An Excuse, and a Rant

Hey guys, want to know what full-time grad school combined with full-time work feels like?

(please note, the above photograph has been totally jacked from some other dude's website.)

I have a list of things to do during my summer break, and resuming some kind of normalcy on this blog is about number six, so maybe it will happen?

In the meantime, here is another nonfic one-pager from my class:

What if I fall asleep on BART and someone decides to slam a fistful of their own feces into my face? I am serious. What recourse would I have? I mean, after the vomiting and the crying and the pitiful, pitiful bellowing coupled with frantic get-this-shit-off-me! dance.  There is literally nothing I would be able to do in this situation. Look, I’m not saying it is exactly a phobia, but yes it scares me sometimes. I still fall asleep on the train, but I always sit with my back to a solid surface. Nothing is stopping anyone from coming up in front of me and slamming feces into my face, but somehow, I am not as nervous about this happening.
  
In college, I knew this guy who claimed he would eat a bowl of his own poop for a new car. I don’t consider this even physically possible, but I did write a letter to David Letterman proposing he offer my friend a car and tape the waste consumption for a segment on his show. I guess nobody really reads those letters because I never got a response. Now that guy I knew is my roommate and, to my knowledge, has yet to eat his or anyone else’s poop, though he does have a new car.
  
This reminds me of the unfortunate time a few years ago when my friends showed me a popular erotic video clip entitled “Two Girls One Cup.” I’m not going to describe it for you because I think you already have a fairly accurate mental picture (just tell yourself it’s ice cream!). What disturbed me more than the actual video was the fact that these friends who showed it to me had now willingly watched the thing at least twice.
  

There are a fair number of people out there who appreciate the power of the poop.  Consider a recurring theme in the sketch comedy show Upright Citizens Brigade, in which  a home-security device is fashioned out of a piece of poop on the end of a stick. It never fails to intimidate. They took hidden cameras and tried to sell the poo sticks to passersby on the street. It was so effective that no one wanted to get close enough to buy one.
  

All poop doesn’t scare me. Bat guano downright fascinates me. I once saw a documentary in which all these bats laid so much guano that entire ecosystems were created. Insects thrived there. When a bat fell off the cave ceiling into the mountain it helped create, it was sucked deep into its frothy maw and devoured by insects and bacteria.
  
See, I respect the poop. If we poop too little, we could die. If we poop too much, we could die. We are born, bloody and silently screaming for air, onto our mother’s shit; when we die, we shit ourselves. Everyone has a poop story because poop is really gross and no one wants it in their mouth, unless that’s their thing, in which case, look, I don‘t want to yuck on anyone’s yum, I’m just saying, please don’t slam poop on me while I’m sleeping on BART. Or, you know, ever.




(I want to write a non-fic book entitled Some of These Things Are Lies, and when Oprah calls me out on the validity of my facts, I will be all, "Umm..." and tap the cover indignantly with my forefinger.)