Nordberry Nosh

Track season (intramural, but we had a coach) was coming up. By official rules we couldn't work out as a team until February 1st. So, as distance guys, we just ran our normal distance workouts, 50 km weeks, as a group to keep in shape.

Technically, we weren't supposed to talk to any coaches, but someone in our friendly "running club" happened to regularly find photocopied articles with sets of workouts. There were ways around the rules. Really, it was to prevent abusive coaches from dominating us all year round, but that wasn't the case and we really liked the 'getting ahead' aspects.

Besides, if we didn't run to get base miles in, we'd end up starting the season at a huge deficit.

I was one of the average guys on our team, but that day? Working out again with a group was fun and we did some easy loping around on the snowy streets.

My runderwear (running underwear) felt small and tight on me, and I figured the bigger balls were doing it, and maybe they'd go back down to normal size after a few more days recovering.

Since I'd been sick, I planned on taking it easy and going slower, but I kept up with the 3:45 to 4 (min/km) pace of the faster guys, something that might have taken the gumption out of me normally. I just felt good! Gliding along it was easy to keep in excellent toe-strike toe-push form (it just feels graceful if it's good form).

After a quick dinner in front of the TV with my sisters and mom (dad got home late some days, he did CPA and insurance work and clients came in late), I went downstairs and did some of my calc 3 homework, and my bio (Biology 332) re-reading re-problem-ing like I'd started, and then knocked out one of the books i'd gotten. It was a quick read - 'Beyond Good and Evil', a diatribe on how to think about stuff by Nietszche, a normally-impossible last name to spell.

Whoever did the translating did a piss-poor job (it had apparently been in German originally) 'cuz the sentence structure was just really, really, really long, and it seemed like there were always 4 ideas in a sentence crammed together.

Or, it was just that Nietszhe was wacko. Not my call.

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to write a 'reaction paper' on the book or not, so I knocked out some ideas and discovered it was 1 am and I had to get to bed or I'd regret it at 6:30.

Still, I had to rub one out in addition to the one I'd rubbed out early in the evening. I got way horny and didn't even need to watch a porn vid, I just lay back and stroked and had a pretty good time. Cleaning up was a hassle - three kleenexes, way more fluid than normal probably because I Just Kept Spurting. Very VERY fun, so I wasn't complaining.

== Chapter: Wednesday to the next Wednesday ==

Not much to note for these days. Read a lot, did a bunch of catching up in my core STEM classes, re-doing calc 1 and 2 homeworks (all the problems, not just the assigned ones)(an online tool told me if I did them right, which helped a lot). My brain was more OCD and it just seemed better to do all of them and be sure I was getting it all right.

I worked my way through several more of the literature list, just saving my reaction papers to the share-drive where my teacher wanted them, regardless of not knowing which one she was going to assign first.

The way I figured it, if I was working ahead in literature, I'd be buying time for myself when the midterms for bio and calc 3 came around. The profs for those courses had warned we needed to work constantly through the year to get ahead so we could spend the last days just reviewing stuff we already knew to cement it and keep it fresh for the tests.

In 7 days, I'd worked through 15 of the 20 chapters from my calc 1-2 book, and it was a clear path to finishing the rest. I'd re-done every homework problem, and since I was working so much on it, I was getting lots faster with each problem.

I wasn't quite caught up with my classes again, but I SOOOOO much more comfortable and confident! I didn't worry that I'd missed something. I had a Ringing-Happy mood going in terms of not being worried about schoolwork.

Running-wise, I was stronger than ever, and I felt some days like I had a bounce in my step that I hadn't had before.

The feeling of being ahead-of-the-game came out in so many ways.

Sight reading piano pieces, I found I could do harder and harder ones, and when I tried them a second and third time, it flowed a lot easier. I could even throw inflection and groove into some of them - and nothing has groove like Prokofiev, except maybe Mingus or Oscar Peterson, but that wasn't me. Peterson is a God among men and I felt lucky to go 2% of the speed he would have been playing.

Listening to a recording of Peterson and looking at the transcript, I had to concentrate to get the notes all right, but after a couple of times through it started flowing? I was confused, but happy that it seemed manageable, whereas before it'd definitely seemed over the top.

Still - Wow, hard music, but Beautiful!

