Boredom can gum up the best of intentions
by Beth Teitell

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

In my continuing quest to become a more interesting person, or at least to become a person better able to fake being more interesting, I decided to watch the World Series.

I imagined the new me (or should I say the ``new'' me?) at the office on Monday, holding court at the water purifier, throwing around axioms like ``good pitching stops good hitting,'' and talking about the double threat posed by the Big Unit (that's Randy Johnson) and Curt Schilling, and how if the series goes long enough, the two of them may pitch a total of five games.

Well, it's Monday morning, and here's my question: Do I get points for having the game on . . . in the background?

I tried to watch, I did. But it was like chemistry class all over again. Stray bits of apparently pertinent information occasionally would penetrate my haze - did the teacher say something about the Bohr atom? - but they didn't take.

Except during the commercials, my mind wandered: Why did the Diamondbacks choose such hideous uniforms? Should I go to Arizona on my next vacation? What's with all the bubble gum chewing?

Actually, that's what a friend not watching the game with me wanted to know. That, and whether Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina is single.

Putting aside the larger question of Mr. Mussina's marital status, and whether he's as sweet as he seems, we focused on the gum, and I posited that the players chew because they're tense, but then she pointed out that lots of people are tense - ``I'm tense,'' she said - ``Donald Rumsfeld must be tense. But we don't chew.''

My theory on the gum is that, yes, lots of people are tense, but players chew because they, alone among adults, can. In fact, the blatant chewing and bubble-blowing serves a larger societal purpose. It shows kids that the players are not chewing tobacco. (A habit that got started, by the way, in the early days of the game, when players wanted to keep their mouths moist in dusty ballparks.)

Besides ballplayers, there are only two groups of people who can get away with chewing gum, and, as with the athletes, in each case, the chewing serves a larger purpose than simply moistening the mouth. Who can chew?

1) The easiest cheerleader on the squad.

Social anthropologists have yet to study the subject, but if they did, the research would show that chewing gum is the female's way to signal her youth and hence her fertility. Who else but a young woman could chew without worrying about the Bazooka sticking to her bridge work?

2) Children.

More than anything in the child's universe, gum teaches the rules and hardships of life. By losing its flavor so quickly, gum demonstrates to even the youngest chewer, in a way his or her parents cannot, that nothing lasts forever.

Gum also instructs children as young as 5 or 6 about economics. Wasn't it Adam Smith who identified the Theorem of Consumption of Limited Resources? (Well, no, but it's a good name to throw around.)

Anyway, what better way to prove that people will waste when they can, and conserve when they must, than giving a kid a five-pack of gum and watching what happens. The first four sticks will be chewed in less than five minutes; the last piece made to last through fifth period.

Meanwhile, since the weekend, I've learned Mussina is married. I called my friend to tell her the disappointing news, but in the end we decided it was just as well. Who wants to end up with someone who might leave a wad of gum stuck under the lip of her butcher block counters?