you're too young & eager to love

I'm supposed to be listening to a lecture. It's boring and tedious, while the teacher prefers to lecture by the grand ol' style of Death By PowerPoint. Seriously, if you put every detail of information up on a PowerPoint slide, allow the slides to be available before (and after) class time, then simply read off the slides ... how does that give me incentive to arrive, let alone participate?

Yay for getting a 96 on the first essay assignment though. Woo.

I'm going to spend this entry raving about Mary Roach's Bonk. She's also the author of Stiff, which is about (to my understanding) cadavers and what occurs to the body during/after death. Bonk is about sex. Or, well, sex and science. The psychology of sex. On top of being fascinating, Roach writes what could be a very boring text in such a witty, clever style that I've literally been laughing out loud while reading it. Seriously. Sitting in the salon, at work, I'm laughing. In my room, I'm laughing. I haven't had a book been able to make me laugh out loud (repeatedly) in quite some time.

A charming element to her writing style is her affinity for footnotes. These footnotes normally expand on some detail of her information or stray off into funny anecdotes. They're ultimately my favorite aspects of the book.

I'm including two of my favorite footnotes.

1) "I always assumed Priapus was a god of something manly -- war or shouting or chariot customizing -- but in fact he was a god of fertility and gardens. One mythology Web site calls him the "the protector of all garden produce." Clearly troubled by the girly job title, he took to wearing robes slit high enough to display his enormous cucumber. Those caught robbing his garden were promptly sodomized. "If I do seize you ...," reads an epigram in Smithers and Burton's Priapeia, "you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles." Encyclopedia Mythica reports that outside of Rome, Priapus was "never very popular."

2) "Kegeling has since been taking a step further, in the form of vaginal weightlifting. The idea being: You don't just flex your muscles if you want to build them up; you train with weights. I once tried the Feminine Personal Trainer for a story. It came with a slip of paper telling me not to be overwhelmed by its weight. I wasn't. I was overwhelmed by its size. Suffice to say, this is the only workout on Earth that calls for vaginal lubricant. The directions tell you to insert and contract, causing the FPT to rise up inside you until all that can be seen protruding is a doorknob-shaped piece of steel, as though you are giving birth to a hardware store. I use mine as a paperweight."