In my physics class I was not learning anything, it was an intro
class for juniors and seniors and we were learning stuff that my
science teacher had covered in seventh grade. I was bored, bored,
bored. The teacher was one of those ladies who assumes because she
has terrible personal hygiene and has no friends that she must be
smarter than anyone else. She was not smart but really officious and
condescending. One time I tried to engage her in a conversation
about t he fallibility of scientific knowledge and she told me we know
for a fact that science is right now even though it had been wrong in
the past. I pointed out that there was no way for a local observer to
infer universal truths and she said we definitely could. I couldn't
understand why she was so ignorant of her own field and may have told
her that. We were not friends. She is not the point of this story
however it was a little girl who play Woodstock in the school's
production of a play about Charlie Brown. She was absolutely and
almost cruelly cast to type in that she was petite, skinny and
birdlike. She seemed like an okay gal but she sat close to me and a
friend of mine who were bored so we would give her grief. I would ask
what it was like to play a woodchuck in the play. She would correct
me in an exasperated tone and tell me it was Woodstock. She would ask
if I had ever even seen a Charlie Brown cartoon or comic. I lied and
said no. I would ask her how much wood she was required to chuck for
the role and she would roll her eyes. I think she liked the
attention. At some point our extreme boredom and young missus
woodchuck came together in a joke that caught on more widely. While
I was sitting back in my chair the zipper on my pants was curling up
into a funny bulge which I started pulling into a more dramatic
shape. Out of the blue I asked, “Hey Woodchuck, do you think this
hurts?” and then punched my fists together on the fabric bulge over
my crotch. She laughed and said I was a retard and then told me to
stop. I reset the bulge and then made a big deal of winding up to
give it a hard smash. She giggled and told me to stop. At that point
my friend started doing it on his pants and then the third boy at the
table of four joined in and soon we were all laughing and getting
scolded. I demonstrated the joke to someone out in the hall at lunch
and told the back story about asking Woodchuck if she thought it
hurt. In the communication it was confused into calling pulling up a
bulge in your pants and punching it between your fist a woodchuck. I
don't know how long it went on for but it was still around when my
wife came through the school four years later because she told me
that punching a bulge in your zipper was called a woodchuck. My
legacy of pseudo crotch punching.
