dissuade is a word

I remember in college I was doing a stupid business-course-based group project (EVERY business course had a group project. It was annoying to no end. Invariably you wanted to get hooked-up with the "older" student. This chick was annoying, no doubt, but she was sure to overwork/co-ordinate and, if you were lucky, bake cookies.) For this particular project we had to write something up, specifically I had to write something up. In this something, I used the word "dissuade." (I shouldn't even quote it because it's a real f##king word!) This one kid is reading it and goes, "What's a dissuade? Is that when you make fun of someone's jacket?" "No. It's dissuade, you know, like reverse persuade."

Now I am not a man of hubris. If you question something that I believe to be true and you're REALLY convinced, you can sow a lot of doubt in my mind (we're talking movie quotes/trivia stuff, not grand philosophies of life). I couldn't help but pause. "Did I just invent a super-cool new word using a commonly used prefix and root? I should think someone had invented this word already, seeing as how it's so convenient." I also began to question my very enrollment in a business major in the first place - it being the most technical business major notwithstanding.

He thought we should remove this esoteric and abstruse word. I declined, though promised to review. Needless to say I remained un-dissuaded.

In which I may write my last post . . .

So, I am headed back to my alma mater for my 10-year college reunion. Wrap your mind around that one folks. Amazing thing 1 is that I graduated, given how mind-numbingly lazy I was. It took me a couple of years to figure out how if I just did a little bit of work I could do pretty well at school. As I got into more advanced courses, some of them required me to actually think. I had not prepared myself for this and my grades suffered. I was a stupid kid and really were I to go back I would have done much better. The funny thing is, looking back on it, was I didn't drink that much initially. As my drinking increased, my grades improved. Don't get me wrong, I never really applied myself, but I did put forth a reasonable effort. The funnier thing is that I taught myself to program when I was a kid and when I got into MIS (Management Information Systems), it was largely "review." I hadn't used the specific languages and whatnot, but I understood how to code. The funniest thing is that neither of those previous points were really funny, maybe curious.

It's funny, again, not ha-ha funny, but I can still remember the first day I was on the internet. A buddy of ours came back from the lab talking about the "world wide web." WTFs a WWW? We went and fired up the browsers that went to Netscape.com. We eventually figured out that this wasn't the only site on the internet, but back then you did have the feeling that if there was anything worth knowing about on the web, you knew about it. Now there are probably hundreds of sites (in English) that I'd love which I'll never find out about.

They've pretty much rebuilt the entire campus since I was there. Maybe they named one of those computer labs after me or something. Then again they don't consider tution paid as a proper donation, despite my protests to the contrary.

At any rate, should you never hear from me again, I either re-enrolled, died or theMonica left me there sans internet access.