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.

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.

Yesterday Anthony Doerr visited K-State and read a short story from his latest book, The Shell Collector. That reading was the best K-State’s had this year. Afterward, the English department got together at Rock-A Belly’s. I was midway through my second G&T when the Saucy Aussie made some idle comment that ended with "vagina." I remember precisely what she sad: "Crikey! Kangaroo Kylie Minogue sheila dingo boomerang bushwhacked VAGINA!" The table went silent for a second, and Saucy Aussie seemed embarrassed, probably because she thought she had crossed some comfort line.

Well, that’s not why we were quiet. The word "vagina" is actually a great source of comfort. Hearing it is like having a cool breeze roll across you on a summer day. No; we went silent because each of us had hoped to be the first to say "vagina" that evening, and when she beat us to the (kitty) punch, no one was ready with another clever vaginal follow-up. Personally, her awesomeness made me feel like a slow-witted prude.

I lamely tried to break the silence. "Thanks! I’ve been waiting for someone to say ‘vagina’ all day," I ejaculated. But ‘vagina’ doesn’t roll off my tongue as nicely as it does from hers. OR DOES IT?

After dinner, Rhymes With Visa drove a few of us - Imad, Tony Doerr, Saucy Aussie - to the top of the hill that overlooks the city. We had to get out and hike a little ways to reach the summit, from which we had a beautiful view of Best Buy. Then Rhymes With Visa drove us back to town. Not til much later did I realize how pathetically funny the whole scene actually was: we were basically all guided up to the top of Makeout friggin’ Mountain, and yet it never occurred to anybody to cop a feel. Lame.

Vagina! There; our reputations are safe.