She Java me crazy

My friends sometimes ask me, “How did you get a girl to marry you?”

They usually ask this when I’m sitting on a couch with one hand down my pants, shirtless, covered in flecks of popcorn, waiting for my buddies to get eaten by zombies so that I can get the PlayStation2 controller back.

The short answer is that I discovered my wife Kara in much the same way that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin: one day, completely by chance, I noticed that Kara, when smeared on a Petri dish, had an inhibiting effect on staphylococci bacteria.

Actually, Kara and I do largely have nasty microorganisms to thank for bringing us together, as we met in the waiting room of the student health services building at Penn State, hacking up pieces of our respective lungs. This was quite an unexpected meeting for both of us, as good things rarely happen in waiting rooms, other than getting extended chances to catch up on the September 1995 issue of People Magazine.

As I was strolling through the room on my way out the door, I recognized this girl from my computer science class sitting there. I knew that she should have been in class right then, because I was skipping it, too. Our computer architecture class, in which we learned to build gothic cathedrals using only discarded motherboards, was at 1:30 in the afternoon. Though this was awfully early to drag myself out of bed, somehow I usually made it anyway, missing only the first half hour or so.

Back in college, I took computer science classes for the same obvious reason that all the other guys did: to pick up chicks. Then I found out the hard way that your average computer science class usually had about as many females in it as the men’s room at Augusta National.

But in this one class, there was a girl who always sat a few rows in front of me. She was perfect in every way. It didn’t work out between us, though, and shortly thereafter I met Kara in the waiting room. Wait, no, the first girl was Kara, too. Yeah, that’s right.

So when I saw her in the waiting room, I thought about all the catchy computer-themed pick-up lines I could use, like, “Can’t you C++ us together?” or “Baby, you’ve already one over this zero.”

In the end, I went with, “Shouldn’t you be in class right now?” That’s the first thing I ever said to my wife. The most recent thing I ever said was, “I’ll crack my toes if I want to crack my toes, Woman!”

I’d been sitting about five feet behind Kara every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for several months, so it made perfect sense for her to be elated that the stud muffin from her computer architecture class finally said something to her. Sure enough, she gazed up at me that day with a look that said it all. The look said, “Who the heck are you?”

I explained that I was in her 1:30 class, and that’s how I knew who she was. She still looked a little suspicious, like I was just feeling her out before trying to close the deal on an Amway sale.

The next time we had class, Kara came over and sat next to me. Then we started doing our homework together. Then we forgot about the homework altogether.

So really, phlegm was what kicked off our marriage. The best advice I can give to my single friends who are looking for love is that, if they can’t develop any decent infirmities naturally, they should probably lick a nursery school doorknob or stick their heads in used biohazard bags. Sometimes a bug isn’t all you’ll catch.

You can tell Mike Todd about exciting Amway opportunities online at mikectodd@gmail.com.