06E016

I am impotent. I don’t have a penis—but that is irrelevant. I don’t need one because I myself am a spectacularly disappointing, flopped-over, flaccid, phallus. In the final intellectual endeavors of my college career, I am not merely coming up short…I am not coming up at all.

It is like I’ve had a raging hard-on for the past four years and just as the finish line is in sight, I’ve gone completely limp. Here I am, all jonezin’ up in the orifice of my college experience and I find I’m softer than an overripe banana. I wonder where it all went wrong. I spent my whole life being told that, just like the boys, I could do and be anything. And here I am, just like the boys: limp dicked. Completely and utterly intellectually limp dicked.

It is not a question of desire. The desire is there. I want so badly to be hot for my senior essay again. To rekindle the glorious times of our youth—when we were nothing more than a notion, the germ of a brilliant idea—before a first draft suddenly became a third draft and deadlines began to loom. There is nothing worse than spending hours locked in a room together shooting blanks. In the end it has nothing to do with my course load; it's about me. This is about my inability to perform.

It is not for lack of trying. I have essentially rubbed my intellectual member raw in an attempt to revive, resuscitate and simply wrap things up. Friends and family keep telling me, “just plow through to the end.” These people tend to be speaking from a place of vaginalessness. For anybody with a hetero-normative vagina knows that such aggressive-agrarian-inspired-pleasure-tilling, is just not possible when you’re working with a wet noodle.

I take solace in knowing I am not the only one feeling so…inadequate. I am not alone. Across the country, students of a certain age are laying prostate over their laptops—adding pages of owijffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff to their academic denouements. A puddle of drool hovers near the space bar as we lay unaroused, unsatisfied and ultimately incapable of just doing it, just finishing it, just sealing the deal. I am waiting for some sort of public service announcement starring a veritable who’s-who of American Academic celebrities to hit the College television station circuit. The great intellectuals of our time—from Gaddis to Gates—sharing inspirational tales of their own battles with Intellectual E.D..

“Keep plugging away,” will be the campaign slogan.

Supposedly this sort of thing happens to everyone from time to time. Remember the goal is not a grand firework finale. Over a million other students will receive their B.A.s by the end of May and I have yet to hear of anyone throwing the Dean of their University to the floor and pulling an old Seinfeld-counterclockwise-swirl as a final graduation gesture.

We just need to get off and get out. Best of luck getting it up.