Winter Break Cabin Fever

Today, my mom came home from running errands with Chick-fil-a kids meals for my sister and me. My 19-year-old sister and my 23-year-old self. As we dug into our 4-pack nuggs, Suz was bustling around the kitchen, straightening things up and doing Mom things, when she casually stated:

"Ginger threw up a sock today."

What?!

"Yeah, she threw up a sock. It was just a gross, balled up mess of sock parts and bile."

After she told us this delicious little bit of information, I was wondering two things...

Where was the sock now? And did she take a picture?

When Suz told me that she threw the sock mess away, and that she did NOT take a picture of it, I was legitimately upset. Like, actually upset that I didn't have evidence of the sock-vomit.

Why?

Because if she had taken a picture, I could have written a whole blog post about my nasty dog and her nasty sock vomit.

I kid you not, I even contemplated RE-CREATING what I thought the regurgitated bile sock might look like and writing the blog anyway.

And that's when it hit me that winter break has officially gone on for way too long.

When you become noticeably, admittedly frustrated that you don't have any photographic proof of a ball of sock mess and bile that your dog vomited earlier that day, it's time to go back to school and be a real person again.

This got me thinking back to the events (or lack of events) from the past month that led up to this extremely low point in my life.

I left the house a few times over the course of winter break, I swear.

The first thing I did was go on a road trip up to Washington, DC back in the second week of December with my friend Jen.

Jen's mom lives outside of DC. So we went up there, had a few nerdgasms in all of the DC mall's awesome museums, hung out with Jen's awesome mom, and just had a generally good time. This short but sweet trip had me feeling pretty good about how winter break was gonna go down.

nerdgasm in the lobby of the museum of natural history

A few days after that, my family and I headed up to Asheville and had ourselves a lovely time at the Biltmore estate. Another very pleasant trip. My spirits were still good. But this was only about a week into break.

A couple days after the jaunt to Asheville, that creepy little menace known as boredom started to sneak up on me. In recent years, when I am home at my parents' house with my sister and we start to get bored, a trend has developed...

We do stupid shit to our hair.

So, 2 days before Christmas and 4 days before our formal, professional family portrait session, Stephanie and I went to the hair salon.

And accidentally dyed my hair red.

Prior to this incident, I had been a platinum blonde for all 23 years of my existence. I went from platinum blonde.......to this.........

just call me Ginge.

Some of my friends and family members told me that they liked it and that it didn't look that bad, but all I could think was OHMYGODI'MAGINGER.

I have nothing against redheads, but on my own head? Hideous. Plus, Suz was none too thrilled about me taking the formal family portrait with these new locks.

Now, keep in mind I did this to my head 2 days before Christmas. So there I was, on Christmas Eve, on a desperate search to find another hair salon to fix the hot gingery mess on my head before the Christmas weekend and before our family portraits.

My sister happens to have quite a bit of experience in the hair catastrophe department, and managed to track down a salon in downtown Greenville that would take me, last minute and with no appointment on Christmas Eve, to try to salvage my coif.

In an epic stroke of luck that doesn't usually befall someone like myself, this woman was a hair miracle worker. She took one look at my head and went straight to down with highlight foils.

thumbs up to destroying the integrity of my hair to avoid ruining formal portraits and being etched off the family tree.

And so, several stress filled hours and 200 dollars later, Susan the miracle worker at Headquarters day spa in Greenville had saved the day. The new finished product went from holy-redhair-batman! to this:

crisis averted.

Some have said it still looks dark blonde, others say light brown. But all I see is "not red." So i'm happy.

Also, those of you who know me know that I don't wear glasses, so I guess I should essplain those.

I'm really obsessed with glasses, but unfortunately I was cursed with near perfect vision and have no actual need for them. Thus, I buy fake glasses and wear them around like I'm bat blind without them.

And I don't even care that I'm announcing that they're fake right now because I just love glasses that much. And I especially love looking like a nerd, so I'd say these huge specs I picked out do the trick.

The hair debacle entertained us for a few days. Oh, and I guess Christmas did too. And just when cabin fever was setting in again, it was time to ship out to Atlanta for the South Carolina bowl game in the Georgia Dome on New Year's Eve.

I had high hopes for New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, USC's football team and the Marta subway system conspired to bring those hopes swiftly crashing down as the clock struck midnight.

We lost the bowl game kind of miserably to Florida State, which is embarrassing enough. After all, they are in the ACC for crying out loud.

