The hour badly spent

In Eisenhauer 016, two students had already come up with a plan.

"Let’s pull down the blinds. Dayton will think it’s darker than it really is, and cancel class," said Cherry. She and the Sexy Communist Spy went to work.

Professor Dayton walked in just as they finished up, and he did not give a fuck. "If you think you’re getting out of class because of a little power outage, you’ve got the wrong guy," he said. He rolled up the blinds, tugged his podium over to the window and started the afternoon’s lesson.

The power had gone out on campus 20 minutes prior. It affected buildings on the main campus; the Stuni but not the library, the classrooms and lecture halls but not the dorms, administrative buildings but not Lafene. It was a bright day, a sunny day; the mindset of “let’s just call it a day and head back home” had not set in, except among slackers.

"If there’s anything that K-State’s students are, it’s flexible and accommodating," said Pat Bosco, dean of student life. "They have great common sense about them, and they respond to these natural phenomena with ease." Sunlight streamed in through windows on two sides of his office.

"For me, I’m a little different. I can’t stand being without my phone," he said.

Due to the power failure, Bosco had to cancel a 1:30 lecture he was to deliver in the Little Theater on boscology — "the art of climbing through broken glass."

A lady in the finance office, having been in contact with K-State Facilities, said two squirrels got into a transformer at the Westar power station by St. Isadore’s Church, repeating an incident that had happened years ago. She didn’t want her name printed in the paper.

Another man in the office overheard her. "So we’ve got barbequed squirrel?"

"Fried squirrel," she corrected him.

At the power station by St. Isadore’s, nine guys in white hard hats stood around the transformers, fenced in by barbed wire. Insert your own Stormtroopers joke here. Two of them fiddled around with a tower of machinery that did not, in any way, resemble the Death Star II. They weren’t interested in talking to the press.

"If I were a new teacher, I’d be in trouble," said Robin Mosher, instructor in the English department editing her lesson plan in pen and ink that afternoon. Mosher has taught at K-State for 28 years.

"If the power isn’t on tomorrow, it won’t affect class at all because we have plenty of windows," she said. Technology would help her classes (sometimes she uses PowerPoint slides), but everything can also be done the old-fashioned way, she said.

Terri Engnoth, another English instructor, took her freshman expository writing class outside and handed out papers.

"It was exciting. It felt like a snow day," she said. "All of my students showed up. I couldn’t believe it."

The power came back on after several hours. Westar would not give out any information about the outtage. The Collegian would not print any information without a named source. Thanks a lot, Finance office. Everyone is hamstrung by red tape! Except the Kansas City Star, who, without naming any specific University official, scooped the K-State Collegian with this AP report late in the evening (link provided via Facebook by Princess Glitter Bunny):

MANHATTAN, Kan. | A couple of squirrels put Kansas State University in the dark for a few hours.

The Manhattan campus was without electricity for more than three hours Monday. The university says power was cut when two squirrels got into a Westar Energy transformer.

Electricity was restored around 4:30 p.m., allowing evening classes and activities to proceed.

You know what would feel nice in the dorms right now? Heat, that’s what.

Wednesday afternoon Erica Hateley presented the colloquium "’It’s Not Just Cricket’: Sexual Colonization in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Someone Else’s Wimbledon." I decided to check it out because the flyer had the word "sexual" near Erica Hateley’s name.

Although she assured us this would be a "post-feminist rant," I wondered whether this would be delivered in saucy layman’s terms, or if instead we would be playing the poststructuralist drinking game. So I sat around for a few minutes and tried to get into the groove of whatever dialect she’s going with this afternoon.

4:06 PM "ideology founded on patriarchy."

4:08 PM "patriarchal heterosexuality." Okay, it’s gonna be one of those.

4:08 PM "psychology of patriarchal capitalist culture"

4:14 PM If Karin Friggin Westman wasn’t sitting right behind me I could just IM this right to all the English majors I know and THEY could play the drinking game along with me. What’s up with that? And why is Michael Donnelly over here too? The back row is for slackers and badasses.

