Some new words I learned from 10th graders recently:

prevalent adj. Easily prevented. Those accidents during the saw-throwing contest were prevalent.

stopless adj. Full of energy; impossible to stop. After I snorted all those Pixie Stiks, I was stopless.

boredism n. The state of being bored. As How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days went into its second hour, I discovered my boredism was stopless.

Remember when you were little, and you'd always want to go over to your friend's house to play instead of having them come over? Your own house was boring, familiar; your mother won't stop getting on your case about cleaning your room. Their house was exiciting; it had better toys, better hiding places, better food, nicer parents.

Now that you're all grown up, the situation's reversed. "Why don't you just come over here?" you whine over the phone. "It's so cold out. I don't want to get up." Going over to your friend's house is such a hassle; it's inconvenient; it's work. They drink the wrong kind of milk (or don't drink milk at all, the bastards), eat the wrong kind of bread. Their toilets are troublesome, their sofas uncomfortable. They have bad taste in music, perhaps. If they come over to your place, you can stay on your lazy ass, you won't have to put on your shoes and warm up the goddamn car. And besides, you've got the beer.

Time for another installment of Humorous and/or Absurd Excerpts from Academic Papers I May Have Authored.

Derrida's main tool in deconstructing the Phaedrus is the pharmakon, the Greek word translating to "medicine" but meaning both "cure" and "poison." [And] as the god of deconstruction, Theuth manages to evade classification according to opposition by being two opposing elements at once: "he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse again."

From "The Pharmakon: Grounds for Play", March 1997

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