Those Brilliant Case Students

     Page Seventy-Six.
     One of my favorite pans is an eight inch cast iron skillet. I use it a lot, for your typical variety of things. Wanna know where I got it? The garbage. It was in the dumpster behind my building about six or seven years ago.
     It was clearly new but already had some rust stains. I thought, "why is there a new, but rusty, cast iron skillet in the garbage"?  I'll tell you my theory, though it may very likely be incorrect.
     My building is filled with Case Western Reserve University students as CWRU is just a couple blocks away. CWRU isn't easy to get into. It specializes in engineering, medicine, law, business and other difficult type things. It isn't your average liberal arts school. So, my neighbors tend to be brainy. They're also a bunch of total idiots.
     This is to say that most people age 17-22 tend to teeter on that edge anyhow. They think they know everything and there's absolutely no reasoning with them.(If you've ever known anybody aged 17-22 you'll know just exactly what I'm talking about.) So, that age bracket knows everything in the first place, then you give some of them extra brain power. They're completely unreasonable. Welcome to my neighborhood.
     I've lived in this neighborhood since 1993, when I moved out of the Shapiro's home (the family where I was the live-in nanny for eight years.) I've had four different apartments in that time: all four within a two block range. I've always been surrounded by these students as it's a built in hazard around here. I'm really quite used to it and in fact I've become friendly with many of them over the years. But, after all this time, I'm still occasionally surprised by the behavior of some of these "geniuses".
     Getting back to my favorite frying pan, I'll bet you anything that it was a gift to some little boy Case student, from Grandma, on the occasion of his first apartment. Problem was: he didn't know how to take care of it. He didn't know that you can't let cast iron air dry. So he used it one day, (I'm theorizing) then washed it with nice, hot, soapy water, then put it in the dish rack to dry. It goes rusty overnight, he freaks out and viola! it ends up in the dumpster and subsequently, my greedy little hands. It's a good pan, too. Nowadays, it's nice and jet black and nothing would dare stick to it as I've seasoned it to within an inch of it's life.
     There you go. It's only my theory, but I'll bet anything that I'm close to the truth. You wanna know some of the other tricks these brainiacs have pulled over the years? I had a downstairs neighbor not too long ago who used to practice his electric guitar at 4.30AM. The first time I went down to admonish him he was shocked that I thought there was anything inappropriate about this. Then there was the time that one neighbor thought that if she put something outside her door, it would magically disappear. She thought that little, magic fairies would take her garbage to the dumpsters. Then there was the brilliant student who let her kitchen water run all day long so her cat would always have fresh water. (This little shenanigan actually forced the management company to change the water policy for ALL the tenants in ALL their properties. No more water included in the rent.) 
     I choose to believe that these stunts aren't just symptoms of the brilliant type. I think that they're symptoms of many young, contemporary Americans who haven't been trained properly in the fine art of "Living On Your Own For The Very First Time". If you know any parents of graduating high school seniors who will be sending their spawn off to college in the autumn, please encourage them to spend the summer training them to be good tenants and neighbors. (Please forgive my soapbox.)