4:15 PM ….

4:15 PM Oh.

4:16 PM "I’m looking at her skirt, not her arse." Tee hee!

4:16 PM "heteronormative patriarchy.”

4:17 PM "It takes a lot longer to find a picture of Anna Kournikova playing tennis than it does to find her…resting."

4:19 PM "destabilize the binary gendered logic of patriarchy"

4:19 PM "scopophilic patriarchy." Okay I FORFEIT the poststructuralist drinking game. Erica wins, because the patriarchy is oppressing us faster than I can type. At this point I decided to just listen, and only use my computer to google the big words.

4:20 PM Oh dear, look at the time! Erica never notices things like that.

4:21 PM There is a "been there done that" popular discourse of feminism internalized by female tennis players. Did I type that accurately?

4:23 PM "the sexualization of tennis-playing woman"

4:24 PM "containing women w/in acceptable patriarchal limits"

4:30 PM "body spectacle:" "pornography’s portrayal of orgasm." There’s something to google.

After she had thoroughly established that tennis is a tool of colonial and sexual repression, we started watching movies.

4:40 PM Heh, Erica said "Scarlett Yohansson."

I wasn’t sure how much I liked Match Point when I actually saw it, but Erica’s analysis pointed out that the film is aware of the colonial representations embedded in its characters, and partly because of that, the mood of the film prevents us from fully sympathizing with Chris Wilton. Uhh, I think that’s what she said. There were more big words too.

4:49 PM In Wimbledon: Why did we fast fwd through the part where Kirsten Dunst is nude? Wouldn’t it be possible to undermine my own internalized scopophilic patriarchal tendencies and make Kirsten Dunst’s ass a site of agency by normalizing her apodysophilia, or would this just reinforce them? Later on, after bumming one of Erica’s Marlboro’s, I felt a little guilty about joining the "I’ll eat out Luce Irigaray" Facebook group. Then I ate out Luce Irigaray.

4:54 PM "retroactive destabilization" what?

5:03 PM Time for questions. Why are these feminized, fetishized representations of America both blonde?

[Erica’s colloquium @Wordle.net]

Wednesday our somewhat-beloved Saucy Aussie will present "It’s Not Just Cricket: Sexual Colonization in the movies Wimbledon and Match Point deconstructed in a silly accent." Dr. Aussie promises to deliver a "post-feminist rant," and is terrified that the audience will jump down her throat afterwards, colonizing her in a decidedly unsexual way. As a fan of both sexual colonization and post-feminist rants, I think all of you should come by and listen! ECS 017 (I think) at 4 pm! Take the piss out of her by shouting "struth" when you can’t understand what she’s saying! Then throw an egg at her! Afterwards we can all go get drunk on SoCo or something.

The Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple arrived at Friday’s Visiting Writer lecture at four on the dot, right on time. The Dodd had already begun her introduction of memoirist Meredith Hall.

Hall explained, before reading, that she had lost a tooth on the plane on the way to Kansas. "It seems to me the only thing people can notice about me. I wanted to tell you that writers from Maine don’t always have teeth missing." Charming! The Olds have the best comic timing!

Hall was ostracized from her small New Hampshire town at age 16, when she got pregnant. Even her parents wouldn’t have her any more.

"It’s a powerful story about being a girl in a world where people don’t want you," said Susan Rodgers. Susan was the head of the creative writing program last year; she abruptly left K-State in August, after she and her husband got jobs at Oregon State Uni.

Hall read chapters from Without A Map, about the months after she was kicked out of her father’s house. She wandered around Europe, broke, stealing and selling shit to get by, relying on the kindness of strangers for the occasional place to crash. She met other families, other drifters, all sorts of people who didn’t speak English.

