The amount of time I've been devoting to not blogging is pretty intense lately. The fault, naturally, lays in that pesky little thing called graduate school, which I hate to love and love to hate. It's been consuming a disproportionately obnoxious portion of my time these days, not to mention my neurons, so it came as no surprise to me when I read this article and was suddenly ready to take up arms in the fervor of revolution against textbooks. I even went so far as to add the link on Tumblr and title it Why Textbooks Blow. I KNOW. (Speaking of Tumblr, are you following me yet? Because you should be.) As a now-seasoned graduate student, this being my second year and all, I can safely say that the real goal here is to pass every class. The bar can become rather low, I've noticed, when it comes to having to take super-specialized classes that focus on tiny details for which only a handful of us students has any interest. Which leads me to my point: if you want to be actually learn anything, you'd best be able to joke about it.

In the midst of last Thursday's three-hour lecture, things were rather dull despite the fact that it's my favorite class this semester. I think even my professor was bored, because she was less animated than usual. I know this because her sarcasm was not up to par with previous weeks; a shame, really. But lo and behold, she managed to make things interesting by adding a sexy lilt to her words upon a shift in topics. "...Soooo, dysarthria."

I was instantly amused, and the following gmail chat suddenly took place between me and my friend Fiona:

Phil: way underused (and rightly so) pickup lines: "...So, dysarthria." Fiona: haha right? wow, you look HOT do you have dysarthria? Phil: have you been working out? I'm so inspired by your dysarthria.

That's as far as we were able to go in our oneupmanship, it was that good. And since I'm still chuckling about three days after the fact, that means that either it did the trick or I'm just a sad, pathetic soul.

(Oh, and before the politically correct and sensitive speech elite police attack me and crown me a complete asshole, I suppose I'll disclaim here by noting that this isn't meant to degrade or poke fun at anyone with this disorder. It's purely phonological entertainment, which is nerd linguistic speak for the fact that dysarthria is a damn funny sounding word. Seriously.)