>Subject: Fwd: college is...
>
>Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
>
>1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
>
>     These include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and
>crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas.
>2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
>
>     These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in
>-ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea
>is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam
>books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them,
>you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your
>life.
>
>     It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was
>in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me
>why -- the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I
>have managed to forget one of them, but I
>still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw.
>Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember
>something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in
>oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and
>Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a
>terrible waste of brain cells.
>
>     After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to
>choose a major, which is the subject you
>intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very
>important piece of advice: be sure to choose a
>major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.
>     This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or
>chemistry, because these subjects involve
>actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to
>wander into class one day and the professor
>will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid
>binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five
>significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the
>professor has in mind, you fail. The same is
>true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and
>hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will
>flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the
>other chemists have agreed on. Scientists
>are extremely snotty about this.
>
>     So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy,
>psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody
>really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve
>virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in
>all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
>
>ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read
>little snippets of just before class. Here is a
>tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything
>about a book that anybody with any
>common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby Dick.
>Anybody with any common sense
>would say that Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in
>the book refer to it as a big white whale
>roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is
>actually the Republic of Ireland. Your
>professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby
>Dick anyway, will think you are enormously
>creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of
>simple stories, you should major in English.
>
>PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding
>there is no such thing as reality and then going
>to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of
>drugs.
>
>PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists
>are obsessed with rats and dreams. I
>once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in
>a certain sequence, then training my roommate
>to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a
>doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and
>above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
>
>SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away
>the number one subject. I sat through
>hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology
>writing, and I never once heard or read a
>coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered
>scientists, so they spend most of their time
>translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code.
>If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to
>learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that
>children cry when they fall down. You
>should write:
>
>"Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of
>prematurated isolates indicates that a
>casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory,
>or "crying," behavior forms."
>
>If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large
>government grant.
>