There was a real sense of disconnection between her and the people and places around her. This was partly due to the difficulty of communicating with people whose language she didn’t speak; much of the process consisted of pidgin sign language and heavy, rigorous observation, in addition to picking and choosing which truths she wants to reluctantly reveal depending on the person listening; but it was mostly because she was in exile. She was hugely depressed. She never missed a chance to remind us of that! It was like an eternally dissatisfied wine-taster, sampling and spitting out everything, all snap judgements and no intimacy. She was romanticizing her isolation. Five minutes into it, the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Blogger was getting bored. He started passing notes to the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Hipster.

Blogger: I hate memoirs. I will never, ever read one.

Hipster: Aww…I like them! I like this. You don’t at all do you?

Blogger: Is it that obvious?

Blogger: It’s starting to remind me of Huck Finn

Hipster: How?

Blogger:

1. i can’t quite figure out where she’s going with this.

2. this is almost exclusively her inner life - little interaction with the outside world except to observe it and move on. not quite like Huck, but it’s getting monotonous.

3. the present tense has NEVER EVER SOUNDED MORE ANNOYING to me

4. sorry; only 3 things

Hipster: haha i do agree that it is getting monotonous

Blogger: it’s a travel blog. It feels like IT MIGHT NEVER END

Hipster: yeah I know, and damn you for mentioning the present tense, because now that is bothering me

Ha ha, he’s sorry he ruined it for her, but he really wonders whether she expressed her guilt to him.

The book was originally a collection of autobiographical essays that had been printed individually in various trade publications. Publishers know how to market "memoirs" but they don’t know how to market "a collection of autobiographical essays." Hall didn’t know how to convert her "autobiographical essays" into memoirs, so she called around and spoke to some other authors for help. In the end, she took the title of each of her essays and added "chapter X" to each of them. Clever!

So the reading was kinda dull. Afterwards, at the House of Dodd, Hall was the belle of the ball, still charmingly toothless, warmly engaging everyone including the Underminer but especially a Pretentious Literary Douchebag chatting her up. The Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple split up and floated around. They shared a Disgustingly Self-Absorbed glass of white wine, passing it off when their paths crossed. All in all, this soiree was much more fun than expected, except for one glaring omission.

Normally, if Erica Hateley is at an event, all the poorly-dressed slackers have a leader to inspire them. But her absence left the slackers feeling empty, adrift, and pathetic. When the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple stepped out for a smoke with its Underminer, Emily Kennedy stepped up to the plate to lead us.

It turns out that Emily is just as awesome as Erica, except no quirky accent. Except! She also does a pretty good Saucy Aussie impression. "I’m not down with the vag," Erica once told Emily, "but if I were," blah blah blah (we were still processing the confirmation of Erica not being down with the vag so we didn’t hear anything after that, but we know we want to hear Emily do Erica’s accent some more). It was great! Now the slackers have a new punk-rock-girl crush, and Erica has her very own underminer!

After that the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple left to go see the Laramie Project. The Underminer left too, not only so she could go see the Laramie Project but also because she needed to broadcast some more underminerey sweeping generalizations.

This scene was unseemingly heartwarming, which NEVER happens. Elizabeth Dodd, Karin Westman, and Meredith Hall are all talking as though they are actually BFFs. Also, Tanya’s husband lurked around and Kim Baltrip sat back in the foyer. Dr. Westman has this way of craning her neck and tilting her head when she’s listening to someone, and she did just that with Hall. It was cute! The Hour Badly Spent was deeply moved.

So there was this Visiting Writer thingie on Friday, and lo, it appeared in the local rag with a few copyediting inaccuracies, but there it is.

What struck me at Sugi Ganeshananthan’s reading was that, although the story was not particularly suspenseful, everyone in the audience was on the edge of their seats, quiet as housecats. I sat at the back of the room so I could pass notes to the well-dressed and cutely accessorized Hipster Elf, and the only thing that came to mind is ’someone should belch.’

I wrote that down and showed her — I had to be very careful because with no one else fidgeting in their seats and checking the clock I couldn’t just conceal my own fidgeting in the general shuffle. After that I decided to just sit back and listen.

Sugi’s prose was clear and brief, expressing feeling beautifully without making us wade through overbearing complexity. After the reading, someone asked her about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

"It’s nice to be in a place where you can say ‘I’m a writer’ and not have people ask you ‘what have you written that I might have read?’"

