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In This Issue

• Jem and the Holograms Suck Major Holo-Ass
• Students Get Involved, Eat Pizza
• Kids Aren't Worth It
• Can You Tell Me How To Get, How to Get to HIV
• Corporation Brightens Otherwise Bleak Childhood
• B'nai Mitzvot of Yore
• Cap'n Planet Saves World, Gouges You
• Bad Street Brawler Jerks Off Crime Off the Streets
• Science Proves America's Youth Turning Japanese
• On the Glorious Afterschool Special
• Chicken Soup for the Athletically Inept Soul
• A Researched Dildography
• Rider Strong Gets Stalked, Interviewed, Married
• Furry is the Way to Be

It used to be that school was about academics. You attended classes and, ideally, learned something. You went home at the end of the day, and if you were good, you did your homework. Maybe you worked on the school newspaper or played in the band if that was something you were really interested in, but it was purely optional. If you look at The Wonder Years, which is, of course, an exact reference guide to what life used to be like, you know, back then, you will see that Kevin Arnold was only very occasionally involved in extracurriculars, and even then it was only to impress Winnie Cooper.

But alas, it is difficult to get by being so uninvolved these days. Within the first month of attending my "college preparatory high school", the guidance counselor came to our health class and sternly warned us that we had better start getting some club presidencies under our belts, and fast, because if colleges saw that we waited until junior year to get really involved, they wouldn't even give us the time of day.

The result of this culture of "involvement" is the appearance of some pretty bogus clubs. To refresh my memory, I looked through the extracurricular listings on a number of high school websites. On the web site for the Bronx High School of Science, I found a listing for the Weather Club. "Meetings are normally a half hour," the description says. "We order out for pizza every meeting. Normally, in each meeting we would have weather quizzes, and we would discuss the current weather conditions. Members can come in the morning to report the weather directly to Mr. G." Perhaps we can assume that Mr. G, the club's sponsor, suffers from sensory impairment of some sort, so by telling him the weather the club members are performing a community service, but basically it sounds as if a group of pizza-eating friends with nothing to talk about decided to give themselves a name so that they can look like they are involved with school activities.

On the website for Evanston Township High School in Illinois, there is a listing for The Pun Club, "an opportunity for students to use language for fun in puns and other forms of wit and humor." The founder of this club probably had an academic profile that allowed her to get into any school she wanted: "1520 on the SATs; graduated fifteenth in her class; 4.072 GPA; and founded the Evanston High Pun Club, serving for 3 consecutive years as president. Now isn't that a good precedent?" Having a cheesy sense of humor won't get you anywhere on its own, but having a bunch of cheesy friends and getting your school to officially recognize your collective cheesiness can make you look like the kind of active person that competitive schools are looking for.

The award for Most Confusing Group goes to something called the FFA Club at Southern Vance High School, North Carolina. There is no description save a somewhat circular motto: "Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve." Had they not filled their webspace quota, I imagine that they would have included the rest of their motto, which probably goes as follows: "Serving to Live, Living to Bowl, Bowling for Dollars, Vying to Try, Trying to Take My Own Life," and finally returns to where it began with "Taking My Own Life to Learn." Below the motto is a "list of haps," which includes a "TAR Federation FFA CDE at SVHS." Hey, if you have to ask...

The best high school club I found, though, was at Springbrook High School,in Silver Spring, Maryland. This club is The Ski Club, of which the entire description is "Virginia ski trip." I admit that this club does sound like it could be fun. And members show that they are the leaders of tomorrow and well-rounded participants in their school communities because they . . . uh . . . go on a ski trip together. They will clearly make better qualified college applicants than those students who were too apathetic or poor to go skiing in Virginia.

Despite all the community-fostering value of high school students doing their socializing in official school-sponsored organizations, I wish I had gone to high school back when students didn't have so much pressure to be involved, and they could just be apathetic to their hearts' content. After all, colleges must have a place for antisocial losers. Where's our pride in desperate solitude? That's what being a nerdy intellectual is all about.