So, I took this Sculpture class back in college. It was a small class, and it was during a summer term, so everything was kind of laid back. One of our projects was to mold our heads out of clay. For some reason, the whole time I worked on reproducing my face with clay, I was standing. This was my first class as no longer a Freshman but not really a Sophomore. I had my "newbie" art classes out of the way (Design I & II, Drawing I & II, a couple of art histories...) but I hadn't yet taken any classes of a particular concentration (Graphic Design, Photography, Printmaking). So I'm in Sculpture with upperclassmen and some of them are even close to graduating and they all seem more comfortable than me and I didn't have any buddies... and so, yeah, I stood by myself and worked on my piece. But there was a table to my left and that's where Joey and Seth and Jhordis sat. Joey was cool, Jhordis was neat... and let's just not get me started on Seth-wonderful-Seth,* okay?

Joey was a talker; he had the gift of gab, and he worked the night desk at a local motel. One day, he's telling us about the TV in the motel lobby. The closed-captioning had been turned on, and as Joey was watching whatever movie was on HBO that night, he's reading the dialogue as well as listening to it. And something happened to him that he found surprising: he started to be offended by how much profanity was in the movie. Sure, he'd swear all the time. He watched movies filled with the "f" word. But, suddenly, to be faced with reading all the obscenities made it different. He mused that our ears are deaf to the verbal assault, but our eyes can still be shocked by it. I was inclined to agree.

About this time, Professor Loucks comes by to check on our progress. He hears the end of Joey's story and he begins to tell us that when he and his wife** had their kids, they started not using profanity. "I mean, we just agreed that it's a really inarticulate way to express yourself and we'd rather teach them better methods." This is an argument I have heard before. Namely, when I let the word "damn" issue forth from my lips while my mother was in the room. (I did it on purpose, wanting to test my boundaries. She said she never wanted to hear anything like that out of my mouth. And I responded politely that she never would. It was years before it dawned her I said rather filthy things past her earshot.) I got what Loucks was saying, and I think it's cool he and his wife decided not to swear in front of the little ones.

Not twenty minutes later, it's time to clean up, and I'm standing at the industrial size sink, getting the clay dust and mud off my hands less than a foot from where Loucks is standing next to the door. Professor Osterbind pokes his head in the door and says "Hey, Steve, you remember we got that faculty luncheon in 15 minutes, right?" And Loucks does a little double-take; remember he has not. He looks down at his baggy purple polo shirt, his black shorts and black Tevas, crusted over with molding clay. "But I look like shit!" he exclaims.

I'm giggling when he looks up at me, caught. I hold my hands up, free from dirt and free from the situation. "I know I only said that because of what Joey and I were just talking about..." I smile. And laugh. And wish Joey had been there to hear it.

* Seth was like the Golden Boy of the JSU Art Department while I was there. He could do no wrong. And he was just one or two classes ahead of me, so he'd done it all better and before me, so that I heard countless times "did you see Seth's piece?" or "what do you think of how Seth did this?" I developed the habit of referring to him as Seth-wonderful-Seth.