story all together.

The building that houses the law school was built in the sixties and was designed as a bomb shelter. It has very few windows and there are certainly no windows in any of the class rooms. So this mechanical problem requires about 100 people to sit quietly in a smallish room and try to concentrate on abstract ideas while their flesh melts into the prefab chairs.

The air becomes impossibly stagnant and oppressive. I have asked many of my colleagues to refrain from breathing. I thought this was a reasonable solution to the problem of the excess humidity, but they all seemed offended by the suggestion. Some people are touchy.

So last night, I was sitting in my Real Estate Transactions class (and yes, it is as FASCINATING as it sounds) and I was simmering in my own juices. The professor is an adjunct practitioner. He spends his days negotiating actual real estate transactions! After a few weeks of this stuff I can tell you that the most exciting thing he does at work is scrape the spores off the bottom of his fern's leaves. And due to the nature of ferns, he only needs to do that once a year. I can imagine a high rate of institutionalization for real estate lawyers. Either that or suicide.

But digressions aside, I was sitting in my Real Estate Transactions class and I was trying to concentrate. It's hard to think under such horrible oppressive conditions, but I was giving it the old college try. I was listening and I stopped hearing sentences and could only hear words and eventually I could only hear the syllables. I understood it to be English, and English is my first language, but I could not make out what was being said.

The professor turns to me and said "what do you think about the risk of loss clause in this contract, Brian?" I said, "Yes." He looked at me with an �I'm puzzled by what you said' look and moved on, so I understandably knew just how Einstein felt. Then he took off his suit jacket and exposed his sweat stains to the class and I felt like we were back on even footing. Isn't it odd that when I do something stupid, I feel about an inch tall until someone else does something embarrassing.

He let class out early because of the uncomfortable climate. When the class stood up to leave, the sound of all the legs peeling off the plastic seats was quite something. We ripped ourselves off of the furniture and ran for the door.

Of course I probably shouldn't complain �cause no planes flew into the law school.

Posted at 1:40 p.m.

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