Gardening

My wife loves to garden.

This is not a bad thing, despite the fact that she grows only ornamental plants and refuses to cultivate the One True Vegetable (white corn, if you're curious). When we bought our house, the yard looked something like the worst parts of Afghanistan, only scarier. After just a few years and $20,000 in seeds, it looks more like the Florida Everglades…only scarier.

No, seriously, we have a beautiful yard. It's so gorgeous that last year it was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Foreign dignitaries drop by to have their photographs taken next to our modest pond, which is based on the fountains at Versailles (though a bit larger). I'd link to the Google satellite image, but they blocked it because so many people were gawking that it clogged their servers.

That's all pretty cool. Not everyone can live in a showpiece house with a showpiece garden and a showpiece family. I wish I could claim that I do, but I manage to clutter up the house so it looks more like Skid Row right before a big police sweep. Still, the garden makes a nice refuge from all that.

The problem is, my wife seems to think that a garden should contain a bunch of things that actually grow. And although I didn't realize it when we moved in, growing things requires water.

“So what?” you ask. “Isn't that what sprinklers are for?”

Me too. Not realizing that this marks us as indelibly, hopelessly, cluelessly male. Because sprinklers aren't the right way to water plants. Not if you're a true gardener with a thumb so green that it puts Amazon parrots to shame. Not if you have, um…envy.

No, the true gardener waters everything by hand.

So what's the big deal about that? Why not just let my wife have her fun? If she wants to squirt plants, or write her name in the snow, that's her business, right? She says it relaxes her. A relaxed wife is Good with a capital G. Go for it, honey!

Sounds sensible. Except that this is a woman who has no concept of the term "water damage." Never mind that she grew up in rainy, foggy San Francisco and spent a decade living in sunny Seattle (well, it was sunny the day she foolishly decided to move there). Never mind that if you left a lawn chair or a marble statue out for three days in one of those places, it would immediately develop mold and start to stink like a car salesman's promises. Never mind the arm's-length list of possessions that were destroyed by mist the first day she arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Never mind that she's developed a habit where every day, summer and winter, she leaves the bathroom window open “to let the steam out” despite the fact that we live in a broiling semi-desert and our house is so dry that even the sponges are cracked. All those learning experiences are instantly forgotten when she gets hold of a hose.

So here's what my summer weekends are like: I get up, grab the newspaper and a glass of juice, and wander out to the patio to soak up (and I use the term advisedly) a bit of sun. Spreading the paper out to my favorite section (the kiddie pages), I settle down and take a sip.

Suddenly, behind me, there is the familiar hiss of a nozzle.

Before I can react, the paper is sopping and my juice glass is full of water. You see, my wife's aim isn't so hot. And, more important, she just doesn't care. In her world, water is this magic stuff that appears from nowhere without any apparent source or reason. If it lands on plants it makes them grow; if it lands somewhere else it just evaporates. It can't possibly cause any damage, because it's “The stuff of life.”

So I sit there, dripping, with my breakfast ruined and a torn newspaper leaking ink onto my hands. And without missing a beat, I take the situation in hand like the commanding patriarch I am:

“Sweetie? Could you bring me the shampoo?”

A Professor's Life

Ah, professors. Those lucky dogs, sitting around all day, smoking their pipes. Every once in a while they get up in front of a class, spout some complete nonsense that only a college student would believe, then retire to their offices surrounded by admiring coeds. In summer they work on their tans and complain about how the administration misunderstands them.

What a life!

Well, I'm here to tell you that the above picture is completely and utterly wrong. I'm a real professor, and I work on my tan in the winter, too.

To be fair, there are a few minor drawbacks to the job—the parents who threaten to sue over a grade, the committees formed to decide what color to paint the restrooms, the frosh who is certain World War II started in 1927 because he read it on a blog—but it has its perks, too. Outside the NFL, how many people suffer from grass stains as an occupational hazard? How many factories are so pretty that people walk their dogs there every evening? (Oh wait...ewwwwwwwww...maybe that's not so great after all.)

To give you an idea of how wonderful your life would be if only you had answered one of those “Ph.D. for life experience!” ads in your inbox instead of wasting your time browsing blogs, here's a typical day in the life of a typical professor:

6:15 AM. The alarm goes off. The professor, having been up until 3 the night before, rolls over and ignores it. His wife gets up and takes the kids to school.

