Hey, look! My column’s at the top of the page! But
there’s no time for reckless celebration.
It has been brought to my attention that summer is indeed upon
us, and nearly everyone on earth is partying hedonistically with
exotic people at exotic locations, getting exotic venereal
diseases.
But if you’re like me, you’re stuck here at UCLA
doing lame-o summer school with boring classes and oh-so-cliche
humor columnists.
So like Humphrey Bogart (or Han Solo, maybe) once said,
“let’s make the best of it, shall we?”
Therefore we shall. As far as I understand, many of us are
enrolled here in summer school because our carefully crafted class
schedule had us taking about one four-unit class every two or so
quarters ““ meaning that we’d only need around 10 years
to graduate.
Granted, some negative people around here (such as your parents)
might be less than thrilled with the prospect of your college costs
rising about 600 percent. So that’s why we’re in summer
school.
But when you think about it, being a 10th-year senior
doesn’t actually sound like such a bad idea.
Sure, you’d be older than everybody else, and you’d
be worrying about osteoporosis and social security, but you’d
still be partying around, hanging out, and playing Frisbee just
like everybody else. Also, you wouldn’t really have to worry
about going to work, or meetings, or paying off your college loans.
It’s true!
If you stay at an accredited university as an undergraduate for
ten years, all your college loans are automatically forgiven. You
can trust me on this.
In light of this new evidence, to all you kids getting ready to
take your first class of Summer 2005, I urge you to drop out of
college now. I say this because I want to be the only tenth-year
senior, making me simultaneously 1) A campus legend 2) Invited to
every single lingerie party and 3) Irresistible to women.
Since those are the three building blocks of a successful
college education, I think I’d be pretty much set for life,
even if I ended up graduating with a degree in something useless,
like communication studies.
Actually, I’m only kidding saying that you should drop out
of college (no, I’m not) (editor’s note: yes, he is).
The truth is, there are a plethora of interesting classes being
offered this summer that will enlighten you and drain away your
units so you can’t fulfill the pre-med requirements.
For example, there is a wonderful class that Kurtulus Oztopcu, a
professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
is teaching called “Elementary Azeri.” He took the time
to personally write me an e-mail encouraging me to take his class.
So I’m taking the time to mention his class in my column and
demand everyone reading this ““ even professors and squirrels
““ to enroll in his class.
To quote from his e-mail: “The series of courses offers
UCLA students the rare opportunity to study this Turkic language at
the heart of the Caucasus and Central Asia, in the post-Soviet
era.”
Need I remind you, Azeri has recently passed both Spanish and
Klingon as the fastest-growing language in America. So this class
is certainly going to be more useful than, say, getting immunized
against Hepatitis B.
Speaking of e-mails, I recently was sent something from the
Official UCLA Emergency Mass E-mail System. I admit, this kind of
got me in a sour mood, because I had proposed earlier the idea of
using my column as UCLA’s emergency mass contact system.
Unfortunately, the idea never really panned out, due to a lack
of support from anyone with common sense.
But it did remind me how much of a dismal failure all my ideas
are. So I’ve decided to include here the Official UCLA
Emergency Mass E-mail System e-mail address. We should program our
fancy phones and Blackberries and other worthless trendy gadgets to
alert us immediately if urgent@support.ucla.edu sends us an
e-mail.
It’s not a good idea to write to this e-mail ““
really, it’s not. Instead, I’d like you all to write
incessantly and irresponsibly to this address here:
aw-confirm@ebay.com
I ask you to do this because they’ve been sending me
around 150,000 e-mails a day regarding an eBay account I
don’t have, and I’m sick and tired of seeing these
e-mails. You can also write to me detailing your experiences with
spammers, so we can all try to figure out a way to annoy the hell
out of those people.
In closing, there’s another class I’d like to
recommend to you all this summer. It’s Music History 4: The
History of the Beatles. It’s a really fun class taught by a
great professor and, even though she didn’t send me a
personalized e-mail, her class still deserves what I believe is
known as a “shout-out.”
And let’s not study too hard and forget that we are, after
all, college students who are practically given license to do
idiotic things and blame it on our youth.
If you were offended by something in today’s column,
send a detailed explanation to aw-confirm@ebay.com and to
akaney@media.ucla.edu.