I mouse-ishly tried to get the commentariat’s reaction.

"You can interview me," said Tanya Gonzalez, bouncing down the hall on her way out. "It was fabulous!"

I guess that says it all.

Since I was trying to commit as many journalistic ethical violations as possible, I took the Hipster Elf with me to the Cathouse to interview sources. The English department and the Visiting Writer were hanging out, in a circle, by the window.

I sat around, trying to overhear and sift through ambient conversation; Saucy Aussie, with her typical aussome, made a boo-boo and dug around in her bag for a bandage (she apparently carries around a first-aid kit everywhere? And weeps at the sight of her own blood); Sean discussed something lofty and English-ey with the Visiting Writer; Jen was being an exceptionally charming and cogent drunk.

"The way that she [Sugi] played with the theme of hurt reminded me of Midnight’s Children," she said. That was the second time in as many days an English major recommended that book to me. Everything is foreshadowing.

I also spoke to the Visiting Writer herself, which felt weird strange because she’s a real journalist and I’m, well, me. And besides the tender, intimate prose, "Love Marriage" — which I have not read — apparently has something important to say about the play of good and evil in a post-9/11 world.

"There is an idea of who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad,’ but the truth is not always obvious," Sugi said. "There are so many different ways to be wrong and so many different ways to be right. The people who probably think of themselves as good, with a slight turn of their lives — maybe five degrees west, could probably be bad." And with that, the conflict between human and Cylon takes another angle. Nerd.

Anyway. Read "Love Marriage." Go ahead and buy it and then I’ll borrow it from you.

[K-State Collegian]

Seriously. I saw her outside Stuni and I’m like "DOCTOR Hateley!" All excited, you know. And she goes "That’s one of the nicer things you’ve said about me."  Touché!

So. Just to set the record straight; she is not the pompous funny-sounding cavewoman I have made her out to be. I personally like this woman. Being around her is pure joy; she is, in fact, good-humored, quick-witted, lively, humble, gracious, she’s got oodles of education and class, and, frankly, she’s kinda cute. But the best thing she’s got going for her is that since she’s spent so much time in Kansas you don’t even have to call her Australian any more! Yay! Glad I could be of service. I’ll be here til around ten if you need anything else cleared up.

I knew, after our talk, during Friday’s annoyingly poetic thunderstorm, that eventually you would get bored or curious and click on that link (I don’t mind that anyone finds it; it’s right out there in the open on my Facebook profile). Then you would read back and see "how I really felt," how childish and petty I really was, how prostrating and selfish I really was, how arrogant and judgemental I really was, how lonely and bitter and embarrassed I really was, but mostly how drunk I really was.

So I knew you would find The Hour Badly Spent and that you would tear through all those posts, and I thought of how easy it would be to just make them private, but then why did I put them there in the first place? Also: I am extremely lazy, so much so that I can’t even be bothered with extra mouse clicks. Also: it’s not really a big deal anyway. Nobody reads this shit except for a few people to whom I’ve given obnoxious nicknames [ed. note: I’m tired of trying to amuse my readers — all 3 of them — with with creative monikers. We’ll be on a first name basis. Except for Professor Potts and Doctor Dodd, because that sounds like they teach at Hogwarts. And Doctor Hately. She went on and on about how hard she studied for that title, la dee da, and if the rest of us don’t damn well recognize or whatever, she is not afraid to shank us. Then she downed a shot of Vegemite with horseradish and yelled "Huzzah, beehotch!" at Princess Glitter Bunny, which was utterly terrifying but also kind of hot*].