(And on a sidenote, if I ever have to hear the Seminole tomahawk chop cheer ever again, I might murder someone. Death by tomahawk chop.)

After the game, my friend Kate and I had a very simple plan: take the Marta to a club called Cosmo Lava, pick up our tickets we had already pre-paid for, and ring in a fun New Year in downtown Atlanta.

We did not take into account, however, how the Marta system has magical powers that turn two decently intelligent 20-somethings into complete idiots with zero sense of direction or common sense.

15 minutes before midnight, we got off on a stop on Peachtree Street.......literally 18 blocks from where we were supposed to be.

We admitted defeat, sat down on a street curb in the middle of downtown Atlanta, and rang in a very anti-climactic new year with this guy:

This man is called Dwayne. He is homeless, has two fake legs, and fought valiantly for our country in Vietnam.

Someone asked me on New Year's Day if I had a NYE kiss. I replied "No," because if I had had a new year's kiss, it would have been Dwayne.

Dwayne was nice and all, but homelessness and prosthetics just don't really do it for me.

I got back to Greenville from Atlanta on the 1st, and for the past 5 days have done almost quite literally nothing except StumbleUpon and watch movies on demand with my sister and drink wine.

That brings me to this evening and my yearning for Ginger's sock vomit. So I wrote this blog.

Happy 2011 everyone! I need to go back to school.


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Nerdfest 2K10

It's almost unbelievable.

If I didn't take pictures and document them in writing, I swear to god no one would ever believe that things like the following exist.

I mentioned in a blog post last week that one of the reasons I blog is because going home to my parents' house is like entering some weird alternate universe where the 1980s are still cool, made-up "designer" breed dogs run loose and wild, and in any given closet or alcove you might find an enormous hidden stash of bird seeds or a life-size Darth Vader head staring out at you from the back corner.

This weekend was no different.

Friday night rolled around, and my parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew were all here for a nice Friday-night-in with Pizza Hut for dinner.

The pizza got eaten, and conversations were had about the usual things: everyone's work week, my school week, what funny things the kids had done lately, etc.

After dinner, my brother, nephew, and I went to the upstairs den. We put on Men in Black, busted out the K'Nex, and started making kick-ass pieces of K'Nex construction equipment, with my nephew serving as construction manager and pointing out every tiny thing I was doing wrong in my K'Nex handiwork.

And then, right there amidst the Christmas decoration explosion that covered every inch of my parents' house, my sister-in-law came sprinting into the den, shrieking with excitement and teasing us with taunts of "Guess what I found?! Guess what I found?!" as she came scurrying down the hallway that led to the den.

My brother and I exchanged glances. We didn't know what the hell Mandy had found, but we knew it had to be good. We. were. excited.

We were not disappointed.

Mandy had apparently accidentally stumbled upon a treasure-trove of a bookshelf in one of my mom's upstairs guest rooms. This bookshelf might as well have never left 1982. Every book on it was 30 years old. And most of them were Star Wars themed.

Honest to god, sometimes I wonder how I ended up being such a dork, but then I remember....Oh yeah! My mother has entire bookshelves and rooms and storage closets and Christmas wreaths completely devoted to Star Wars or any of the franchise's various spin-off stories.

The thing Mandy had found was this:

This is a children's book entitled "The Ewoks and the Lost Children." Awesome.

After this, it was game over. We were all on missions to explore what other hidden caverns of nerd-dom the Suz had hidden away in closets in her house.

Something like this happens every time I come home to my parents' house in Greenville.

It's like....

Oh hey Mom! The North Pole called, they want all their Christmas shit back. Or....

Oh heyyy Mom, George Lucas called, he wants his massive collection of weird-ass Star Wars memorabilia back. Or...

Oh heyy Suz! The 1980's called, they want all of their creepy-ass shit you only ever see on "I Love the 80s," that you have stored in all the closets of your house like it's totally normal to still own an Atari or a Care-Bear, back......

So, like I said at the start of this post, if I didn't have photographic evidence, people might never believe that some freaks in the year 2010 (my mom) still actually own this stuff and keep it in their house like it's completely acceptable.

Exhibit A:

You see that name scrawled in the upper left of this device? Yes. It says "Michael" in small-child-chicken scratch. This first belonged to my 30-year-old brother when he was about 5. And my mom still. has. it. Why? The world of normal people may never know.

It's the "Fisher Price Big Bird Record Player", by the way, and the record we put in it tonight was this also-30-year-old record of Empire Strikes Back.

