“Oh, while you’re all here: Sam bet me a beer I wouldn’t do this at the dinner table,” I said, then did it.
Susan and Dominic looked at Sam and said in unison “that was a stupid bet!”
So, last night Sam and I were playing Madden (that kid is unfairly good at the game… fucking British kids…). I scored a touchdown and, sitting in my chair, thrust my hips forward twice (like… humping an invisible thing in front of me.) Sam says “I’ll bet you a beer that you won’t do that at the dinner table!”
“Does it have to be dinner?”
“No… but at least half of the flat has to be there.”
“Does it have to be a beer?”
“No Dave, it can be a cider.”
“Deal.”
And then we shake.
“But you have to say something blatantly sexual, to one of the girls at the table, and then smack your own ass after it.”
“That wasn’t the deal Sam. I made two humping motions without saying a word, and you bet me a beer I wouldn’t do THAT at the dinner table.”
“I know… but that’s stupid!”
“Yeah? Why do you think I took the bet?”
Sam still has a gambling problem, and – I’ll have a pint of Strongobw, please.
Speaking of Sam, shortly after blogging about his “AHH, AHH!!! JESUS CHRIST, DAVE!” experience, Sam told me the following.
“See, I know you, Dave. I know that if I retaliate, even though I have it in writing that you think it would be just and fair, you would STILL re-retaliate just because you’re an American! So the way I see it is, I should really just cut my losses and wait patiently for your next scheme!” I almost felt bad… but then Sam locked me out of my room and jousted me in the face with a dirty, wet mop and stole my desk chair… or maybe that was what I was retaliating against… Unimportant!
Our trip into Cambridge was put off until this upcoming weekend. (In case I didn’t mention that we were going to Cambridge… we were… and then we didn’t… and now we are again…) We got our tickets yesterday and I’m stoked.
So, this past weekend was rather quiet with a few excursions, but mostly just hanging out in the flat.
On Friday night, Dom, Susan, Juliette and I went to a party at one of the “nice” dorms. (Keep in mind, I have my own bedroom, a water front view, and a sink… and I’m in the poor kid dorm.) The nice dorms have queen-sized beds, full bathrooms in each suite, and leather seats in front of their kitchen table… and they STILL cost less than housing at the University of Arizona.
We arrived at around 9 and the majority of the 20 people who were there had already polished off a few drinks, including a girl named Sarah. Dom knows her, I don’t remember how, but he introduces us.
“Hi, I’m Dave.”
“Hi Dave, I’m Sarah.”
“Sarah, nice to meet you,” I say and she squirms with excitement.
“I just… LOVE the way Americans say my name! Will you… uhh…. Tehehe…. Will you say my name again? It’s sexy…”
This went on for about ten minutes.
Actually, no: it went on for EXACTLY ten minutes, then guess what happened? (Come on… you all know…) Her boyfriend showed up!
Now, I’m mentioning this not only because her boyfriend showed up (which happens to me more than reasonable or fair) but also she poignantly ignored me the rest of the evening.
As we were leaving the party I was incredibly tempted to go up to her boyfriend and say something like “Hey, tell Sarah I said thanks for the head she gave me before you got here,” but momentary glory of getting her in trouble with El Gordo wouldn’t have been worth the broken nose.
So, after dealings with women went unsuccessful, it was time to go do man things. That’s right: here at UEA, it’s bunny season.
No, no. Not Playboy Bunnies… I mean... BUNNY bunnies!
So, Dominic and I went to the rugby pitch to unleash our inner cavemen. It was time for bunny chasing.
If any of you have a copy of the movie “Homeward Bound” within arms reach, you might want to just pop that DVD into your computer and watch the scene where they tried to do this. Older and wiser than Dom I may be, but he got to play the role of Shadow (making me Chance, the full-grown puppy played by Michael J. Fox)
I knew we weren’t really going to catch any, but somehow after a few beers watching something run at full speed away from you, truly fearing for it’s own life is an empowering feeling. (And in return, I’m sure watching me sit on the grass wheezing for air for about a half hour was an empowering feeling for the bunnies after I decided it was time to call it quits.)
We tried to catch this all on video but my camera’s video capabilities wouldn’t have it. (Honestly, I don’t think any camera could have captured it with how dark it was.)
But here’s something I did wonder. In the unlikely event that I had somehow caught one simply by sheer luck of surprising the thing, what the hell would I have done when I caught it? I mean, a cave man would have killed it and eaten it but come on, did you click that link? Did you see that bunny? I probably would have been so astonished that I even made physical contact with the thing that I’d’ve held on to it in amazement for long enough for it to bite the shit out of my hand, and then I’d’ve dropped it. Good thing I am neither fast enough, nor stealthy enough to catch a bunny.
I only have one class on Mondays. It is my “The Politics of Language” class, which I have commented on in previous posts as being incredibly boring. It still is, but it’s getting a bit better. We’re moving on to some cooler stuff. This past Monday we had what felt like, at the end of it, had been a 2-hour group therapy session talking about our educations.
The professor started us off by writing 20 sentences on the board, and each one of us had to break it down and explain it. Subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object, context, connotation, all that stuff. We all went through and discussed our sentences and then he broke us up into groups of 3’s. He said he wanted us to debrief about how the experience had been for us, and then we would discuss with the class about how that came to be. (That was a poor way of describing it, but I’ll just clarify by continuing…)
In my education, other than what my Dad has taught me about spoken grammar, I have never had any formal education regarding grammar, structure, or even punctuation (minus my lovely copy editing teacher telling me he wanted to send me to Guantanamo Bay for unlawfully harboring commas: the grammatical terrorists.)
I remember roughly in sixth grade they started mentioning terms like “direct objects” and telling us “Oh, you’ll learn about those next year!” This continued, telling us we’d learn it “next year” all the way through something like 10th grade, when all of a sudden in 11th grade we should have learned it “last year.”
My AP English teacher during my senior year, try as she might, knew full well that she was dealing with a bunch of students who had been inadequately informed of direct objects as consequence of our high school being under-funded. I can proudly say I scored a 2 on the AP English test.
But, I graduated high school and made it to college. I decided I’d probably learn this in English 101. They told us we’d learn it in 102. What happened when I got to English 102? “Didn’t you learn that in English 101?”
The reason I said that this was like a group therapy session was because every person in the class, to some degree, had had the same experience.
Professor Womack brought up an essay he’d recently read called, “The Lost Generation of Grammatical Education.” It stated that the baby-boomers had never learned the type of grammar that the “college kids of today” were learning.
But none of us were! Including the two ladies in our class who are my parents age. The professor said that each one of us was dramatically off, and incorrect, in our description of the sentence structure. And then, the inevitable question came.
“But if we can all comprehend both spoken and written English, and none of us are failing out of college because of grammatical mistakes, why is it so important?”
Apparently, that is exactly the point of this entire class. It’s called the POLITICS of language because apparently there’s a movement of grammatical anarchism on the rise and we’re going to lead it! (Power to the punctuation!)
This class may have outed me, and I may be outing myself further by writing about this… but since last year I’ve had the dream of finishing grad school and then making a million dollars writing a book called “I have a Ph.D. in English and I still never learned what a direct object was!” So, for sake of that dream happening, please don’t tell me what a direct object is. I want to see if education will ever tell me on it’s own… because in this degree, it doesn’t seem like it should be something that I have to ask to learn… in the very least, they should be asking why I DIDN’T learn it, but still: no one has.
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