This stupid blog was not meant to be some sort of cudgel. So, about all those verbal swipes; umm, my bad. Skimming back through them, I’m actually terribly embarrassed. They weren’t really about you; they were about me: a tabloidey chronicle of what the f, exactly, I am doing here, because otherwise I’ll forget. And if now, I am sometimes disturbingly quiet, it is not because of you or any you-and-me stuff. I had a pretty bad summer, during which I made a terrible mistake and now I’m a thousand miles away and cannot fix it. I don’t mean to play the mystery man but I also really don’t want to talk about it. However, it’s on my mind a lot, and at times it will make me kind of withdrawn and surly until I can think of a witty declaration of some sort, which will usually come in the form of a Russian reversal ("In Russia, declaration think of YOU!"), because those are cheap and easy. Everybody knows how I feel about cheap and easy.

Anyway. So. Not to be all "the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream" over this but it really is all kind of old. A month in blog time is like two years of reality. I’ve aged TEN YEARS since, you know, back then. Which makes me forty-fucking-six. And not to diminish what happened, either, because we did, in fact, have a good time.

It was a good time because you took me to Lawrence in the winter, which was beautiful and white everywhere, and to that party full of Lawrence hipsters — who are much better than Manhattan hipsters because in Lawrence their dresses are smaller. It was a good time because of that morning we laughed together for five straight hours, even though I know you are not that funny and neither am I. It was a good time because we drank way too much and spent nights together and all that other stuff, and perhaps there was just not enough "other stuff" but whatever; you get the point.

Let this be the last of these pretentious livejournal-ish rants of mine. And I’ll try to cool it on the Sonnet 30 references. The Collegian is out! Let’s go make fun of it. And maybe while I’m at it I’ll write more coherently.

*This never actually happened. But it definitely should have because isn’t it awesome? Plus you can totally picture it.

As we float towards autumn I can’t help but be reminded of that feeling of being newly in love. The whole world is so beautiful, everything a delight. Winter snow feels like warm summer nights; every outing precious and magical. Even every second you spend alone is surging and overflowing with anticipation, for that next time you meet.

It’s like that night she was in your car, that old 95 Mitsubishi, driving up through the hills with the windows down and the radio way up, and you pretended to sing along to punk rock songs you didn’t know just to impress her. And maybe it worked, because she didn’t mind one bit when you put your hand on her thigh; you even thought you could see her blushing and trying to hide it. Or maybe you were still too shy to touch her but she gave you that look, when you dropped her off, that smile both happy and not really innocent, and you told yourself next time you shouldn’t be so shy.
 
No, I’m not dating anyone. I’m just back in Manhattan, that’s all.

Sorry for being out of touch! My intertubez connection has been kind of wobbly, which has seriously impeded my otherwise steady accumulation of BBW porn (don’t judge me). Also, I’ve been trying to avoid my stalkerey ex. Yeah, I’ve got one of those. And not in the sense of "an enthusiastic follower who just likes me a lot," which is what people in Kansas think a stalker is; no, it’s more like "someone who’s intrusive and crazy and a little bit destructive," which trust me, is soooo much more exciting than the Kansas kind.

Good times, good times. So I’ve been spending my time temping in swank Santa Monica offices as well as furiously groping around for more school money. What’s going on with you guys? Grey Lady? Sexy Communist Spy? Princess Glitter Bunny? Atomic Fireball Candy? Saucy Aussie? Poetess? Sitemeter tells me you all still check in here once in a while (thanks!).

In addition to the money thing and the temping, my friend MiniMii celebrated my return to Los Angeles by taking me to the Wild Goose and springing for my first lap dance ever (don’t click there). And OF COURSE I was gonna write an awesomely cogent blog post about it, transitioning from the viewing of nipples to some revelatory insight on the true nature of man-woman relations, but I got drunk and couldn’t really come up with anything to say about it, except "tits!" which really sums up everything in the world with wit and precision.

Technorati Profile (Don’t click there).

The Poetess recently gave voice to the existential horror of attending an informal gathering of English professors: "I’m not smart enough."

Well, yes you are, and that’s really no big deal. English professors are just like the rest of us. Nobody comes to a party to be outsmarted. They just want you to listen to them, get their jokes, seek explanations for what you don’t understand, and squeeze their asses when no one else is looking (Professor Dodd will use colourful pants to indicate her receptivity. But do not try this with the Saucy Aussie. I saw her first!).