I find this especially comical because my mother never really let us watch Sesame Street. She thought that the characters looked decrepit and homeless and didn't think they were good examples to show her young children.

....But by god she bought the Big Bird record player.....and kept it for thirty years......





I just stuck this in here because after the childhood toy artifacts started coming out, I figured I might need it, and I got really excited that Rolling Rock is making "Rock Light" now! Awesome!


Exhibit B:

This poor child doesn't know it yet, but she's doomed for a life of LucasFilm-fueled dorkhood just like the rest of us.

The bookshelf where Mandy had found the initial Ewok book that sparked this foray into the Outer Rim of course had to be revisited, where books like the rest of these seen above were found: "Shiny as a Droid," "Return of the Jedi: The Ewoks Join the Fight," and "Star Wars: The Wookiee Storybook." Classics!



Exhibit C:

I just felt like "Shiny as a Droid" was too epic not to give it its own close-up. I'm thinking about bringing this in to my 9th graders for a read-aloud to help them think about imagery and vivid details. Just kidding.......or am I?




Exhibit D:

I wasn't kidding about the giant life-size Vader head. I found it in a closet, accompanied by this....

A giant shiny life size C-3PO head!

And before you go thinking that these little guys are just for display, and don't actually serve very legitimate purposes.....I opened them up and found this inside....

Star Wars character figurines inside a giant Star Wars character travel case inside a closet filled with nothing but blast-from-the-past Star Wars memorabilia. You're welcome, George Lucas.


AND, just so you don't think this household was COMPLETELY biased towards and obsessed with Lucas-lore, I give you....


Exhibit E:

Donatello, in all his green, teenage, mutant, turtley, bandana-ed glory. You can't tell from the picture, but this thing is about 2 feet tall.

*For those of you in my grad cohort, you now have a visual representation of what I wanted to be for Halloween the year after my mom made me go as Alice in Wonderland. And I had to settle for being the trampy, harlot, green M&M instead.*


Sometimes I fear I talk about Star Wars a little too much. But, this is my blog after all, right?


Let's go GAMECOCKS, and may the force be with you.


And just for good measure, some Admiral Ackbar parodies:





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Sh*t My Professors (and Classmates) Say

Oftentimes when I am sitting in class, I get bored. I look for avenues to rectify this situation in a variety of ways. But most often, I entertain myself either by drawing ridiculous things in my margins, or by quoting ridiculous things I hear come out of the mouths of either my professors or my classmates.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may be familiar with a post I did called Notes from the Margins. This post will be similar to that, only I decided to also add in all of the random quotes I copy down during class.

This is partly because I take a lot of my notes on my computer now, so drawing in the margins isn't really an option during those classes. And partly because my professors and classmates are hilarious, in my opinion, and I want to share their deep thoughts with the world. Enjoy.

The other day, one of my Education professors was having us engage in an activity on imagery. She walked to a classmate wearing a flannel shirt and posed the question:


"What does Rachel's flannel shirt feel like?"

My classmate's response?


"Flannel." Well said, Jen.



And from that same professor comes these profound ideas:

"You'll just want to stab yourself in the face with a fork. You'll just stab yourself."
(regarding the idea of us trying to fully grade every piece of student work that comes in)


"Your grades are dropping like prices at Wal-Mart."
(self-explanatory)


This next group of quotations comes from a Professor on whom I loosely based my Endearing and Hilarious Quirky Professor. I have him for a graduate English/Film course, and the guy is an absolute trip.

"Capitalism castrates men. They must win their balls back with Fight Club!"
(we were discussing Fight Club that day)


"Are you opening it?....Is that you?.....Oh! I thought it was Tyler Durden!"
(on the classroom door creaking open from a draft)


"I didn't mean to humiliate her. Oh wait, actually I did."
(on calling a student out for being late)


"They're freshmen! They're scared of me. They don't yet know I'm a pussy cat. Meow!"
(talking about the other, undergraduate level course he teaches)


"Piss ant! I love that word!"
(I can't remember the context, but does it matter?)


"You guys want to look at the vomiting scene? I love vomiting."
(during a discussion on Brokeback Mountain)


"If you guys know anything about S&M communities, this is exactly what happens in S&M communities."
(he then retracted this statement after he realized it might not be 'school appropriate')


"If I spit on you, I'm sorry. This is my blanket apology in advance."
(apparently he is a spit-talker. I never sit close enough to experience this.)


