Saturday, November 25, 2006

tangled up in goo

If there's one thing nobody wants a pop quiz in, it's gymnastics. So when the professor started singling people out and making them do athletic moves on the spur of the moment, I tried to sink into the floor. When it was my turn, I instinctively went into defensive mode and showed everyone how to wield a quarterstaff and a broadsword, using the broom handle by the door. Still, the guy complained it wasn't technically "gymnastics." Again, defensive: "Bite me, this isn't a gymnastics class. It's physics."

To which the other students gasped. They were all wearing tights, and what I had taken for the science lecture hall was, in fact, a gymnasium. But what was the proper defense for being in the wrong reality?

The building shook, the ground trembled and split open. The desks and stupefied students tumbled down through the crack one column at a time. Then there was no solid earth beneath me, either. It was about eight feet down into a stream of boiling goo. It wasn't "hot" boiling, just agitated. We watched the professor fail to make any athletic moves and within a minute or so only his hand was sticking out. Another crack opened and drained the goo away. Firemen came to rescue us, even though none of us was one fire.

Just one of those days in imaginary college.

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