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In This Issue

• Life After Graduation? You're Kidding!
• Touched By Tom Brokaw
• Mr. McLaughlin's Culturally Confusing Neighborhood
• Livejournal: Hardcore Gateway(TM) Drug
• Columbia Decompiled
• Looking Back At Evolutionary Monkey Business
• How Right You Are!
• The Fed Kidz Page
• Veganism Sucks
• iPod Shuffle Advisory
• The Great Debate: Tune In or Pass Out?
• Weapons of Ass Destruction
• Letters to the Feditor
• THEY WATCH
• The Blue And White

M. "Teddy Baby" Holden

Godzilla in undergarments (size 512 ZZ)... a dream job!

A strange thing happened over winter break. I was planning just to plant myself on my parents' couch and lay there watching Comedy Central and eating dreidel cookies for a month, while I looked forward to a final semester of taking only basic drawing, two gym classes (Intro to Fitness and Wellness and Beginner Swimming), and some class called Samurai, Cowboy, Monk. But for some reason, my parents kept asking me, "So what are you doing next year?" It wasn't only them. Whenever anyone I knew saw me, they would say, "So what are you doing next year?" Even people I didn't know were saying it. It was like some creepy episode of The Twilight Zone. And it made it really hard to hear Jon Stewart. When I answered by saying, "Well, in May I'll be done. You know, done," their reactions were not exactly positive.

My fellow seniors, like me, you have probably recently come to the unpleasant realization that you will not actually be "done" when you graduate. You will be done in the sense of being "done having things paid for by your parents," "done having health insurance," and "done referring to 10am on a Wednesday as 'the middle of the night,'" but in other important ways, you will not be done. For example, after college you actually have to keep doing things. What kind of things, I wasn't really sure, until on a lark I disabled the e-mail filters that block spam from Columbia administrators-it's an option in pine-and serveral hundred e-mails from some place called "the Center for Career Education" came pouring in. At first these were hard to make out because they were composed almost entirely of cryptic phrases like "Goldman Sachs" and "human resources" (which I imagine means something like using humans as car fuel), but eventually I figured out that what these e-mails were trying to tell me was that I am supposed to get a job.

Ah, a job. I suppose on some subconscious level I knew it all along, but Columbia has done a lot to confuse me about this. For example, I was once told that Columbia College does not allow its students to major in creative writing because it is "pre-professional training"(?). And Columbia will not give credit for internships because "they do not educate you, but rather teach you job skills" (www.columbia.edu/missionstatement/). So you can see how I came to think that if I was getting educated I did not need to worry about getting a job. I guess I assumed society just liked to keep educated people around, like how some people keep dogs around despite the fact that they contribute nothing more than their droppings to society. I was counting on society building me a little house in its back yard, providing me with bowls of gooey meat, and occasionally letting me pee on someone else's lawn, while most of the time leaving me to work on my dissertation on "Gender and Japanese Monsters."
   The problem is, though, that after four years spent mostly writing academic papers on "the other" in sixteenth century literature, I don't think I remember how to do anything useful. In fact, I can't even think of what anything useful might be.  If surviving for days on only ramen noodles, a chocolate bar, and kalamata olives is a job skill, then stick me in a suit and call me employable. If not, I'm going to have a problem.

Some of you may be reading this and thinking, "But I'm an English major, and I've had a job lined up since October." In that case, you are a douche bag. And by douche bag, I mean you're working in finance, aren't you? As it turns out, working in finance does not require any skills except the ability to squirt antiseptic water into a vagina, which is a metaphor for whoring yourself out to The Man for sixty grand a year. Investment banking firms, it seems, will hire anyone who went to Columbia. But I have to say, you people have a lot of gall to make all those comments about the alienation of the individual in commercialized society in 20th Century Lit. class and then turn around and fellate J.P. Morgan.

And I suppose by "gall" I mean, practical sense and intelligence. After all, if you are a slimy worm with a hook stuck in it and employers are fish, then the fish are biting, so to speak. While you have jobs set up seven months before you graduate, I'm considering a career in an industry that hasn't even started hiring people who graduated last year- publishing. Apparently, beginner publishing jobs consist mostly of reading. Hey, I can read. Cha-ching! Even if I were practical enough to sell my soul to The Man, I probably wouldn't know how. Maybe one of you investment bankers can advise me on how to properly conduct the transaction-and on how to clean my vagina.