"You're freaking me out over there, baby cat!"
(he calls several of the girls in the class 'baby cat', for reasons unbeknownst to me)


"I love Hearts. I play Hearts all the time. Cause I'm a girly man!"
(on his affinity for the card game Hearts)



And now, some actual notes from the margins:


this was during a lecture on Genesis. obviously my Professor had just addressed this particular phrase...





homegirl LOVES her some pride and prejudice. this was her reaction when someone questioned Mr. Darcy's suitability for marriage. "Oh my god, he comes with a wonderful package!"





just a nice little rendering of a potential book cover for Kafka's Metamorphoses. I think my roach is especially nice, given my opinions towards roaches.




some classmate who never says a "peep" during class wouldn't shut up during this particular lecture. which led me to draw Peeps?





"All the other royalties/crowns of Europe were pooping in their pants." I think she may have been talking about British imperialism or something. Regardless, i thought it was worth writing down.




This is a margin note between Heather and myself. I can't recall the exact context, but I know we were talking about tyranny in ancient Greece ("tyranna"-saurus rex). the rest is up to your imagination to decipher.




"Actual child being butchered in front of you? Not cathartic...traumatizing." ....during a lecture on catharsis.




possibly my nerdiest margin note drawing yet. it's an owl, complete with a Hogwarts acceptance letter, addressed to the "cupboard under the stairs."




i. was. tired. i guess i thought drawing sheep and Zzzz's on my paper was a good alternative to actually counting them in my head and falling asleep.




my professor is Italian, and sometimes her English doesn't translate exactly right, resulting in words like this: "sexuated"...in reference to Marilyn Monroe.




I believe we were talking about paganism of some sort, and I was particularly proud of my illustration of Pan. mythological goat demons FTW.



And finally, although these last two quotes don't fit exactly into the parameters of this blog post topic, I found them worthy of posting:

From my lovely roommate:

"Well, do we have any mugs? or any particularly big, spacious cups instead?!!"
(on whether or not we had any clean bowls to eat ice cream out of, and her desperation for finding a suitable replacement without having to do any dishes)


And from my oldest brother, who has a 5-year-old kid....we were getting into the white van my mother had procured for transportation to another brother's wedding in NYC:

Brother: "Well, it has windows, so at least it's not a child molester van."

5-year-old nephew: "Daddy, what's a child molester van? WHAT IF IT IS A CHILD MOLESTER VAN?!"

Brother: "Oh, uhhh....Daddy's just being silly."


Father of the year award goes to......?



Cheers! And go Gamecocks!
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Why I Blog

Sometimes people ask me why I like to keep a blog, or how I come up with things to write about. I can think of a whole slew of reasons and answers to those questions, but I thought I'd provide you with a few general examples. Here are some reasons why I blog.



Reason #1: I am a nerd.

And nerds do nerdy things like write regularly and keep blogs about nerdy things they find interesting or entertaining.



Reason #2: I am in grad school.

It's like a bottomless pit of blog topics between my classmates, professors, high school students, rants about classes/term papers, etc. Also, my head would most definitely explode if I didn't engage in some writing (read: venting) outside of academic papers. Barf.

For instance, the picture below depicts what my classmates and I did in a graduate course of ours this past Wednesday night. We constructed "masks" out of tissue paper/masking tape/plastic serial killer-looking-face mask combinations as a way to teach high schoolers "characterization." Right...

Coneheads, anyone?



Reason #3: I come from a family full of nutjobs.

Now before all of you crazy family members get offended....don't. I mean this in the best possible of ways. If you guys weren't all complete weirdos, you'd be super boring. So, thanks for being freaks!

This might be the biggest reason of all. I could spend two whole weeks at my apartment in Columbia and not come up with a single thing to blog about, but after an hour home at my parents' house in Greenville, I'm suddenly inundated with topics. Let me explain...

A couple of weeks ago, I came up to Greenville on a particularly slow weekend in Columbia, hauled my laundry basket into the utility room, and made my way to the kitchen to raid my Mom's cabinets. I also did a quick survey of the kitchen counter to see if there was anything left over from dinner.

However, instead of congealing fettucine alfredo or pot roast remains, I found this......on the KITCHEN COUNTER......:


Why yes, that IS a dead snake placed inside a ziploc bag labeled "Warning! Monster Snake!", just in case you were unsure of the bag's contents.

The author of this bag's label, my Dad, spied me snapping a picture of it from the next room and came bounding in. Apparently, if I was going document this, I was going to document it properly. (Can someone plz fill me on on standard snake-corpse-photography procedures? Kthx.)

