How the hell else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?

My confidante Ragen just asked me to text her a story while she's bored at work. I sent her the first one I could think of, and I thought I'd share it here.

In my first class the fall semester of 2002 at WKU, we were all sitting around not talking while we waited on the professor. No one was attempting to break the ice, so I just blurted out one of Brodie's lines from Mallrats: "One time my cousin Walter got this cat stuck in his ass."

Everyone turned to me, a few laughed, a few asked me to continue. So I went through Brodie's whole opening monologue. I didn't notice it, but the professor walked into the room in the middle of it and just stood in the back of the room, listening.

After I finished up with the last line - "Brodie, how the hell else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?" - the prof just walked to the front of the class, looked at all of us, and said this: "You know, the term for that is 'felching'."

Needless to say, I almost bled from my ears because I laughed so much and so hard. It was righteous. I got a B in that class, and the prof gave me a copy of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere when he saw that I was reading American Gods one day. Obviously, he was a cool cat. Those were the days, for sure.