Oh - and yes, despite the fact that the entire planet held Russia in contempt for atrocities they did in Ukraine, I liked Prokofiev anyway. I just had to think about him as a composer first and as a Russian second. Note, I learned later he was born in Ukraine and my cognitive dissonance dropped to zero and I let myself fully like his stuff again.

Now there's something I've left off here because there wasn't much to tell - my social life.

I had girlfriends in high school, some, but I was pretty shy and reserved and didn't date much.

In college the previous year I'd dated Gail awhile, but she had decided to not tell me she was going out with another guy (her parents' friends' son, a truck driver). When I found out from someone else, she told me, "It's not serious, we just went out on some dates," and I should "get over it," and that I should 'get a clue and dress better'.

I had thought Gail and I were exclusive. I also didn't like being criticized and looked down on and cheated-on, really. She called it quits but really it was my response that made it end.

This was hard. I really liked her. She'd told me many times she liked me, too, and I thought things were okay, but apparently she had different ideas and I felt really misled. This left a bad taste in my mouth, relationship-wise, so I didn't ask anyone out and just let school be my thing.

== Chapter: Thursday ==

To my _immense_ surprise, Madison, a girl in my calc 3 class, asked me if I could help her out with some problems, stopping at my table during lunch. This was a giant red flag.

Granted, we sat relatively near each other in class, so she obviously was just asking someone she knew could answer the problem. The trouble was Who She Was.

First, she had an attitude that said she was better and higher-class than the people around her. She was in gymnastics, like my sister Tina, so I heard stories. Tina had talked about 'stuck-up Madison' on various occasions, to my bemusement, so I knew her character both from my own experience and from my sister's funny anecdotal evidence.

Madison was also way out of my league, from being super-pretty and all, and she knew it, and I knew it, and that wasn't an ignored-fact in interacting with her.

The way she asked seemed innocent, but I knew what to watch for from my sister, and I knew that underneath she regarded things as if she was doing me a favor by letting me help her.

To her, I would be better off just from knowing and associating with her. It was a gift she was giving me, just talking with me.

I got up from the cafeteria table and we stood off to the side so my friends (very much geeks trying to stare at her attributes) didn't interfere. I asked what she meant, and she showed me her notebook with some problems she'd worked out and had trouble with.

I asked, and she handed me the notebook, and I went back about 10 pages and looked at the work she'd done.

Her problem was, she'd obviously (to me) forgotten a whole bunch of trig. Even for calc 3, you need trig, and how she'd made it through calc 1 and 2 I had NO idea.

I told her right where her problem was on her most-recent three problems and compared them with the same error on problems several pages before, explained a little more, and watched the light bulb go off.

That part was kind of fun.

She looked at me and her eyes narrowed, and I could tell she was calculating how to get more help from me. She asked if she could 'go over some stuff' at lunch tomorrow.

I knew this was a ruse to get me to do her homework, or at least to get free tutoring based on the slight possibility I might think she was interested in me. I knew better.

I said I was busy, my friends and I were rolling up characters for a new D-and-D game (a flat-out lie) but that if she wanted to stop by my house either that night or the next night, I'd be willing to do some tutoring for a half-hour or an hour.

She thought about this. I think she was considering the word 'tutoring' as a more formal thing, instead of being a hang-out and work-together idea. It would be more official. She replied, her voice being more animated than her eyes, a kind of manipulation in itself. "That sounds sooo good! I don't know how to repay you!"

I could easily see what was happening. In her mind, she thought she could imply that there'd be kisses or a date at some nondescript place (where no fashion-friends would see her), as a reward. Then, she could either deliver or not on the promise/implication, and skate away having used me.

My radar was up. I needed nothing from her... except, maybe money.

I laughed and said, "Understandable. But, no, this will be actual tutoring, I've done it before - a long time ago - but, yeah, not free." Obviously I didn't need her mock-charity of gifting me with her luminous presence.

Rethinking, she proposed, "Oh... Then, maybe, I can bake you cookies, or bring over dinner or something, and we can work over that?"

I laughed again and said, obviously thinking and considering what I said, "Not quite... My sisters have gotten tutoring through the official college service, matching tutors with students. They usually charge $50 an hour. I'm at least as good as that, but, say, $40/hour would work. Tell you what. Come over, tonight, say, 7 pm, I'll give you 15 minutes free, if you feel it's worth it, you pay at that 40 rate, or just go home. Up to you."

