The hour badly spent

At this point, the topic sort of writes Shane Oram’s column all by itself.

In past years, gender roles were defined clearly in almost every society. Now, in the face of constant change, it seems chivalry has been cast away to conform to female independence and male laziness.

Our parents’ generations – and the ones before them – were bound to simple standards on how men and women should act. This system seemed to be ideal for many years.

As technology advances and many men get trapped by video games and the Internet, words like “slacker” are being thrown around to describe the increasing lack of motivation this gender might demonstrate. In this generation, men are having a hard time steering through adulthood especially in the areas of friendship, drinking, sex and the future.

Of course the internet is destroying everything, just like it always does. Social interactions were much easier when men just stuck to a medieval rape manual.

However, on the other side of the spectrum, some women have not made it easy for men to be chivalrous. In this shift in role definition, women have become more independent, branching out of the house into more traditionally masculine roles.

No longer do they need a man to support them financially, socially or sometimes emotionally.

Chivalrous actions are based on love and kindness — not some hidden agenda to undermine women. I hope women can accept and enjoy these fruitful displays of honor and respect and not give in to radical schemes and misconstrued propaganda.

Why does chivalry continue to make headlines here? Why can’t we stop being such spazzes, put down the medieval rape manuals and reconceptualize our boy-girl relations? Try this: when a girl calls you and wants to go out somewhere, just say "I can’t; I have to practice my guitar." When she points out that you don’t actually have a guitar, tell her "What is this, the Inquisition? Get off my ass!"

[Source: K-State Collegian]

Everyone knows I’m pretty flakey. Still, my movie-nerd friend, Silver Bullet, made sure to remind me that I had promised to go with her to her sister Erica’s wedding in Palm Springs.

"Sure. Again, when is it?"

"June something."

June something took place last week. Wednesday night we picked up the groom’s brother Donnie and the groom’s brother’s wife Palim from the airport at 11 at night and right away headed to the little resort town.

We got there two hours later, dead tired. Silver Bullet and I checked in; the room was massive. We sat around, amazed at its sheer amazingness. Then we fucked and conked out for the night.

Her phone rang sometime Thursday morning. Erica was perkily inviting us down to the pool for drinks. And swimming, one assumes. We were still groggy and tired, so no. She hung up and we fucked again, which I was almost too sleepy to do at all, and didn’t even have the presence of mind to make her get on top. Thanks for nothing, doggiestyle.

We woke up for real much much later.

"Is it really noon?"

"It’s the curtains. Hotel rooms always make you feel like it’s twilight outside."

Silver Bullet’s phone went off again; sister still bugging us to come outdoors and socialize, so we did. The pool seemed kind of small for a pricey resort in the middle of the desert. This disappointment, however, was mitigated by the open bar and the fact that everyone was dressed to show off as much skin as possible, which I believe is the only upside to California weather.

Donnie ordered me a vodka tonic, then a screwdriver, then another one, which I noticed they made with tequila instead of vodka. Strange, but best to do as the natives do; in Russia, vodka make YOU!

When we were done swimming, Silver Bullet and I walked around in search of a place to eat. The town is really just a big strip mall and everything looks the same. We settled on a Mexican place. The food wasn’t terrific and neither were the margueritas but at least they were big. Evidently I sucked mine down too fast, because when we got back to our room I lost my lunch.

Then I slept.

I woke up hours later, groggy again, but in time to get ready for the ceremony.

"Hey, if you still feel sick you can just hang out in the room during the wedding. I’ll come back afterwards."

"No, I can do this. This is why ya brought me right?" I got dressed and we walked down and across the street to wherever the ceremony was taking place (my memory’s a little tequilic) and took our seats.

So. The wedding happened. Priest, walk down the aisle, speech, kiss, yadda yadda. I’m sure I was supposed to be feeling something — everyone else looks happy and moved or whatever — but I think the tequila was feeling it for me, leaving me to sit around and be bored. When the thing was done everyone walked further up the street, to a bar and grill where reservations had been made. Still bored, I decided the time had come to start shit.

"So, most of your sister’s friends are assholes, right? Which one is the worst?"

"Christina."

"Which one is she?"

"You see the girl back there in the blacknwhite dress? She’s blonde. Yeah, her."

Later on I sat down with the rest of the family — well, the ones who seemed drunk — and asked the same question: which one of Erica’s friends was most turdish? Christina was universally agreed upon as the most vile, smelly turd in the entourage. Awesome! Although I prefer to actually know and associate with gossip targets (it makes the feel gossip much juicier), this was exactly the kind of thing I’d been waiting for! Besides the sex, of course. Sadly, only Silver Bullet was willing to provide a concrete example of said turdism:

"Once I overheard her say something really mean. It was kind of behind my back, but the way she said it, I know she meant me to hear it."

