One of my roommates has been singing that 70’s porn theme for the last 24 hours. It’s a lot funnier when he does it.
We’ve come up with a brilliant addition to the English language today. It took both of us to convince a mutual paller that the existing root form of the word held its own spot in Webster’s bible.
"Protraction is not a word!" she exclaimed with doubt.
"Of course it is," the roomie retorted. "It’s a variation of the word protract, which is often deviated to make up "protractor, which is what you used in grade-school math.
"The hawks like to use it to describe the messy fixes their hate politics get us in," I added. "as in... ’this appears as though it’s shaping up to be a long and protracted conflict.’ It means elongated, extended, or drawn out."
You see... there’s only so far a couple of fledgling ideologues like my roomie and I can carry the self-absorbed pretentious kick before the illicit drugs and empty beer cans begin making shit up for us.
"Yeah... elongated and extended..." said my roomie, "as in, ’hey dude... I’ve got the biggest protract-on for that girl.’
"Way ahead of you man..." I couldn’t stop myself from saying, "I just protactulated all over myself again."
And to think, they’re considering giving the two of us degrees, and sending us out into the world.
See, a head-full of illegalities will put shit like that in your mouth.
Some people are well-adjusted, and turn their trips into brilliance.
Until some ties from the Harvard school of business come along, buy the rights for a penny, market that beam of light to the public, make an outhouse full of money for-themselves and convince the creator to go back to school for retraining. You may have heard of this scheme before. It’s called...
"Life-long learning."
And you too can have a piece of the pie for the low-low cost of a-debt-so-large-that-the-interest-will-be-more-than-you-can-possibly-make-in-a-month.
But worry not... cause if that education you can’t pay for gets old and outdated the week after you graduate, you can always choose another flavour of the month, and come back for retraining. Ain’t life-long-learnin’ grand?
If you’re lucky enough to be in the Arts, then you can rest assured that those thousands you put towards this class will provide you with the best damned reading lists you ever did see. Whatcha mean you don’t like this plan? You give us fuckloads of cash... we tell you what to read, then we bring you into class twice or thrice per week, subject you to a lecture on what we think you should have interpreted from those readings, we’ll fire a few questions at you, ask you to regurgitate what our opinions are back to us in a paper, and then chuck a grade your way if yer lucky.
Look at you fukkers out there in readers land... nodding your heads as if you can relate to what I’ve just said.
Feck... I can’t even relate to what I’ve just said. Though I hear it come out of the mouths of people around me every day.
There’s some merit to it I suppose. Many classes are nothing more than reading lists with a bit of discussion around them. But I sure as hell didn’t know all that wonderful shit lay out there just waiting to be read prior to me hittin’ a class or two. And how the feck else are you gonna get that many budding right-wing bastards together and force them to deal head on with the theory of surplus value?
Though that doesn’t seem to deter these little zits from growing up into labour-crushing, worker-exploiting, bigger zits; getting daddy’s corporation to elect them to a seat of power; deregulating tuition to make a spot for their investors in the new "education industry"; tearing down years of accomplishments by the united working class, and generally stealing the highly guarded knowledge of anal dimensions such a yours and mine.
And if they aren’t as successful at proving to us heathens than greed is a glorious and integral part of our economic makeup, as their pecking-order brethren, then they wind up working for crack-ass description definers like Random House or Webster’s.
And just for kicks... they deny us use of words like "protractulation" and "fuknut."
But we continue to kick-it with smiles anyhow, don’t we? That’s what pisses them off the most you know. That we haven’t forgotten that one day, when we’ve got their backs up against the wall, the unwashed masses will raise the collective pen, and scrawl on page 473 of the New People’s Dictionary:
pro-tract’-on: n [pro tract’, on] 1. a part, or thing that protrudes, or protacts. 2. set up, in an upright position. 3. tissue that becomes rigid when filled with blood
~
God Bless the materialists
Melo - 2003-04-14 03:59:41.691345-07
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