DVDs Have Chapters-(Excerpt From the Book “Crazy @ss Brothers In Laws”)
Martin strolled into my house asking if he can use my DVD player. “Yeah, why?” I replied. “I have a book report due tomorrow so I need to watch this DVD,” he said casually. Puzzled I inquired what a DVD had to do with a book report. “I have to write the thesis statement for each chapter of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman”, Martin replied as he plopped down on the couch. Still wondering how the DVD factored into the assignment I probed further. “So exactly how are you going to identify the thesis statement of each chapter if you are watching the movie instead of reading the book?” Smugly, he replied, “Duh, Sis that’s why I got the DVD instead of VHS because DVDs have chapters.”
At this point, I was dumbstruck and speechless that anyone in college could be this moronic. When I inquired if he knew what a thesis statement was, I was surprised to discover he did. Yet somehow he was still convinced he could listen closely to the dialogue in the first few minutes of each DVD chapter and capture the thesis sentence.
I took a deep breath, looked at the clock and leaped into action to save dorkwad from himself. “Martin, first of all, you’re an idiot. Second, you can’t use a DVD to do this assignment.” Martin immediately tried to protest but I quickly cut him off. “You have to use a book for this so did they give you any other book options?”
Martin produced a wrinkled handout that had a list of 15 different book titles. The handout indicated jerkwad had been given the assignment three weeks earlier. I grabbed my keys and sped to Barnes and Noble to grab the shortest book on the list. It was written in the new “Chicano Style” which meant while significantly shorter in page count it had far more chapters than all other books. When I returned with the book, Martin was asleep on the couch. I booted up my computer and shook him awake. To my horror, the only thing slower than Martin’s reading was his typing. Each time he typed a letter he spent up to twenty seconds on the keyboard trying to find it. It was excruciating to watch for someone who can literally type with their eyes closed. I told him to move over and to simply dictate the thesis sentence to me while I typed. Unfortunately, a chimpanzee can read faster than Martin so soon I was reading and typing the thesis statement from each of the 27 chapters for him. When I finished at 4 am in the morning Martin was snoring on the couch.
I woke him up, handed him the finished paper and went to take a shower, seriously pissed that I now had to be at work at 8 am with zero sleep. Martin got an “A” and I learned NEVER to select a “Chicano Style” book when you need minimal chapters.