Guy at a Cocktail Party Who For Medical Reasons Can't Eat, Drink, Piss, Poop, or Grab a Breath of Fresh Air
"Excuse me, we've run out of subjects to talk about and now you're boring me. I'm going to go find someone else to talk to or, barring that, check my phone"
Guy Who Thinks He's Going to Read A Lot in Prison
[Buddy drops off College-Educated Convict at the prison gates]
Buddy: Hey man - good luck in there. No TV, no internet, no phone, no women - what kind of a country do we live in where you have to endure that, all for embezzling a few thousand bucks?
College-Educated Convict: No you don't understand. It's an amazing opportunity dude - no TV, no internet, no phone, no women? That means NO DISTRACTIONS! I can finally read all those long books I didn't read back in college - Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, The Power Broker. Plus I'll have time to learn Italian, learn Chinese, and even improve my chess game! Prison transformed Malcolm X into the urbane, well-read man he was - it's all right there in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I'm gonna read all 500 pages of in prison!!!
Buddy: Wow, when you look at it that way... I'm jealous bro!
[Last Day of Prison, 2 years Later]
[Buddy is picking College-Educated Convict up at prison gates]
Buddy: Ni hao
College-Educated Convict: What?
Buddy: "Ni Hao" - ya know, Chinese for "Hello." I mean you must be fluent by now but I just learned that phrase from my waitress last night, heh
College-Educated Convict: Yeah... um, I didn't exactly learn as much Chinese as I intended to.
Buddy: But now you parliamo italiano, si?
College-Educated Convict: No, no didn't learn Italian either. Or improve my chess game much.
Buddy: But the long books - I mean you must've ripped through The Power Broker
College-Educated Convict: Well, uh, I, uh, I got through the Yale years. And I mean that time pretty much molded Moses into the man he'd become so --
Buddy: -- wait you had 2 years of no TV, no internet, no phone, no women and you still didn't read any more books than I did?
College-Educated Convict: Ya know, I mean, 2 years is less time than it seems - it really goes by fast. And I got into this wicked volleyball league. Well it wasn't really a league but we played like 2, sometimes 3 times a week. And the warden was really nice so he'd let us watch TV whenever the Red Sox games were on, and baseball's a 162-game season. Plus my cellmate Jose it turns out knew almost as much about The Beatles as I do, so we traded all sorts of crazy trivia - did you know there's a version of Please Please Me with Pete Best on the cover instead of Ringo?
Buddy: Basically what you're telling me is that it's impossible to actually sit down and read long books as an adult, no matter what the circumstances
[pause]
College-Educated Convict: Yes.
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