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Making fun of my roommate shines a light on my lack of knowledge in the field of thermodynamics and makes me feel like a fraud.
My roommate Dom wasn’t very bright.
He called his mom constantly with mundane questions like how many Tylenol he should take for his headache. Despite being an accounting major, he often struggled to calculate his debts. I covered his $20 share of a keg one Friday night and when he went to give me the cash, he only had $12 in his wallet.
“Shit, sorry dude,” said Dom. “What’s 12 minus 20 again?”
“Negative 8,” I said.
“Shit, shit. I mean what’s 20 minus 12?”
“It’s 8,” I replied blankly.
“Okay, cool. So I owe ya $8 then, right?”
“You know what? Don’t even worry about it,” I figured I was never getting that money anyway. Why waste another second doing arithmetic with a brick wall?
There are several dozen more stories about Dom’s exploits, like the time he spilled an entire gallon of apple cider vinegar on our living carpet and didn’t clean it up, or the time he almost murdered me for setting off a stink bomb in his bedroom, or the time he tried for 10 full minutes to operate a pepper grinder upside down, or the time he decided moving out was hard so he left all his shit at the apartment and just drove home at the end of the year.
There was even his failed attempt at applying for a forensic accounting internship at the FBI. One of the questions on the background check asked if he had ever trafficked narcotics. Dom, being Dom, answered “yes” because he had once played chauffeur for a high school buddy’s weed run. Needless to say, he didn’t get the job.
Also needless to say, we gave him a bunch of shit for being dumb. Kirk used to write complex vocabulary words on the whiteboard in our kitchen just to see the puzzled look on his face. I started doing impressions of him struggling to understand simple concepts — boiling water, doing laundry, reading a map, etc.
One night after a couple of beers, I picked up a Thermos that was laying around in the kitchen. “Hey guys,” I mimicked Dom’s thick Jersey-Italian affect, “ya know how ‘dis Thermos keeps hot things hot and cold things cold? ‘Dats pretty cool and all, but like, my question is… how do it know?”
Despite him never actually uttering those words, “How do it know?” became our way of hacking on people for asking a dumb question. We repeated the story way too often in situations like, “Can you believe this guy? He doesn’t even know how a Thermos works.”
But the more times we told the story, the more people who were brought in on the joke, and the more exaggerated it became, the more anxious I got. And it wasn’t because the whole thing had started as a stupid impression that we were now playing off as an actual quote.
I didn’t give a shit about that. My insults did not need to be authentic.
What I did worry about, constantly, was that someone might some day uncover my secret. If that happened, my carefully crafted public persona as a snarky know-it-all would crumble to pieces in front of my eyes. The thought of it absolutely shook me to my core. On the nights where I consumed less than a liter of Evan Williams, it even kept me awake tossing and turning for hours.
My deep, dark secret was this:
I personally had no idea how a Thermos worked.
Okay, okay, I understood the general concept. It’s insulated, so the temperature of whatever is inside stays pretty consistent. But is that all there is to it?
If that’s it, then why do all of my friends laugh so hard at this anecdote? Why is it so insane that Dom would ask for more info? Is there something glaringly obvious I’m missing? Do they all know something that I don’t? Am I a total fraud?
As my anxiety grew, I started avoiding any conversations about Dom’s intelligence like the plague. Whenever someone brought up the temperature of their beverage, I’d quickly change the subject or nod along without really engaging. Sending prank emails impersonating the FBI’s narcotics enforcement division began to lose its fun. I even skipped watching cooking shows, fearing that insulated receptacles could make an appearance.
But life has a funny way of throwing curveballs at you. One day, while on an Acme run to procure a new cooler for that weekend’s jungle juice concoction, Jake picked up a Thermos off the shelf. “We should get this for Dom,” he mocked.
“Yeah, but how do it know?” Kirk asked with a mischievous glint in his eyes.
My heart raced, and I felt the weight of every Thermos-related joke we had ever made pressing down on me like an anvil on my chest. But then, a light bulb went off in my head. Instead of panicking, I’d deflect my own insecurities in my favorite way — by shitting on my dumb friend even harder.
“Well,” I began, my voice taking on the battle-tested meathead accent that could only mean one thing, “I’m pretty sure ‘dis thing operates on the principles of quantum thermodynamics or inter-dimensional temperature differentials or some shit. I think there’s like a tiny guy in there ‘dat opens up a little wormhole to transfer the hotness or whatever to some kinda parallel universe like in Donnie Darko or some shit. Then it’s like, when you open ‘dat shit up, the little alien dude sucks the hotness back in and closes up the wormhole so you don’t fuckin’ lose your mind and shit.”
“Wow dude,” said Kirk. “Did you learn all that at your FBI internship?”
Everyone laughed and from that moment on, my secret was safe. No one suspected a thing, and the joke continued to bring laughs for years to come. As for me, I found a renewed sense of confidence. It wasn’t important to accumulate knowledge and grasp difficult concepts. If I ever felt threatened or uncomfortable, all I needed to do was talk like Paulie Walnuts and mercilessly dump on someone else.
After all, I didn’t need to be the smartest person in the room. I just needed to be smarter than Dom. And last time I checked, I can operate a pepper mill flawlessly.