My memories of many of these events are vague but I'm doing the best I can with the facts.

It was my Freshman year, the traditional year of stupidity, and I was at college in Durham, NC. My friend Scott had biked over for the day from N.C. State to see his girlfriend. We hung out for a little while and he said the trip was pretty easy and about 25 miles. I decided that I'd bike to N.C State with him and then come back.

So after he had seen his girlfriend we took off. It was a pretty easy trip and then he showed me a little of N.C. state (I don't remember anything) and his room (t&a posters) and he treated me to dinner on his meal plan. It was at this point I realized I was going to run out of daylight. So I took my leave and had him repeat the directions home.

Well, it was getting dark as I left. And before I had even gotten out of the city it was dark. I've never much liked biking at night and for no good reason I decided not to turn around. So I biked the route I was supposed to and got way on the side whenever a car came.

So I'm biking on this road at night for quite a while. And I never see the road that I'm supposed to turn on. At this point I start to get really worried. I'm pretty much on my own because I know no one with a car. I continue to bike around and am in the middle of nowhere when I finally run into some IBM research park. I ask the guard for directions and then try to follow what he tells me.

Soon, I'm even more lost. But then I see one of those big green Interstate signs. Well now I have a real dilemma because I know the interstate will get me back but it would involve bicycling on the interstate at night without lights.

I decided what the hell and started biking. I kept on the shoulder and I started to feel some relief. I was going to get home. Now, the problem with the interstate is that it has many entrances and exits. And at the entrances and exits, a bicyclist has no access to the shoulder.

So I'm biking along past an entrance, and there is this car coming in my lane and another car entering the interstate! The car in my lane starts holding down his horn and passes within about six inches of me... A less aware driver, a bump in the road, a difference in timing between the two cars- it all could have been very bad. But I could not stop for death and eventually I made it home.

Cooking

It was another stressful night of my sophomore year and I was cooking up some spaghetti. (It's not hard. You put some random amount of water in a big pot. You wait for the bubbles. You break some spaghetti and you stick it in there. You look at the clock and then go back in your room to study.)

So I'm trying to read some book with a name like infinite sets of vector calculus when white smoke starts to come in around the door. "Well hell", I say to myself, put the book down and open the door. I look into the hall which was filled with smoke. I get my roommate out of the apartment and go back in to investigate.

I wade back through the smoke to check on the spaghetti and THERE IS STILL WATER IN THE POT. For yours truly, scientist extraodinaire, this is stumper. I sit there staring at the pot with the spaghetti and the water. I go back outside and tell my roommate who isn't much help.

I go back in and check (yes, there is still water in the pot). Then, on a whim I look in the microwave. I open the door and look at a scene of complete waffle carnage. The entire bottom floor of the microwave is warped and there is a stack of 4 pieces of distinctly waffle-shaped charcoal. The waffles I had meant to put in for 1 minute I had put in for 10.

I get asked two questions about this story that I cannot answer. The men ask: What happened to the smoke alarm? The women ask: Why were you going to eat spaghetti and waffles?

I'm an open minded guy and I have a friend that is an open minded guy. We are going to try this Tofu stuff. So we got to the store and we get a bag of Tofu. We cook it up in the microwave. We put it on two plates and we start eating.

While we are eating it we start discussing it. "I had thought it was supposed to be like plain yogurt or something. "

"I had no idea it would be this spicy."

"Or this gritty."

At this point my spider-sense is going crazy but I can't figure out where we could have gone wrong. So I check the cooking directions again. My eyes catch on the line: add 5 pounds of tofu. It was an amazing moment- a guy who had gone to Duke and a guy with a full scholarship to USC had eaten two plates of tofu seasoning with no tofu.

Raj is probably the smartest guy I know. He had a 4.0 at Duke in biomedical engineering and is currently excelling in Med school. Which makes this story all the better.

Raj was at summer camp where he used to practice running down the hall and seeing how high he could jump. He would get up a running start and then thrust his body into the air, every muscle straining, to see how close he could get his head to the ceiling. He does this every day and he never gets much higher than he did originally.

One day he is trying as usual and he gets this mutant jump and as he sails through the air he has enough time to panic before slapping his head against the ceiling. He was fine but I think there is a lesson there.

When I was in fourth grade my family left South Carolina for a year because my dad was on sabbatical. A sabbatical is an option professors have every seven years to work for another university. We ended up in Connecticut staying at another family’s house who was also on sabbatical. They were real animal lovers. They had a wallaby, a ferret, a giant turtle and some other animals. My parents didn’t want to deal with these animals but they figured that I could take care of "Wally" the blind wallaby.

Now basically a wallaby is a small kangaroo and in fourth grade I was a very small human. If Wally were standing up he would probably be about 4 feet high. The problem with Wally was that he was all leg. Think about a rabbit’s hind legs which are just this huge coiled mass and then make the rabbit about half of the size of a person.

Besides feeding the wallaby I often had to walk him. One time I was walking him up a very steep hill to the top of our yard. I was ahead of him waiting for him to come up. He is almost at the top when he loses his footing. One of the saddest sights I’ve seen is a blind wallaby scrambling in the air as he slides down a hill. Wally was fine but he began to plot his revenge.

Two weeks later I was leading him back to his pen when Wally heard the call of the wild. He starts bounding off and I’m attached to him by the leash. Like a first time water-skier I fall over and start getting dragged through the brush. Wally, legs-a-pumpin heads straight for the largest poison ivy patch in Connecticut.

I end up with a case of poison ivy so bad that there is no visible skin on my upper legs and the rest of my body doesn’t do so well either. My legs would get so hot that I would wear wet paper towels on them under my clothes.

I’m in high school and I go to a local basketball park to shoot around for a while. There are no lights on the court and as it gets darker it becomes harder too shoot. Finally I decide to leave and drive home. I get in my car and crank up the stereo. I drive about a mile at a normal speed making my turns and everything.

I happen to look in my rearview mirror and there is a cop trying to pull me over. I have no idea how long he has been trying because of my stereo.

He has me suffer in my car for a while he calls back-up. Then he comes over and has me get out of the car and place my hands on the hood. He is really worked up that I hadn’t stopped my car immediately. He asks if he can search the car. I let him because I have forgotten my driver’s license and I hope he’ll go a little easier on me. There is nothing interesting in my car but he grabs this sandwich bag and tells me they are going to test it for drugs. I’m a little confused at this point so I’m asking him what exactly I did wrong. As I do this I take my hands off the hood of the car. He yells at me to put my hands on the hood of car.

After looking through the car he has me sit in the front seat next to him. He starts to get confidential with me. I don’t know what he wants. I point to the basketball in the backseat and I tell him I was shooting around. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t know what this guy wants but I decide to try a different tactic. Ordinarily I’m the worst liar but I’m nervous enough from the situation anyway that I starting getting emotional and making up this story about how I had a fight with my parents and I had to be alone. I think the cop was satisfied with this misery and after giving me a stern warning about not having my license he let me go.