I had lunch over the weekend with my former roommate Karl. For those of you that don’t remember him, Karl was my roommate following Karl first with Dennis and then just the two of us. He flunked out of Southern Tech University with a 0.something GPA after having been burned out from his G&T high school as well as being a little too cocky about his remarkable intelligence. Viewing things such as attending class, taking notes, and doing homework as a waste of one’s talents is not the route to success. Then he got a job at Bregna, one of the worst five employers in the entire country, and that was itself enough motivation to go back to college. He graduated from Delosa Western with a near 4.0 GPA and got into a Masters/PhD physics program in a pretty well-regarded midwestern university. It’s amazing what a little motivation can do for you.

It’s the first time we’ve seen one another in a number of years. Fortunately, Web let me know he was in town or we would have missed each other again. We ate at a restaurant near our second apartment where he would frequently pick up food for me. It was the first time I have actually been in the restaurant.

Karl hasn’t changed all that much over the years. His hair comes down to his waist now. He still can’t grow any facial hair of note. Perhaps the most noteworthy change is that he seems to talk a little less about his superior intelligence than before and a little less about the inferior intelligence of those around him. Part of it is probably mellowing with age. I also think, though, that now that he is actually walking the walk, he doesn’t feel the need to talk the talk so much.

We did have an interesting conversation about the astronomy class he’s teaching. Astronomy is apparently the science class taken by kids who don’t like science and he is having to bite his tongue a lot in explaining and re-explaining pretty basic concepts to the students. I’ve never been a science person. Honors chemistry was the least of all available evils to meet the Honors College requirements. After that, I took geology. Astronomy hadn’t occurred to me, or his counterpart at Sotech probably would have been complaining to his former roommate about students like me.

I also got a kick out of the fact that he refuses to watch The Big Bang Theory because everybody keeps calling him “Sheldon.”

Notably, his pseudonymic last name on this ball is named after said character. The similarities are hard to ignore.