Your best strategy is to figure out what everybody thinks of everybody else, which you can use for leverage when you ascend to the top of a multinational crime syndicate. This exercise is all about self-effacement. You are not here to show off your resplendent panoply of grace and charm. And if you have enough grace and charm to impress the English professors then I hate you already.

So don’t name-drop, like I did with Princess Glitter Bunny ("Oh of course I know what you’re talking about. Unlike the other undergrads, I’ve read Derrida! Har har har!") That’s just wankerish. Rather, just ask questions. Find an old man, with a bow tie and bushy eyebrows, who is already drunk. He is the best place to start. He is a font of experience, good humor, and as a bonus, he is actually kind of awesome. Ask about what he’s written, what he likes to read — Milton, apparently — where he’s travelled, etc. Let him do the work. He’s just itching to unload some jovial backstabbey nugget about one of his peers. Just wait. I promise it will be funny. You should also probably try to make yourself as drunk as he is.

Do not sit next to Rhymes With Flan. You did not dress well enough for that, and this fact will gnaw at you every second you are there. She is tall, slender, blonde, stylish, and her diction is flawless. If she were your age, she’d be a wholesome sorority frenemy. You, by contrast, mumble and stutter (which is partly why you’re listening and not talking); your sartorial contribution is a wrinkled green docent shirt your ex gave you seven years ago. You wore it today because you really don’t have a windbreaker, but next to Rhymes With Flan, you look like you’re homeless.

Eventually, something underminerey like this will happen:

The Hour Badly Spent:  Do you mind if I smoke?
Rhymes With Flan:       Oh. Please, don’t. Ew [shudders].
The Hour Badly Spent:  Oh, okay.
Rhymes With Flan:       Yech.

You’ll see the Perverted Shakespeare Professor. In class, he’s so upbeat, almost cheerleaderey; this evening, long after class, he might seem somehow jaded and weary. We suspect the production of ‘Tis Pitty Shee’s A Whore must have been stressful, what with all the preparations being made during those weeks after spring break where everybody goes through a ceaseless gauntlet of exams and term papers and projects. That is why the cast only met for their first full rehearsal a day before curtain time.

I don’t know shit about Jacobean drama. Or any type of drama, for that matter. But I’ll talk about it anyway. The performance — Saturday night, wish you were there! — was fun and celebratory, and slightly campy; just like the Professor conducts his classes, except with slightly more incest. My favorite actor was the Roman soldier: his uniform was a polo shirt with some pinned-on medals.

You might hear about studentfucking. Kind of interesting, but it’s really to be expected, and it’s only juicy if you actually know either of the parties involved, which you don’t, because you don’t know anybody, which is why you’re drinking with English professors on Thursday night and the following Friday afternoon. So put the hearsay out of your mind, because (A) you don’t want to get anyone fired, and (B) you’re not an earnest do-goodey cockblocker. Also: don’t shout out "studentfucker!" in the middle of a lecture (Sorry about that! It was noisy! How was I supposed to know the dean would hear me?).

You might also hear of dumb stuff the students have said — about ethnic minorities and such. It won’t be so bad. All the real wingnuts either go into engineering or polisci. Don’t worry about who, exactly, said what; there’s a good chance you’ll find out soon enough who this person is, based on your ability to stereotype better than she can (a gender neutral pronoun would be really nice right about now!). She will get a column in the Collegian. She will bring guns to class. She will run for student government. She will meet a soldier who will love her for her "values," and they will marry young and have lots of little douchebags, who will attend K-State.

You, however, will not find love. You will find rum, which is just a different kind of love.

Speaking of which, in time, the Most Annoying English-Major Couple will make an appearance. They really are cute together. They will sit next to each other, of course; bemusedly chatting about their plans for the future. They will lightly stroke each others’ arms, but not excessively; they will smile at each others’ literary puns, but not excessively; and one of them will drink. Excessively. And that is the real secret to shmoozing with people who have more intelligence, class, and wit than you.

