Posted on 02/17/2018 4:06:29 PM PST by nickcarraway
Steve Kenilworth sighs as he flops down on the couch in the staff room at Rick Astley High School, his Grade 8 math classes finally done for the day.
"I'm grateful to have such a full workload this semester because it really keeps my mind off…my…my situation," he shares in a sternly hushed tone as both of his eyes scan the room.
Kenilworth explains that several months ago, much to his shock, biology teacher Samantha Young confessed that she has romantic feelings for him. Meanwhile, however, Kenilworth has been helplessly in love with English teacher Dana Freeman for a number of years, and that number is six.
"I mean, both of these women are just magnificent. And equally so. Any man would be lucky to be with them. Me, on the other hand, I'm just kind of a weird dumb tool? I seriously don't know why either one bothers to acknowledge my existence. Ugh, I mean, look at me. I look like Steve Buscemi's exhausted, vaguely nauseous great-uncle."
"What I'm trying to get at here is that two sides of this love triangle are very clearly equal, whereas the third one is not," he continues thoughtfully. "I wish I could say this whole mess is an equilateral, where every side's the same. But come on. Who am I kidding? Dana and Sam are both radiant pillars of light, titans of intellect. Whereas for dinner last night, I ate cereal off a Frisbee because I had no clean bowls in my home."
"And before you get any fancy ideas, who said anything about milk?"
Asked what he plans to do about this frustrating romantic entanglement, Kenilworth shrugs wearily. "I'm trying to figure that out. Regrettably, my Texas Instruments geometry set doesn't come with a moral compass."
"In the meantime though," he says, "I figured I may as well calculate the height of our love triangle. Or maybe even the area! I mean, why not, right? It's just a neat and fun thing to do! Gosh, it's both so neat and fun!"
Kenilworth springs to his feet and crosses the hall into an empty classroom, where he immediately busies himself scrawling complex equations all over a white board like some kind of weird secret genius janitor in a '90s rom com.
"I've tried to talk to her about my feelings but we just keep creeping around the perimeter of the issue," he says. "Which, for those interested, with specific respect to an isosceles, is equal to 2a+b. That's how you'd go about solving for P in that case. So."
"Does anyone have any questions?" he adds, even though last I checked, this reporter is equal to one person.
Kenilworth returns to the staff room, dejected. He opens a yearbook and gazes longingly at Dana's staff photo.
"As far as English teachers go, man, she's acute one," he says, before exploding into a fit of howling laughter at his own joke, a sound not unlike a hyena freaking out with joy about a Boxing Day sale continuing on for an extra week after he'd assumed it had ended.
At the time of this writing, forty minutes had elapsed and Mr. Kenilworth had still not recovered from his joke.
Thanks, I’ve been blessed.
“Ugh, I mean, look at me. I look like Steve Buscemi’s exhausted, vaguely nauseous great-uncle.”
Seems like he should be a writer rather than a math teacher. Maybe that’s why Dana the english teacher likes him. One can only imagine why the biology teacher thinks he’s so “great”.
With Ingrid Bergman in the part of the hypotenuse.
Certainly some of their singles were not on their (UK) albums...making the Beatles’ output even more extraordinary.
Or as I learned when working in NYC during the 1970's,
"Never get your meat where you get your bread and butter"
The guy from the Georgia Satellites/.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.