Excerpt: Diary of a Convention Addict

from Chapter 22

Mr. Ellis was my favorite teacher. Cool guy, probably too young to teach, great to have around when he was leaning over someone’s shoulder in the next row over and gave you a nice view of his ass. Don’t get me wrong, I hated his classes. He was, for reasons only some mischievous deity can explain, the sole teacher responsible for every typography class I was required to take, and there were far too many of those. I’m an artist, not a letterer. Typography—then and now—made me want to slaughter babies. Or puppies. Or kittens. Anything equally as cute and fluffy, really.

So, due to this lack of love between myself and the subject of Mr. Ellis’ classes, I spent the majority of class time finding other means of entertainment. My favorite choices for this were designing characters in my sketchbook that were not meant to look like shirtless versions of my teacher without his glasses (I swear.), thinking lewd thoughts that were not appropriate for a student to have about their teacher, drooling, and pretending that he was lecturing me on the proper way to strip him naked and tie him to the headboard of my bed rather than the finer points of serif versus sans-serif fonts. This, of course, only happened when I actually showed up to class. He had some other job during the early days of the week, so his classes tended to coincide with cons. By this point we know where my priorities were.

It was to my greatest surprise, then, when he approached me in one of the computer labs on a day when I didn’t have his class and was most certainly not pretending to have some homework that required that I be in the same lab as him. He approached me to question me about a specific convention and the things I knew about it. My brain took an automatic detour to getting him hammered and having my wicked way with him in the rave before I was able to complete a rational discussion. I feigned concentration on my work. It always worked well when he asked me questions in his classes and I’d been too busy staring at his crotch to see if I could guess some specific measurements.

Ahem. Not important.