Her notebook was right there, so I used her pencil to put my name and phone number down, then my address and "7 pm-ish", writing neatly because I was aware she was definitely more into style than substance.

She said that she'll think about it, and I went back to sit down.

My friends, watching this interaction but not being able to hear it, asked me immediately what was up, and I just said she wanted tutoring in calc, for free, and, "I'm worth more than free so she'll probably blow me off, and besides, I'm not cool enough to hang with, she might get the soles of her shoes dirty."

This generated a load of blow-me-for-tutoring jokes which I laughed at, at first. We had a pair of girls that hung with us (8 guys, 2 girls) and I was more aware than most (from having had exactly one more girlfriend than any of them) that that talk was mean.

I called them on the mean-attitude and told them that's low class even if they don't like Madison, it's not right, 'and Jason, you're a lawful good cleric anyway', which generated some laughter because Jason was NOT lawful good in real life.

Why did I do that? Mostly my sisters piled on and complained whenever I'd joke about a girl not being 'discriminating', making sure I didn't get away with saying that kind of stuff, so I was trained, I guess.

My friends were good guys, and I knew I earned 'points' with the girls in our group when I called out the crap-talk. But, I figured I had to be fair to the guys, too - two of the guys were mildly autistic and didn't have social filters.

== Chapter: First Tutoring Session ==

That night, I showered after I got home (I hadn't showered at school after running), brushed my teeth, and straightened up a little around my room and in the larger downstairs-kitchen/tv room area since it was easy for the others to come down to watch TV and leave stuff, it wasn't their personal space like it was mine.

Right about 7, I 'happened' to be upstairs when the doorbell rang.

Of course, it was Madison, wearing a heavy coat in the -20C weather. I let her in and she hung up her coat, revealing she was in heavy and frumpy 'U Manitoba Winnipeg' sweats.

We didn't need to say much, and just went downstairs to work at the downstairs kitchen table outside my bedroom. It was a good workspace - sometimes we had our D&D tournaments there.

Before we started, I got a piece of paper and wrote down the time as we started, and she got right to work, asking for a re-explanation of something that showed she was majorly confused, the question didn't make sense.

I didn't feed her answers. I asked her questions and got her thinking, and she figured it out, with me aiming the conversation.

Right about 16 minutes, I got up and got some lemonade mix out and made a pitcher. I asked, "So. Are you getting something good out of this?"

She was obviously torn. She didn't want to say yes, but she had learned stuff, and she didn't want to lie.

I regarded this as a good sign, that she was being ethical about the question. But, in the end, I knew, she'd revert to form, per my sister's assessment, so I needed to be prepared - prepayment.

She replied for a minute or so, summarizing what I'd done for her, and how it _had_ actually helped, and was something she hadn't gotten when just studying with her other friends. This only served to be her convincing herself to say yes, and she did.

I said, "I think so, too. So. I'll need prepayment, in cash or e-transfer, to keep going, since my sister said you borrowed a tennis racket from her once, never gave it back, insisted you had, and didn't even seem concerned you'd done something wrong. So, do I believe my sister? Yes. And, that puts this in a confusing spot. So, prepayment."

"...Prepayment?"

"Yep. So, if you want a half-hour from starting now, that's $20 bucks, then we'll start."

She was aghast that someone wouldn't believe her, or might doubt that she was totally honest. I think her idea was, she was pretty and could just get away with stuff. That led her to get defensive. "No one, has ever, ever, said I was dishonest, and ..."

I was prepared with a spiel. I said, "Listen, I'm happy to tutor you. I think you can definitely learn the material, and get A's on the midterms and final. Certainly B's even if you do part of what we work on. That way, you can go into diff-eq or linear with your head held high, you'll be totally confident you can handle those things with a good grade in calc 3."

"But... pre-paying?" she was caught on this.

I had another story ready. I'd done some thinking since she'd stopped by at lunch.

I was pretty sure I knew how to handle her.

I sat down opposite her instead of side-by-side, set down the lemonade pitcher, my glass, and an empty one for her, too. I just sipped and waited, figuring she'd come up with something, but really the onus was on me, so I finally asked, "Do you know Danielle Eagerton?"

