Pheonix Rising (The Layman's Term: Boy)

I go to a women's college. From an academic standpoint, the lack of men is pretty awesome. There's no testosterone flying around in the air and interrupting you while you're trying to make a deep and profound point about the connection between the self and political thought. (To the guys reading this, please don't think I hate you. On the contrary, I happen to like you very much. I've dated quite a few of your kind.) 

This is my visualization of testosterone. Imagine trying to speak up in class with that in the room.

On the social scene, however, the lack of men is not so hot (unless you don't prefer them to begin with, but that's a different story.) For a while, whenever my friends and I walked around campus, our eyes seeking in vain for the semblance of some masculine figure, we would groan and grumble to each other about how we would be celibate until graduation.

Luckily, it was not our fate to live like nuns for four years. My school has a consortium with four other colleges around the area. The first is another women's college. The other three of those schools have guys! And because the five colleges interchange students through classes, once in a blue moon we would catch sight of a guy sitting in a class. Or waiting for his lunch order. Or standing at the bus stop. Or walking around looking lost, or maybe just awed by our Lothlorien-like campus. I got kind of excited at these boy sightings. I mean, we all did, but in retrospect I think it might have been a little extreme to point excitedly while yelping "Boy!" in a high-pitched Japanese anime voice.

Eventually the solution was figured out by 006 (double-oh-six) and Panda, two clever girls from the dorm down the street. The trick was to think up of a good phrase that would be immediately obvious to those in the know, but otherwise unobtrusive to the innocent observer, in most cases the boy. The term coined was "Phoenix Rising". We used it liberally for a few days, and all was well.

Then one fine morning, the four of us - me, Purl, 006, and Panda - were strolling down the sidewalk of the village commons when lo! and behold, a dark, tall, sultry, resplendent, and Damn Smoking Gorgeous specimen of the male sex came our way. After we were done gaping, Purl turned to me and whispered in awe, "Red Hot Phoenix Rising." 

Now we had a basic rainbow color system to refine our observations, red being the hottest and violet for...not. 

I will also point out that Orlando Bloom as Legolas is more pretty than anything else. He is extraordinarily pretty in those movies.

Next comes Red Hot. This term is reserved for special sightings.

They are so cool and thoughtful.

Red Smokin' Hawt would be for...actually, I don't think we've come across one of those yet. That would be way off the charts and our brains would probably short-circuit and blow up.

But I couldn't leave it at that. No. I then took it a step further and decided that extreme cases of overall heinousness merited a title as well. The following recorded conversation then took place:

Me: So what if we saw a guy but he turned out to be completely hideous?
006: No one cares about those, Primp.
Panda: Yeah, that's why you only point and stare at the cute ones anyway, right?
Me: (ignoring 006 and Panda's sage remarks) How 'bout "Shriveled Phoenix"?
Purl: What?! That's disgusting.
Me: Why? Don't you remember that scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when he first sees Dumbledore's bird?
Purl: Just say it out loud. Try it.
Me: (opens mouth)...oh. Right. (I ponder for a moment.) Well then, how about "Dying Fawkes"?
006: But then it just sounds like he's old and senile.

Seriously, Edward is actually 107. But don't read the books. Your time should be better spent and not wasted on Sparklepires. If you really want to validate that, go read Dan Bergstein's Blogging Twilight on Sparknotes. It's a great blog and he's hilarious.

Why was I the one to come up with the more unattractive and possibly repulsive term? Questionable. Let's skip over that part and just say that we eventually decided on Dying Fawkes because the word "shriveled" has some suggestive connotations. So does the word "penetrate". I don't know about you guys, but I find that those two words are almost always followed by awkward pauses, no matter how subtly one tries to slip them into a conversation. Unless I'm playing Hot Seat. Because in Hot Seat, anything goes.