Spring quarter: a constipating experience

  Howard Ho How could someone be a
masochist? Beats me. Howard Ho can be found in his grimy dungeon at
palmtree@ucla.edu.
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Welcome back from spring break and into another edition of the
grotesque, educational column with me, your masochistic host. As
usual, I’m here to serve up another smorgasbord of
provocative insights to register a blip on your flatliner of a
life. Today’s topic is how to overcome constipation and enjoy
the arts in one fell swoop.

Constipation is one of those unsung joys in life, especially
when your life is spent in front of that ubiquitous enema known as
television. Journeys to the great white throne are usually short
and sweet. There’s nothing wrong with that. But as with
meeting your favorite celebrity, you might want to hang out rather
than just do a hit and run. Finishing an entire magazine article
before the dirty deed is done may be one of the sickest, most
horrifying experiences I can’t wait to have again.

To illustrate the universality of the constipation experience,
spring quarter represents one of the biggest craps you’ll
have to take. Unlike spring break, it’s a time for a
blossoming of more than just ill-fated love trysts, but a great
time to enjoy the arts at UCLA. Yes, the parental thought control
machine would rather have a studyholic who, outside of study group,
has no social or cultural life. To be truly daring, doing culture
at UCLA must be as regular an experience as taking a crap.

There are generally three stages of constipation. The first is
“complacent contamination,” where the victim attains
his fateful bowel movement. This may be caused by a host of
diseases that use constipation as a greeting card symptom. Unlike
them, however, I know that your constipation was actually caused by
an overdose on those tasty Vitamin C pills.

As with constipation, your quarter begins with a load of classes
that seem manageable, like the big turd that you must push out of
your system. As with constipation, the first impulse one has is to
push gently, as if it were another annoyance. Instead, the
constipation fights back by just being stationary while you enter
denial, “Any minute now, my butt will be feces-free and as
soft and amorphous as my opinions and ambitions are.”

This is when one enters the second stage, “conclimatic
conflict.” After realizing that you’ve been on the
toilet for half an hour, you become militant, determined to have
fun in spite of your anus. This means bringing your favorite
magazines, books, crossword puzzles, and even homework.

Similarly, while doing the constipation of academic learning,
feel free to put off school work with trips to Westwood to see the
latest Hollywood propaganda. After all, waiting five hours in line
to sit in the back row of the Fox theater to see “Attack of
the Clones” is a tortuous activity best described by Yoda
when he said, “Stupid are you.”

Some may chose to see the great Festival of Books, coming later
this month. If anything, you should go just to see the sacred,
forbidden Royce Quad grass get squashed flat by big tents. Others
will attend Spring Sing, the UCLA equivalent of karaoke. As your
backlog of readings and late homework assignments pile up, the arts
are the best antidote to put it off longer and longer.

Finally, the last stage of constipation is “contemptual
conflagational,” where one decides to get it over with, if
only because you regret missing the Rembrandts’ song from a
“Friends” rerun. Now is the time to resort to drastic
measures. Soaping up the butt is an unsavory but popular solution.
My favorite is pulling and stretching, trying to create one more
square millimeter of space for those farts that dot the
constipation experience.

During spring quarter, you will find that finals hit you like a
brick. You panic and resort to all-nighters, actually reading books
instead of just the back covers, and calling your friends to ask
what happened during all the classes you slept through.

All in all, it’s a quarter like all others, but you, the
constipation survivor, will feel grateful for the trials and
tribulations of suffering for culture.

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