Geek NOT Nerd: November 2008

My brother in-law wrote this many years ago, I just found a copy of it and it still makes me laugh out loud, and I thought it was appropriate for the holidays! Enjoy!

Three Levels of Fullness
By Abraham Park

If you are a Berklander, inevitably you get extremely full, very often. The usual conversation after an over-eaten dinner is that eating too much is very bad for your health, and that you are starting on a diet next week so this week is a preparation week. Of course, within a couple of days you find yourself once again uncomfortable in your seat, moving about desperately in futile efforts to relieve pressure off of that one button that is holding back inordinate amounts of pressure.
After an extensive survey, I noticed that overeating is very common among brothers and sisters alike. I also noticed that there are three general stages of fullness, of which brothers achieve the second stage much more frequently than the sisters.
I was sitting around a table once, talking to some people, and each of them described his or her most horrible experience of gluttony.
Person 1: “I could feel that my pants were too tight. I was very uncomfortable in my seat, and no matter how I adjusted my seating position, I couldn’t get comfortable. That must be about LEVEL TWO in your scale.”
Are you kidding? I told her that what she experienced is below LEVEL ONE. I would categorize that as “CONTENT” or “HAVE ROOM FOR DESSERT” level. Then one brother told me about the symptoms he experienced when he was very full.
Person 2: “I hadn’t had Korean food for a long time, and that curry rice and kimchee looked really good. Afterwards, I felt like I was going to burst. Food looked disgusting, and I could feel food inside of my esophagus. There was no way I could eat any more. Occasionally, food would come back up, and I tried to burp but couldn’t. I was sweating profusely, and my pants were riding up my ____. I think I experienced LEVEL THREE. There is no way that a person could feel any fuller than I was.”
I told him to be quiet because the symptoms he described were very common among those experiencing the LEVEL ONE. Only the chosen few have reached LEVEL TWO, and symptoms are as follows, described by a very foolish brother, “I just couldn’t breathe anymore. I had to sit at a 45 degree angle on a sofa just to continue my existence. People asked me some questions, but I couldn’t answer them. The food must have expanded in my stomach, because I got more and more full as the time went by. I felt dizzy, and I couldn’t get up. Finally, I tried the bathroom, but it didn’t help at all. When I barely got up, I couldn’t see my feet. If I had fallen at that moment, I am positive that I would have thrown up.”
I don’t know whether I should be embarrassed or be proud about this, but so far, out of everyone that I’ve talked to, I am the only one who has reached LEVEL THREE. Let me describe to you what happened. I still have nightmares about that day.
It was during one of the summers in my college days when I visited my grandmother in Korea. As is with all other grandmothers, food was her life. Her greetings are not Hi’s or Hello’s but rather “Did you eat?” It doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, when I see her, she wants me to eat her food. Korean grandmothers are all alike. If you eat a lot of their food, you instantly become a “very good boy.” If not, they go on and on about how America has corrupted young Koreans and that it is a shame that they don’t eat Korean food. Anyway, I was one of these “very good boys.”
One day, I came home to find three other grandmothers talking with my grandmother. And when I entered the door, they screamed, “He’s here!” Soon I found out that they had come to watch me eat. My grandma had bragged to them about me, how much I ate, and how good a boy I was. Incredible.
Within half an hour, I found myself sitting in front of a very huge bowl (one of those shiny, metal, half-gallon type bowls) filled with rice and a whole table full of various dishes. I couldn’t let my grandma down so I ate the whole bowl of rice. I was extremely full and I was very proud of what I had accomplished, By then, all of her friends were exclaiming, “Wow! He eats a lot! He is such a good boy!”
It was then that my grandmother put a smirk on her face. “Calm down, that’s nothing.” And then she filled the whole bowl with rice again!! What is this? Does she think that I am an animal. There was silence in the room. I somehow managed to eat the bowl of rice, with everyone watching me in silence until there was just a little bit of rice left. There was no room left in my esophagus. All the symptoms of the LEVEL TWO were already showing and I was leaning to my right to continue my breathing. It was physically impossible for any more food to go inside. It was there that I decided to put water in the bowl to mix with rice, so that I could drink the last portion. In my past experiences, I always had room to drink even though I was full. I managed to gulp some down. Finally, I was confronted with the very last swallow.
I do not know what made me swallow that last gulp, but at that moment, I knew I had entered LEVEL THREE. My vision became blurry. My head was full of food. I saw a vision. I experienced the signature characteristic of LEVEL THREE, in that I actually, physically felt my stomach stretch, like when you squeeze a balloon. “Bwhoop.”
I do not want to explain what tribulation I went through to survive that afternoon. Anyway, if you think you also achieved LEVEL THREE, please tell me. Until then, I still am the one and only one. Well, maybe some have reached LEVEL FOUR which must be death. Then I guess they wouldn’t be able to tell me about it.