"Yeah?"

"She got Pete Earnhart to 'help' with her freshman English 101 papers on the promise she'd go out with him at the end of the semester, on two dates. Those dates were postponed, and then she left for the summer, and then 'had a boyfriend' so he missed out on payment."

I let that sink in.

"We talked about it, Pete and I, we were on track together. He was pretty sure he was getting scammed, but he wanted to see if she'd follow through. It was curiosity, for him, his eyes were open. It turned out exactly as we predicted - and we did predict each step - she never intended to pay up, even with time-spent. We laughed about it, to a point. He didn't want kisses or crap like that, he just wanted social time. She was 'above' him, blew him off, and then badmouthed him to Jenny and Sierra, we know how that rumor started. He was far, far worse off than when he started, it was vindictive and nasty, what she did."

She started to object, but I interrupted.

"No, now, hold on, I know, you aren't Danielle. She's a psychopath, you ask me. But, you put up with her. You said nothing. You run in the same crowd. I see you talking at lunch and in the hallways, in the quad, at the athletic center - your body language there says it all. It's all 'surface' and disdain. So, yeah, it's honestly kind of off-putting. If you were me, and one of your friends had been cheated by a friend of mine, well, what would you do?"

This gave her pause, and she got it. I could tell that sank in, the truth of it. "Ooookay," she nodded, pursed lips, knowing obviously this would really be a transaction. "Prepayment. I don't have cash though."

"I'll take e-transfer."

She thought about it, but then admitted, "I don't have that, either. I had to get lipstick yesterday, and... yeah."

"Will your parents cover it?"

"I'd rather not..."

I thought, then got out a piece of paper, wrote on it, and handed it over. It said, "Mr. Kowalski: Please pay Kevin Kopaire $40 for one hour of calculus tutoring on this date _____, signed, Madison Kowalski."

"This way, if you don't pay, I can show up at your door and present this to your dad, and get payment from him. It's a legal promissory note, we covered this in my for-fun Business Law class." It'd been a simple class and pretty fun, too, can recommend.

She looked at it and squinted. She wasn't sure.

"So, if you date and sign it, then I'll take that, plus one other item of collateral, and we can start."

She had just finished signing and dating the bottom when I said collateral, and she stopped to look at me with a sideways face. "Uh...?"

"I need to get something out of this right away, so I know I'm not going to get screwed by this transaction. You can disavow this paper to your dad, and I'm out. So, I have to think, hey, what's worth $40 to me? That kind of thing." I looked, and calmly, with an open, honest face, I said, "What do you think I can look at, that's worth $40 to me, for an hour's effort?"

She made a mean face at me and closed up her notebook. You're not getting that."

I took a sip of my lemonade. "Okay. What's your counteroffer?"

This made her burst out laughing. "You _are_ negotiating, aren't you!"

"Yep. I know that, twice a week for 10 or 12 weeks, 20 hours total, is worth $5k of not having to re-take calc-3. And, I have a lot of other fun things I could be doing. I love playing chess, my piano practice, and I'm taking a break from an online tournament, so... I could be there. This, it's fun, too. I like helping people, as long as I'm paid."

She considered and said, "Shirt off, bra stays on."

I said, "Completely naked." Obviously, this was a negotiation. I added, "Socks are fine."

She laughed, and thought for a moment, then countered, "Bra and underwear."

I could tell she didn't worry about the downstairs aspect because we were at a table.

"No top, no bra, pants on or off, your choice. Bare boobs."

"Not going to happen."

I nodded, and considered, "Okay. So... how about, I'm naked. You get to make fun of me, you see what you want. We do NOT touch each other, or get close. You're topless, I'm naked, we're both vulnerable. No pictures. I just get to remember your body. That's worth $40 of collateral to me."

"Wait... I'd still have to pay you?"

"Yeah, this was collateral, not payment, unless you're negotiating that part..."

We discussed it, calmly, academically, with me doing a relaxed-slouch in my chair to reinforce the fact that I was coming in from a position of strength.

Eventually, we settled on the idea that tutoring was prepaid $40 cash, or she could just be topless the whole time if I was completely naked. I guaranteed that rate for two weeks, and we could stop it at any time.