fudgsicle.

i rather dislike the first day of a class. every single class, every single professor, begins very unoriginally with the same question:

"so, what exactly is ______?"
fill in what you will; religion, politics, poetry, language, calculus, butts, guano.
it's always the same. the sad and miserable class then proceeds to grope silently within cobwebbed brains for some all-encompassing rather vague term that will most likely earn a "not quite." from the professor. the professor always knows the answer, they want a particular word... like beauty or life or energy or something like that. of course the class never gets it, guessing synergy and patriarchy and anarchy. then the misery ends as we are chided with the correct response and it is subsequently written on the blackboard in scrawling large script. it's repeated, written in every notebook, and then forgotten. why was it necessary for me to be told that poetry is words? i was aware already, as it were.

the only class that inevitably avoids this sad sad sad first day, is language. italian specifically. no, in this class we delve quickly into the names of gelato flavors. thank god. we are told inappropriate italian stories with inappropriate italian words. the word phallic is used by one student to describe the difference between a fudgsicle and an ice cream bar. poetry can suck on its words and politics can bite its governance and religion can swim in its god. in italian we talk about penises and gelato.