Mind Your Own God Damn Business

I am fucking sick of writing papers.

Normally, I like writing. I do it enough that I can usually hack my way through a five page paper fairly easily. I’ve been writing five page papers like nobody’s business these last few days, however, and my brain is starting to short out.

If my count is correct, I have written almost 30 pages worth of papers over the last week. Papers about subjects that I don’t want to write papers about, which is the real problem. I turned my last one in about thirty minutes ago. The only logical thing to do was take a shower, grab a glass of Kool-Aide and sit back down at the keyboard and hack out another thousand words.

I’m finishing up the core classes for a Social Science degree so I can hopefully, at some point down the road, be an actual teacher with things like health insurance and pay over the summer. Social science is pretty fun, so it’s been a busy summer, but it’s also been an entertaining summer – I took a few history classes, a political science class and a women’s studies class.

I haven’t been in school for about four years, and I forgot a lot about college – the weird hoops that you have to jump through, the 20 year old boys who think that they are smarter than everyone else on the planet, spending the equivalent of three months rent on textbooks for one class – It’s been kind of fun to come back to all of it.

There’s one another thing that I had completely forgotten about that I find less entertaining: The token old person in the classes who feels obligated to speak as much as possible but doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it’s an older man. Sometimes it’s an older woman. Sometimes they’re 40, sometimes they’re 60, but they always make sure to talk as much as they can and make sure that none of it quite makes sense.

"Astroglide Warming Lubricant - The perfect contraception for people who are actively trying to get pregnant."

This semester, it happened in my Women’s Studies class. There was one guy in the class who was a few years older than I was. He felt compelled to talk frequently, and was always about 20% on topic when he did. It was always just close enough to the topic that I would think that he was going to say something that had to do with what we were talking about, and then it would veer off into something bizarre and unrelated. One day we were talking about third wave feminism when all of a sudden he asked the teacher what she thought of metrosexuals. Another day we were talking about contraception and he told us about the time he was shopping with his wife and he saw a big tube of warming lubricant. Another, we were talking about domestic violence and he told us that he and his ex-wife used to fight all the time and then have crazy make-up sex.

At first, it annoyed me. After a while, I started to love it, though. Every time he put his hand up, I was excited to find out what sort of crazy, unrelated information was going to come out of his mouth.

I started trying to guess what he was going to say before he said it. We had just been talking about Nancy Reagan…was he going to tell us that he used to love reading that comic Nancy? That his daughter looked just like Nancy Drew? That he saw Nancy Sinatra buying warming lube with a metrosexual? I never knew what it was going to be until he said it, and he almost always exceeded my expectations. After a while, the only time I got angry was when he was on topic and said something insightful – there’s nothing hilarious about that.

On the last day of class, he really outdid himself, though.

It a free day, so we were just supposed to find something that we wanted to discuss in class. One girl brought in Mrs. Congeniality. A guy showed us a youtube clip of a woman talking about the media. Another girl showed us an episode of Sex and the City (Someday, I’ll forgive her for that. Someday. (P.S.: No, I won’t.))

Anyway, last but not least, it was my good friend older guy’s turn. He headed up to the front of the classroom, plugged a flash drive into the computer…

And started showing us porn.

I won't lie - the subject to the left of this picture is porn, and I was pretty seriously considering putting up a picture of some dude's ass. I decided to be classy and go with this picture of Mr. T in a suit instead. You're welcome.

I mean, it wasn’t ALL porn. There were some pin up girls and old sculptures thrown in, but it was about 70% porn.

It was awesome. For the first four or five minutes of the presentation, he would bring up a picture and describe it to us as though we were blind. “Here’s a girl sitting on a couch with her hands on her boobs.” Next picture. “Here’s a girl taking a picture of herself in the mirror with her breasts exposed.” Next picture. “This girl is standing on a boat and she’s not wearing any pants.” Next picture.

Finally, one of the girls in the class asked him why he was showing it to us. He explained that he wanted to show that this sort of thing had been around for a long time. We were then treated to another five minutes of him showing us pictures and then describing them to us just in case any of us were blind or autistic and couldn’t understand that he was showing us people or figure out what poses they were in. The highlight (at least for me) was when he showed us a picture of two naked girls embracing. After explaining to us that the picture was of two naked girls embracing, he elaborated more than usual by saying “Some people find this offensive, but I think it’s beautiful.”

It really was the perfect ending to the class. If he would have been doing it in an attempt to piss everyone off, or if he had had any inkling of how inappropriate and bizarre it was, it wouldn’t have been that funny, but I’m pretty sure that he genuinely thought that he was doing something meaningful and relevant.

I feel like he may have set my expectations a little bit too high, though. I’m sure that I will have other old and slightly confused peers in my classes between now and when I graduate (again), but can I really expect them to proudly show the class a bunch of Internet pornography? Probably not. Only time will tell, I suppose.

He’s not the only thing I’ll miss about that class, though. There were some really cool kids in there that I enjoyed getting to know. I’m guessing that I’m ten years older than them, though, and so I think that it would be kind of weird to try and maintain contact with them outside of the class. Now that I think about it, I guess that means that I probably won’t see any of them again. Oh well. It was a fun six weeks.

Now, it is officially time for me to get some sleep. I have one day of tests, and then this summer session is done and I can start the next summer session.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll see you all on Monday.