Graduate Students Love Fun Too

Over the CLCWEGSA¹ listserv this afternoon I learned that a faculty member had graciously agreed to donate her old junk to furnish the future "graduate student lounge."  According to the email, "She says she has a nice futon, some rungs, and a few more ideas to make it a more comfortable space."  My first response?  Thank the lady for luxurious ideas.  But then I thought about her offer of "rungs."  Because what this graduate student community really needs is a jungle gym. 

Freshman have their "fifteen."  Graduate students know how to multiply.  I decided that in addition to rungs, the Graduate Student Lounge of the Future could stand for some swings.  Swinging invigorates both mind and body! 

If we're gonna have rungs and swings we oughta have monkey bars too.  Sure there's something inherently racist about the African-American students swinging on the monkey bars, but who cares?  I'm talking about monkey bars here people.  Monkey Bars.  What hunched graduate student wouldn't disavow Derrida after a few hours of monkey bar-induced glee?  (Besides the closeted Republican one, since he obviously hates fun.  Why else become Republican?)

Nothing could improve a graduate student lounge with rungs and swings and monkey bars.

Except a slide.

So I sprung into action and formed the CLCWEGSA Wants Monkey Bars and a Slide Committee.  Our first meeting is tomorrow.  I anticipate the Swing Faction will complain about their marginalization.  But don't worry.  If they don't like it they can take a long slide down a short . . . slide.

[1] Comparative Literature Creative Writing English Graduate Student Association, pronounced "click-weg-sa" and hands down the worst acronym ever devised by people with ostensible mastery of the English language.

Comments

[pseudored]

If my grad student lounge had a slide I would have spent much more time there! But here is the danger as I see it: slide + coffee = third degree burns. You could ban coffee, but then you have to ask, will promise of a slide trump caffeine fix?

[Zach]

I'd push for a kiddie pool.

[eM]

You should demand a sheet fort and flashlights for late night reading.

[Stephen]

As long as you have high ceilings, what you really need is a trampoline.

[T. Scrivener]

Oh, oh can we bring back nap time for the freshman? Formals for the faculty? Imagine post-colonials and deconstructionists getting their hands on "See spot run".

[Belle Lettre]

I've been in a funk this week, this has surely been the thing to lift me out of it.

You had me at "monkey bars" and then killed me with the "long slide down a....short slide."

But just when you're dead, you're reminded that the best stuff isn't even made up--oh, how I remember "click-weg-sa."

Thanks for the laugh, I needed it!

[Belle Lettre]

BTW, you missed an easy "swing voters" pun. Slide into action! Vault yourself to success!

[Natalia]

A sheet fort is a good idea, but I seem to remember making forts as a kid out of... books. (To my parents' dismay.)

[Luther Blissett]

It's amazing how the same conversations go down from graduate program to graduate program. My first year of grad school, some Mary Poppins type grad students wanted to band together to decorate our lounge. Others of us liked the dank 70s decor -- it made it OK to spill beer and cigarette ash wherever and whenever.

Anyway, the debate began on the listserv, and I made a modest proposal: let's cut a hole in the floor and run a fireman's pole from the 4th floor lounge down to the 1st. That way, whenever an literary emergency went down, we'd be on the scene even quicker. My friend then proposed that we carpet the walls and floor of the lounge in an orange and black shag he remembered from childhood experiences in hippy VW microbuses. Finally, we called for a rotating heart-shaped bed, so that when the grad students boffed their professors and/or undergrads, it was done with class.

Luckily, the debate was settled when we learned that it was against union rules for non-union labor to perform any re-decorative work in a campus building.

[Debate resurfaced, though, when, following the Deans' refusal to continue giving us free home internet access through University servers, I floated my plan for free mass communication throughout the metropolitan area via pneumatic tubes and tin cans connected by string.]