"Well?"

"She said, ‘if I were as fat as Silver Bullet I’d probably kill myself.’"

It doesn’t get much more douchey than that, does it? Silver Bullet is about the nicest girl I know (most of the time); you’d have to be pretty mean to insult her like that — just condescension, no provocation. Maybe Christina should just kill herself anyway.

"Thing is, she used to be really fat. It took time, but I’m pretty sure she only lost that weight from snorting coke."

"Whaddya mean used to be? Also: cocaine is a helluva drug!"

"Are you still drunk?"

"Fuckin tequila. Yes."

In today’s Collegian Sarah Burford shared a story about cocking and shooting off at a local firing range. At first I thought the article was mostly kind of bleh. But when I re-read it, I noticed it seemed eerily similar to the Jenna Haze (NSFW!) movie I’ve got open in another window, right now. I am perfectly aware that this says more about me than about Sarah Burford, but humor me:

"Whoa!"

I let out an involuntary yell as the rifle butt slammed into my shoulder [ed. note: That is HOT!]. The men around me chuckled and continued to advise my shooting skills. It was my first experience at a firing range, and I didn’t know the first thing about guns. To me, they were foreign objects, entirely too powerful and consequently, rather intimidating.

But my timidity lessened and my interest increased as the volunteers at the Fancy Creek Range instructed me on the basics of shooting.

This is where I made a major shooting range faux pas: I described a gun as "cute." No matter what a girl thinks a gun looks like, she [should] keep her comments to herself if they have anything to do with femininity.

So coy, so sexy. It’s totally obvs that it’s her first time, right? Of course you can’t tell a guy that his gun is cute. It invokes the castration complex. THEY ARE ALL BIG AND SHINY. My gun is the resplendent avatar of my virility. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say my actual penis doesn’t suffice at all, wink wink. In terms of length and girth, nudge nudge. This is what it looks like:

Memoirist Allison Wallace visited K-State and read from her book, "A Keeper of Bees," in which she chronicled the flowering and withering of her marriage against the backdrop of learning how to sustain a bee colony.

Observing and cultivating bees gave Wallace time to reflect on the value of work and the impermanence of achievement. "There is no such thing as work that stays done," she said, having gone through nearly a dozen colonies over the course of her marriage.

She lost some to swarms; she accidentally starved one colony, but she kept learning and kept at it, and remained a hobbyist even after the process of her divorce.

Not wanting to end on a down note, she read us a passage on honeybee sex. "It’ll only take a minute," she promised.

A horny queen bee finds a cluster in the sky where male worker bees hang out; she flies right by them and then they speed up to catch her. The first lucky stud to reach her and tap that ass is "catapulted into a backflip by the force of his own ejaculation." With his endophallus and lower abdomen ripped off, he plummets to the ground, mortally wounded. How is this any different from the way humans do it jokes ensued. Okay, I guess she ended on a down note anyway. Then she fielded some questions:

"What have the bees taught you about creating sustainable communities of people?"
"Oh dear. I don’t know a thing about that." Next?

"Is it safe to say that if honeybees didn’t exist, we wouldn’t exist?" - some fratboy in the back.
The Memoriste paused for a moment, so I decided to let Obi-Wan answer this one. Yes, Mr. Fratkid. Honeybees are the damn Force. They surround us and penetrate us. They bind the Galaxy together.

When Matt Combes wrote his anal sex column, two things ran through my mind. First: this is a sure way to get all the red staters on campus to get their heads out of their asses and slide some cock in there instead, which - judging by the student body reaction - is what they all secretly want. Second: although it’s informative and frank, it seemed kind of crappy to sort of throw anal sex in their faces; it’s insensitive to their tastes. Nevertheless, there it was. Matt pretty much managed to moon us, and on principle, I always approve of a well-timed ass.

Nevertheless, something bugged me about it, and I couldn’t figure out what until I read Whitney Hodgins’ better-written column, then went back and read Matt’s recent oral sex piece. Matt takes care, early on, to cite statistics and warn us about disease. At the end, when he pats us on the ass and sends us on our merry way, my penis began to feel abnormally cold and dead, as though my mom just had The Talk with me.