Thursday night the Perverted Shakespeare Professor jokingly claimed to "personify radical chic." Suspecting a ring of truth in this, The Hour Badly Spent immediately launched an investigation, and in the process, found out why I never scored a date with any of the hotties in that class: everyone wants to have sex with him.

This irrepressible sexual attraction cuts across all boundaries. It makes no difference whether the student is male, female, gay, straight, promiscuous, or celibate. Yeah, even the virgins.

Later on, the Saucy Aussie and Princess Glitter Bunny turned the tabloidy tables on me.  The Hour Badly Spent is not used to being asked direct personal questions. So, when grilled about who, exactly, I supposedly wanted to snog that night up on the hill, I suddenly got all shy and evasive. I didn’t really want to keep anyone in suspense. It was Saucy Aussie. Umm, duh.

Forgive me: I was afraid saying it would bring the drunken revelry to an awkward halt, and then I’d have no one to sit next to duing Tis Pity She’s a Whore. PRIORITIES!! Additionally, where my friend — Atomic Fireball Candy — is going for her doctorate, there are explicit rules against such fraternization. Hey! Don’t ruin this for me with news like that, I begged her, but it was too late. Also, someone recently told me that I "come on too strong." That’s putting it mildly. Between trying to crank out witty sex-related banter and playing like I am not in fact that interested, I probably come off looking half-insane.

Didn’t mean to get all livejournaley there. Anyway, so, I also tried to find out which professor’s raging sex drive has done the most damage to the integrity of the English department. Apropos of nothing, we discovered that East Midlands men have a reputation for being bad in bed. If this is so, how is it that they apparently manage to bone enough lit students to even acquire a reputation? Clearly I’ve been going about this all wrong. My old shtick was to find someone I really like, impress her with my ribald wit, and later on go down on her gently and lovingly for long periods of time. From now on, I will just work on timing my ejaculations to coincide with the ends of Ballykissangel commercial breaks.

In my crackpot bid to merge my soul with the id of the English department, I started documenting the heroic exploits of the department’s all-stars in a faux tabloidish style on this blog. To my surprise, my wildly inaccurate portrayals of their wit, as well as the gratuitous vagina jokes, have been found and re-googled by some of their subjects (Here’s the drum: whenever you visit The Hour Badly Spent, my site metrics page shows me what search terms you used to find me).

The Saucy Aussie insists - in a funny accent, of course - that I’m upping her street cred, because in truth she is extremely prim and proper, not "tart as a nipple-shaped jawbreaker," as I may have suggested in various bathroom-stall etchings throughout town. Nevertheless, I can’t help but imagine that these hyper-literate googlers get together and peek at the screen over each others’ shoulders and do to my blog exactly what I do to the Collegian - scoff with derisive indignation (No fair! You guys know I can dish it out but I can’t take it), except the bonza English professors probably do it better than me because they use words like trope and metatextual, and I’m deadcert Anne Longmuir likes to make obnoxious literary puns and everyone else has to awkwardly play along like they get the reference.

Anyway, just saying, if you’re going to squiz me regularly, it might be prudent to bookmark The Hour Badly Spent or add it to your RSS reader. That way I won’t see the Google searches on my site metrics page and won’t know it’s you. If, however, you would like for me to know for sure that you’ve been by, feel free to comment the living shit out of this beehotch. Ideally, your responses would consist of:

• backhanded remarks about my personal hygiene.
• wild exaggerations of my sexual prowess.
• well-deserved umbrage whenever I post something stridently offensive or wrong or unfunny or off-limits or just plain too prolix. Fair dinkum?
• witty and pretentious English-majorey jokes as they relate to the post at hand. Because I, too, would like to dust off my L’écriture et la Différence and undo the chain of logocentric binary oppositions that characterize Western thought, but I can’t do it alone. It’s really hard.