He proceeded to pick up the snake-bag, maneuver the python corpse inside until it suited his demented preferences, put it back down on the counter, and demand that I do a re-take.


Much.....better? Thanks, Dad. It appears that Steve committed this reptile execution on one of his many obsessive sweeps down our driveway with Weed-B-Gone.

So, that weekend in a nutshell? Snake carcasses on the kitchen counter. Totally normal.

I came home again this weekend to watch the Doodles because Suz would be out of town. One of the first things I did when I got home this time was go to the refrigerator for a Diet Coke fix. I found a Diet Coke alright, but I also found this.....INSIDE the fridge....:



Why yes, that IS the spare set of keys to the house, stashed inside the box of Michelob Ultra...inside the fridge...

It appears that Suz thought this hiding spot would be most conducive to my actually finding the keys. This tells me that my mother is either very hilarious and sneaky, or she thinks I'm such an alcoholic that the FIRST place I'd think to look (or anyone for that matter) for a hide-a-key is INSIDE a case of beer, INSIDE the garage refrigerator.

Sorry for telling the world about your hiding spot, Suz.

And while we are on the subject of my mother, that brings me to my third reason-du-jour why my family is usually a pretty supple source of blog topics.

My mom has the creepiest, most obsessive relationship with Hallmark ornaments and Christmas decorations I've ever seen. And I've been to a national Hallmark convention.

Almost every single surface in our house already looks like Santa rolled in here and exploded all over everything. So I took a little tour of our house, snapping pictures in any given room of the creepiest decorations I observed on my walk-through....



THIS is the first thing you see when you come through our front door. I left the ladder in the picture for scale. Did I mention that this welcoming fellow is on display BEFORE we even made it to Halloween? Meaning our poor little child neighbors will be subjected to his pedophilic gaze come Saturday night.

Santa really IS always watching you, kids. And Santa is a 7-foot-tall creepy-ass Freud-lookalike.

These next three pictures are in various parts of our house, but all come from the same Christmas decoration "designer." These hideous abominations are called Anna Lee "dolls," but feel free to switch the term "dolls," used very loosely here, for "maniacal demons" or "satanic imps" or something along those lines. What kind of sick person thought that making dolls' faces look like acid trips would create feelings of Christmas joy or holiday nostalgia in any sane person?



(by the way, these 2 are in a random, rarely used upstairs bathroom. Suz leaves no surface un-Christmased.)



And just a few more examples of Suz's decoration-infatuation-blog-topic-inspirations...

Suz has so many ornaments that she can devote entire Christmas trees and entire Christmas wreaths to certain, very specific themes. This one is obviously the Star Wars wreath. In the words of Yoda....Think it's awesome, I do.

Anywhere, literally anywhere you go in our house, you can look around and find some version of the creepy pedophile Santa staring you down. I don't know how any of my siblings or I got through childhood thinking that old Saint Nick was a jolly, good-intentioned soul with these mutant Santas lurking around every other corner.

We certainly wouldn't want anyone to feel devoid of Christmas joy whilst sitting on the porcelain throne!

As if the 7-foot-tall-front-entryhall Santa wasn't disturbing enough on his own, this little sidekick gremlin stands guard at his side. He is apparently "checking Santa's list" for him, a.k.a marking down the names of trick-or-treaters they'd like to molest later.

And finally, a nativity scene. So we can pretend like we are good Catholics when guests come over, and that we don't just go to church on Christmas Eve...... drunk....... (just kidding...)

So thank you, innate dorkiness, grad school shenanigans, and the weirdest (and best) family I could ask for, for providing me ample material to keep this little guy going.

I am, however, always open to suggestions. Happy Halloween!

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The People You Meet in Grad School: Part 6

This is my first TPYMIGS post since May, but now that another Fall semester is in full swing, another installment of this series is definitely necessary. Up to this point, I've limited my TPYMIGS posts strictly to fellow students. I decided it was finally time to give some of my professors my acknowledgments, which spawned TPYMIGS number six:


6. The Entirely Too Quirky Professor

We have absolutely all had them. The professor that most certainly can NOT be from this planet, because nobody from this planet could possibly find it in their mental capacity to get that enthusiastic about Elizabethan love poetry or the life and times of George Eliot.


let's be honest. no one cares.

But just as soon as you resign yourself to that assumption, the Quirky Professor waltzes into English 750 or Philosophy 600 or whatever it is you're taking, decked out in a wrong-decade-looking or otherwise awkward outfit, looking around at the room in a bewildered way, as if they haven't a clue as to what the hell these 20-somethings are all doing in their classroom.