Shouldn’t sex columns be, well, sexy? When I go buy my next Porsche, the first buzzkiller to remind me to buckle up will be promptly run over. We read these things for the softer, more personal angle: the sturm und drang of awkward hookups, the agony of slow, drawn-out rejection, the acrid sting of betrayal, the intimate warmth of the layer of sweat between you and the leggy tattooed hipster (I actually have no idea what this feels like), and so on and so forth. Instead, he’s all "90.1 percent of men and 88.3 percent of women have engaged in heterosexual oral sex." Toe-curling epiphany: men and women like to go down on each other. Also: "herpes hits almost anywhere in the mouth region, and along with gonorrhea, can get in your throat." Or, in this case, VD can be written into a column and spread to unsuspecting promiscuous bastards like me.

Today’s sex column, Students should improve sex IQ by understanding myths, courtesy of Whitney Hodgin, was written with humor, class, and balanced with sensitivity toward red-state tastes. I’m sure I’ll never see another article like it.

She gingerly reveals the typical deep-seated sexual fears of, surprisingly, men. Do women fake it? I’ve always found their blank, disinteresed expressions; their derisive amusement over my penis length, and their post-coital mantra: "Hey, it’s been real, but I’ve got a better party to hit up" to be extremely convincing. But Whitney meant something different by "it": "toe-curling orgasms." No, I’ve found that they tend to get bored and fall asleep before they can get around to faking those.

Does size matter? Dave, a K-State human sexuality instructor, said "As long as a guy is two inches long, he’ll get the job done." That’s right - this is serious work! Annisa, a K-State senior, did not agree: "I don’t think two inches would do it," which is not good news for me.

"On the other hand," she continued, "a guy could be really big and not know what to do with it, which is worse." I know what to do with mine. When it’s sunny, I hang my wet laundry across it. That way, all day long, it smells like fresh detergent, although I have to suffer the effects of fabric softener.

Full disclosure: I met Whitney at an English-majorey speech or presentation or something last semester. She suggested that I write at the Collegian, and because she is a cute geek girl, I did not disagree. Sadly, after I had been there for a few weeks, Whitney disappeared from the newsroom, leaving me nothing to look forward to except the aloof self-importance of the remaining more dedicated, if mediocre, writers. Occasionally I would look over at the old, un-manned Macintosh by the window and hope a left-wing geek girl would just materialize into the seat, but it just never happened, which is as good a metaphor as any for my time in Kansas.

I.
Late at night, you
used to take me
by the hand and,
voice like a halo,
say those three little words:
Come to bed.
How did you ever do that?
What kind of magic makes a whisper glow?

II.
The best part
about having a girl with glasses
always came
right before you took all your clothes off
slid into bed
draped your leg over my hip
and we’d made love;
right before that, when you’d
set your glasses on
the nightstand.

III.
That spring night, when you
wearing that nimbus-white nightgown,
fiddling with your fingers, sat up, because you
couldn’t sleep;
That was the night you told me you loved me for the first time.

As detailed in Residents ‘Plunge’ to raise money, Manhattanites and members of Phi Beta Sigma dove into the ice-cold waters of Tuttle Creek Lake as part of a fundraiser for the Special Olympics.

Doesn’t Scrooge Mcduck do this exact same thing, except instead of water, it’s gold? We should try it that way next year.

52nd-annual KSU Rodeo thrills contestants, viewers
To win 2008’s Miss Rodeo title, sophomore Janae Skelton "had to go through a pageant process which consisted of a written rodeo-knowledg test, a horsmanship contest, a personal interview with the rodeo’s judges, a modeling competition and speech."

A model dressed up as a cowgirl, eh? Why in the world did I miss this? Oh, yeah.

Latin is not a dead language, sharpens vocabulary skills
I couldn’t agree more, Blake! In fact, after reading this article, I felt inspired to take a crash course in Sanskrit, because it’s so close to Indo-European - widely considered the origin of so many Western language families. Now, I like totally have a much broader appreciation of modern culture. For example, I can understand the elusive LOLatin tongue:

"I’m in ur Sennit, stabbn ur Seezr!"

"Almust invaded ya…
wit mah invizible leejun."

"Tha die…
I haz cast it!"

Now, if only your column could help me translate the brutal language of love. Ha ha! Thank goodness for Annette Lawless’ advice yesterday: Sex secrets can be damaging, yet add touch of mystery to relationship.

Today in the Fourum, someone predictably called Annette a "prude" because she dumped the grown man who sleeps with high school girls and videotapes it. I had no idea R. Kelly reads the Collegian! Someone else also left this servicey nugget: 

"Hey, Annette Lawless: if you’d like to learn more about mysterious sex secrets, you should come by TKE this weekend."