When I was talking with the Saucy Aussie the other day we both noted this one quirk of Kansas: people here tend to say the same things Stephen Colbert would say on his show, except when Colbert says them, it’s satire. The title of this post is a direct quote from a local gun nut. I was hoping that all the gun hoopla floating around campus lately was just whacko buffoonery that would die out if I looked the other way. Surely no one would seriously entertain the paradox that bringing guns to class would prevent school shootings. Enter the Collegian.

Last week they ran two front-page articles on the "debate" hosted by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. And by "debate" I mean "no one opposing carrying concealed showed up to argue, because as students, they’re probably worried more about writing term papers and shit than waving pistols around." Naturally, I stayed at home to watch porn. But Terence, a K-State senior, diligently went and observed.

The worst problem, and the reason I left, was what this particular audience member said. The question was about the difficulty of identifying the ‘real’ killer if other students were armed and firing. The man’s answer was basically, "If you have a classroom full of students that look like you and you and you, and then a guy in a black trench coat with an AK-47 comes in, you’ll know who the killer is."

When this kind of ignorance and narrow-mindedness is allowed to be spouted, it’s not a debate - it’s propaganda.

While Ryan raises an excellent point, the analogy breaks down in that people don’t use their seat belts to fucking shoot other people.

But why do these emergencies happen in the first place? Why, indeed, are gun-toting crazies springing up on universities? Do they just pop up out of nowhere? Is there a training camp somewhere in Texas? Is it remotely possible that when you tell alienated sociopaths that having and using lethal weapons is the truest expression of your liberty, that it makes you a responsibly functioning citizen, that it connects you with the soul of our nation’s heritage, blah blah blah, well what the fuck else will the frustrated triggerhappies do? Volunteer at a soup kitchen?

Nevertheless, the SCCC seems to have a strident following. It’s inevitable; the struggle between two factions will dominate this campus. On one hand, limp-wristed crepe-chomping femicommunist pacifist Jewish furries; on the other, us, the rugged, individualist protectors, who are really just following the 67th book of the Bible: the Constitution. That’s right; I said us. Between the team that’s armed and the team that’s not, which side did you think I was gonna be on?

"People have the right to defend themselves," said Concealed Carry Instructor Patricia Stoneking. "To post any place as a gun-free zone is to basically pose them as a target."

There you have it. Hordes of bloodthirsty villains lie continuously in wait for the chance to pick me off. With my back to the wall and all hope lost, I’ve got no choice, only one chance to take back control. And this has to be subtle. If it’s overdone, I’ll be posed as a target. Therefore, nothing fancy; just a couple of gats, a bandolier (looks like a seatbelt!), and some surface-to-air missiles slung tastefully across my back. Hell, if you’ve got a problem with my Second-Amendment rights, I’ve got a problem solver. Its name is revolver.

Friday night at Rusty’s Last Chance, Arianna celebrated the hell out of her 21st birthday. Carolyn, Cate, Cherry, Jordan, Marco, Brandon, and Johnny all showed up to toast the occasion.

Johnny was wearing all black, with a black fedora, black leather jacket, and sunglasses. At midnight. Only complete assholes wear their shades indoors. True to form, he kept trying to grope all the single girls.

"I’m sitting over here," said Carolyn. "Don’t let him find me."
"You can’t really hide from him," I warned. He’s got special nightstalkerey powers. That’s why he’s dressed like a vampire. Who will be the next to fall for his hypnotic charm?"

At some point, after Jordan whipped out a camera, Cherry and Arianna started making out. A few seconds later, Cherry remembered the camera was still going and started getting really into it.

I’m pretty sure those two assumed this would be the highlight of everyone’s night. I, for one, still had the fabulosity of the English department - Chris Kennedy, Anne Longmuir, Erica Hateley, Tony Doerr, et al, on my mind; liquor-laced hilarity sans spectacle. Next to that, watching these annoyingly young snerts ham it up for the camera all over each others’ faces was as much fun as seeing your spaniel lick its own crotch. You take one glance and you’re like, "Muffy you are so stupid," then you go back to something more interesting, like the newspaper. Woman beats off burglar with gnome, page 8.