Once they get over this initial unexplained academic shellshock, they are FIRED UP about you being in their class and about their subject matter. However, there is a divide at work here. Things can go in one of two directions with the Quirky Professor. They are either Endearing and Hilarious Quirky, or Caustic and Demeaning Quirky.

The professor that is on the positive side of this stereotype is more or less friends with his or her students. This is the professor that everyone wishes they had as their adviser and that you run into at a random pint night on a Tuesday. While it is obvious they have been buried in the world of Academia for a very long time, they are still at least trying to make efforts to be real people.

They are usually sarcastic (in the best of ways), and attempt to make jokes about John Milton or Judith Butler or some other uber-nerdy-intellectual subject that isn't actually funny at all, but you want to carry them around in your purse like a toy poodle just for even trying.

The positive Quirky Professor actually utters phrases like "Holy Toledo!" and has an awesomely blended combination of modesty and doesn't-take-themselves-too-seriously.



They have a comprehensive handle of their content knowledge, peppered with all the right amounts of failed-but-precious jokes, nonsensical offhand comments, and colorful anecdotes from their weird-ass personal lives to make their classes truly enjoyable.

And then there is the other side of the spectrum: the Caustic and Demeaning Quirky Professor.

If this is a male professor, he is usually older and it is clear that he was tormented in high school or suffered some other kind of trauma at the hands of his peers somewhere down the line. Sympathy is not required, however, as this torment was obviously due to a very abrasive combination of massive arrogance and excessive nerd-dom, and he is now taking out 20 years of repressed angst on you and your classmates.

He is so engrossed in his subject area that he has completely forgotten what real human interaction is, and has instead replaced it with sarcasm that is either only understood by him or that is incredibly insulting to students in some way.

This is the type of professor that is so impossibly nerdy, and at the same time so impossibly cocky, that you are genuinely astonished if you find out he is married or lives any life other than that of a crotchety, solitary hermit, surrounded by his academic journals and inflated self-love.

You experience a fleeting excitement on the first day of his class, because he has mentioned Lord of the Rings so many times that you are already able to start a running tally of his LotR allusions. This is very short lived though, as it becomes clear almost immediately that despite his seemingly awesome obsession with Middle Earth and Tolkien-lore, this guy is a giant bag of douche.

If the Caustic and Demeaning Quirky Professor is a female, she usually tends to wear so much bangle-y jewelry that she creates her own little soundtrack as she walks around the room, offering up her "comments" on your work, which are really just thinly veiled insults that she issues to establish how much smarter than you she is.

She is almost always, without fail, a raging feminist, hellbent on showing the patriarchal Academic world that she and her vagina are just as capable and knowledgeable as Dr. Phallus down the hall there.

If you are a female student of hers who happens to NOT share in this radical, we-must-castrate view of men, you might as well drop her class. You are chicken shit. You might as well have sprouted a penis and time traveled back to the days of pre-suffrage for your crime against the feminine race.

right. because THAT's attractive...

Possibly stemming from her uber-feminism, this negative version of the Quirky Professor also has a massive superiority complex. If she is an Education professor, this means starting every. single. goddamn. sentence with "In MY classroom..." and then proceeding to bore you for the next 10 minutes with how something she did when she was in a non-college classroom 50 years ago was the greatest, most messianic teaching method that a group of high schoolers had ever seen.

In a non-Education class, this superiority complex bares its fangs in other forms, such as the Quirky Professor loving the sound of her disdain-filled voice too much to ever dare let students speak or participate, or through asking near-impossible questions that she knows her students won't know the answer to, and letting the crickets chirp their symphonies as she smugly glares around the room waiting for one of them to produce a (wrong) answer that she can then pompously correct.


anyone...anyone....? ..bueller?

If you've been lucky enough to have some Hilarious and Endearing Quirky Professors, you've probably signed up for subsequent courses of theirs, even if it was called "You Will Hate Your Life 700" or some otherwise ominous course title. You'll take your chances.

If you've had the Caustic and Demeaning QP, rest assured, my friend, we all have. At the very least, you and your classmates can bond over your mutual hatred and vent about him/her at pint night.



In the classes I'm in with particularly Quirky Professors, I like to keep running logs of entertaining shit that comes out of their mouths during class, and I'm hoping to compile them into a blog in the near future. So, stay tuned.


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