Yesterday, an unsuspecting engineering major wandered into ASU’s East Music Building and was immediately shot.

Wait!  Before you mathematicians drop your TI-89’s, rush from your Star Trek-themed dorm rooms, and begin waving picket signs in my face, please be assured that, like most juvenile stereotypes, my first sentence was grossly untrue.  (You never could take a joke unless the punch line was “rhombitruncated icosidodecahedron,” could you?  Kidding, kidding!)   What is true, however, is that Planet Birthday Cake—lovingly nicknamed “The Music Building”—exists as a world unto itself.  Consider yourself warned.

For the benefit of all left-brainers who still wish to venture into the mad, mad, mad, mad world of solfege exercises and bad viola jokes, I have compiled a short list of the natural laws that govern Planet Birthday Cake:

1. Music professors have a right to hum in the elevators, ride their bikes through the hallways, forget to attend their own lectures, and run into doors/small children--all in the name of “musical genius.”  Stare, if you like.  They won’t notice.
2. Some musicians engage in a strange practice called. . .uh. . .practicing.  Instrumentalists practice on the first floor; vocalists on the third; pianists on the fifth.  Thus it is.  Amen.  The first floor rooms are the newest, so performance majors, who are better than everyone else, claim these.  The third floor is vocalist territory. The echo-y rooms allow singers to bask in the beauty of their own pulsating vibratos.  Pianists live on the fifth floor with the Steinways.  (Singers:  Beware of trespassing lest you be pulverized by that little girl who looked so sweet and timid sitting beside you in theory!)
3. Musicians may heckle, threaten, and/or kill other musicians who dare knock on a practice room door or steal an open room without first waiting in line.
4. Musicians may leave sheet music on a practice room piano, indicating that the room is still “theirs” even while they are out eating lunch, attending a lecture, or vacationing in Hawaii.  Note: This can also be considered “stealing” which would give the annoyed colleagues of said musicians the rights listed in Law #3.
5. Music students attend must four “convocations” (student concerts) every semester, and each convocation must conclude with a marimba piece.  Don’t ask why.  It’s all part of some weird percussionist conspiracy.
6. Never venture into the music building’s basement floors unless you are a percussionist or music theater major who actually inhabits one of the dank, dark corners of the lower levels.   It’s decidedly eerie down there.
7. Students must only use the computers in the music library to 1) check their e-mail or 2) update their facebook profiles.   (Who posted all those crazy signs claiming that the computers should be used for “library-related research?”  Ha!)
8. The elevators in the East Building must always go “up” when you push “down” and vice versa.  The West Building elevators must lurch and groan from floor to floor at approximately .02 mph.  If any elevator ever deposits a harried freshman on the correct floor at the correct time, the universe will implode.
9. Music composition majors must never write silly articles lest they be mauled by angry mobs of math and music nerds shortly thereafter.  (Did I say “nerds”?  I meant “socially capable scholars who would never harm a fellow nerd.”  Oops!  There I go again.)

I think I’ll brave the hecklers and go fight for a practice room now.  Or maybe I’ll take a real leap into the unknown and visit one of the math buildings on campus.   Where can I find a copy of the rules that govern the world of mathematics?   What’s this?  “Linear Partial Differential Equations and Fourier Theory”?   Take it back!  I’d sooner venture into the percussionist underworld.