‘Oh my God,’ Tim thought, ‘I don’t know if I can take any more of this.’ He made a valiant effort to pay attention to the professor’s lecture, but it was sooo tedious. Marginal costs, marginal revenues; one is linear, the other is curvilinear. “Why?” asked the professor. “Who cares?!” Tim wanted to scream at him. Instead, he let his eyes wander about the room. Normally he sat towards the front in an attempt to get himself to pay more attention to lectures, but today he had been late and so had taken a seat to the side in one of the last rows, towards the top of the tiered lecture hall. Maybe it wouldn’t help him pay attention to optimal pricing theory, but it afforded him a much better view of the other students.
Tim looked at the students around him and began his own version of a game he often played with his friends at parties or dances on campus: ‘Who Would You Do of the People You Can See Right Now?’ He noted the beefy swimmer-type from his Macro class last semester. Sexy, but not so bright. Next to him was another athletic-looking dude—probably a teammate; these guys always seemed to stick together. He was bent forward, elbows on his knees and head propped on clasped hands in a pose that suggested he was just as enthralled with the lecture as Tim. The guy’s shirt had ridden up his back a bit so that it revealed the waistband of his underwear. For some reason Tim found that very sexy—like a peek at something personal not meant to be seen by others. He craned his neck forward a bit—in a way he hoped wasn’t obvious—to get a better look, and felt his pulse immediately quicken when he saw more bare skin beneath the guy’s waistband. ‘Is he wearing a jock?’ Tim asked himself. His head then immediately filled with a series of related questions: ‘Who wears a jock to class, even if you are a jock? Are they really that comfortable? When was the last time I even owned a jock? Little League?’ Frequent chains of thought such as these are what would ensure he earned no better than a B in this class, Tim was now convinced. As if aware of the distraction it had on Tim, swimmer number two sat back up so his shirt again covered his waistband.
Undaunted, Tim began a new scan of the room (pricing theory was a lost cause for today).
“Oh wow.”