higher learning

It's that time of year again...yellow buses have reappeared around the neighborhood, Target is stocking insane amounts of lined notebook paper, and the kids around the block have less spring in their step. In the spirit of the season, though, I can't help but think back to my freshman year as an undergraduate.

Yes, those carefree years...classes only two or three times a day, staying up until five in the morning and rolling out of bed, in a half comatose state, at 7:58 for your eight o'clock class, and the Sunday night condition of the dorm bathrooms, puke crusting over the rim of the sinks, beer bottles plugging up each of the five toilets, and broken glass covering the tile (our janitorial staff wouldn't work over the weekends, for some odd reason).

I also remember the fun times trying to schedule classes as a freshman in college. In high school, it was pretty much a given as to what your classes were going to be. You HAD to take a math class...so your choices were Trig or Pre-Calc. You HAD to take an English class. You could choose between Creative Writing or Literature. In college, your choices were much less restricted, which led to some very interesting course loads. Granted, you were given an Undergraduate Advisor, but if yours was anything like mine, then throwing darts at the list of courses being offered for the term would have been just as helpful.

I'm quite positive that my undergrad advisor was working on commission, he got a cut of his advisee's tuition for every additional year past four that he kept them in college. His advice to me was, "Hey, you've got lots of time, just take whatever looks cool!" His great advice pretty much electived me out in my Freshman year of college. To an 18 year old freshman, advanced math and science does not look very enticing. On the other hand, Intro to Pop Culture, described as 'a critical review of television and pop culture', 20th Century Film Studies, and Short Stories, which by my way of thinking would be a whole lot less reading than actual novels, all sounded very 'educational'. My advisor also encouraged me to follow my instincts and take a sociology class called 'Water'. To this day, I'm not real certain as to what the point of this class was...except to say that we talked a lot about water.

The worst class, though, of his 'take whatever looks groovy, man' philosophy of class selection was the one and only art class I took during college, Introduction to Drawing.

Now, I've always enjoyed drawing. Most of my notebooks in high school contained many pictures of my different teachers. As it turned out, though, this was not the collegiate idea of 'art'.

For the first half of the semester, we drew boxes. At the start of every class, the professor would toss out three or four cardboard boxes, and we would draw them for the next 90 minutes. We were allowed to miss two classes before our grade would drop by a full letter. I missed my allotted two during the 'box drawing' portion of the class. Then one day, out of the blue, a lady walked in, dropped her robe, and we graduated from boxes to nudes. Quite a jump. And take it from me, there's not a whole lot of similarity between boxes and naked women.

Now had these women been Playmate quality girls, you can bet that this would have been my first of several art classes while in school. Unfortunately, the women we drew were 'Elephant Girl', 'The Chick with the Hairy Pits', and 'Anorexic Annie'. I'm sure that they went by much more normal names such as Brittany and Jennifer in their 'real' lives, but this is how I knew each of them. Which was all well and fine, until the day 'Old Professor Guy' walked in, took his pocket protector out, dropped his briefcase, and removed all of his clothes.

Some people say that the human body is a beautiful thing. I strongly disagree. And as this old man struck a basketball pose, feet wide apart, knees slightly bent, his back to me, I realized just how cruel a thing gravity really is. I know that the women of the world experience the whole 'saggy boobs' thing as the years pass by and gravity takes hold. But as I looked at this old guy who was facing away from me and saw these tiny little balls dangling between his knees, I realized that guys aren't exempt from gravity either. I also realized, as I skipped the other art class that week in favor of lunch with a friend, thus missing the final class with old dangly balls as the model, that I just lowered my grade in art. I ended up with a 'C' in art class, which was a small price to pay, really. Because I learned an even more important lesson from the whole experience.

To never, ever, take another art class again.