9:00 AM. The professor wakes with a start. Quickly doing the arithmetic in his head, he calculates that he has had 7 hours of sleep and is ready for another exciting day of critical thinking. Full of new ideas, he rushes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth with shaving soap left over from the one and only time he decided to go without a beard. (This professor never discards anything. Ever.)

9:05 AM. Suddenly, he remembers that he has a 9:15 meeting this morning. With his boss. And it takes 15 minutes to get to campus. Fortunately, nobody cares if professors smell bad, because the students smell worse. Besides, his boss is elected by the other professors. And he can't actually do anything if our hero is late.

The professor makes coffee.

9:30 AM. The prof arrives at the meeting with an insincere apology in hand. His boss isn't there yet. He memorizes the apology for future use.

10:30 AM. With the meeting over and nothing actually accomplished, the prof returns to his office to hold scheduled office hours. Wise and experienced, he always schedules office hours at times when students are unlikely to be available. He whiles away the time by grading a few quizzes. The worst answers will be e-mailed to other faculty so they can laugh at the students behind their backs. The best ones get saved as the answer key.

What, you thought he knew the answers?

11:00 AM. The “office hours” were only half an hour; now it's time for the first class. Preparing a good lecture takes a lot of time (usually two to five hours per in-class hour). But this guy has a system: a quiz will take 15 minutes, which he can stretch to 20 by generously allowing a bit of extra time for latecomers. Then he'll discuss the upcoming test (“Will we be allowed to use pencils?” is good for a five-minute explanation of why only ink is acceptable) and take a brief side journey into last night's episode of “American Idol.”

Some lecture slides downloaded from the Internet will fill the rest of the time, especially because he'll spend a lot of it trying to figure out what the equations mean. But who cares? It's a private college; these kids must be rich. They probably all have trust funds. They should give him a cut. Or at least donate an endowed chair to the college in his name. Who do they think they are, anyway? Damn snotnoses.

12:00 PM. Lunch is an important committee meeting. Every college has a few committees that do real work, such as deciding which students are doing so badly that they should flunk out. But the professor in charge of the dartboard forgot to bring it, and the administrator in charge of bribes left her list in the office. So everybody spends the hour arguing whether the cafeteria food is even worse than last year.

2:00 PM. Returning to his office, the professor spots a student heading his way. He quickly decides that it's the perfect time to wander through campus and think deep thoughts, and ducks back outside before he has to answer a question.

Close call!

3:30 PM. The afternoon class is a seminar on the applied biology of psychological linear algebra, with applications to the ideological niceties of quantum physics in Bollywood films. This is a perfect course because nobody understands what the hell the title means, so the prof can just let the students argue about whether World of Warcraft is more fun than Modern Warfare II. He soon falls asleep and gets one hour closer to the rest he thought he had had all along.

5:00 PM. Returning to his office, the professor realizes that he has forgotten the research paper that he had promised to send to a journal editor by today. Cutting and pasting from random files on his computer, he produces something that looks coherent and sends it off. Hopefully, the guy won't notice.

6:30 PM. The prof heads home and settles down to study the latest discoveries in his field. The tome he is wading through today is destined to become a classic: G. Larson's “Beyond the Far Side.”

8:00 PM. Time for some relaxation. Our hero channel-surfs for 90 minutes, driving his wife crazy, before putting the kids to bed.

He doesn't notice that he actually tucked them away under the bed, but that's OK. The Larson treatise has convinced him there aren't any monsters there.

10:00 PM. Back to work. This is the quiet time when the professor can get a lot done and be ready for the upcoming day. He begins by checking his e-mail, then spends an hour on YouTube. That leads him to an insightful Dave Barry satire and some important thoughts from Jon Stewart.

2:00 AM. OK, now we really have to buckle down. The professor spends an hour refining the equation he came up with last night at about this same time. Unfortunately, he hasn't yet noticed that he's actually working on the receipt from his wife's last trip to the grocery store.

3:00 AM. Exhausted but proud of the day's accomplishments, the professor decides he had better get some sleep, since he has an appointment tomorrow at 8 AM. A quick mental calculation reveals that if he goes to bed right now, he can sleep a full eight hours, get up at 7:30, and still make it on time.

He sets the alarm for noon.