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In This Issue

• What To Do With Books
• Craigslist Finds New Ways to Disturb
• Ovary Mining: Profit In Your Pants
• Letters to the Feditors
• Experience? Uh, no
• Sitting On Babies?
• The Internet = Porn. Porn = The Fed. Logically...
• "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Dregs?"
• Hey, Athletes! Need a Team? Call Me Ishmael.
• Hot Sex? Meh. Mock Interviews? Ooo Yeah, Baby.
• Swipe, Suffer, Suffocate
• From The Desk of Lee "El Cuisinart" Bollinger
• Practice Protectionism in the Bedroom
• Living at the Speed of 2.99x10^8 m/s
• Sensitivity Training Averts Termination
• Congrats, You're Fucked
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• THEY Watch

Shaina Rubin

Books: the new steroids.

Upon graduation from Columbia, the typical student will face an important logistical problem:  what to do with all those books?  The solutions which spring to mind most quickly – burning them, shipping them home, throwing them away, or shipping them home burnt to be then thrown away – are enticing, but rather than pushing these stores of knowledge into the oblivion of an academic past, why not incorporate them into a budding professional future?  That’s correct, books can help one’s career aspirations!

    What?  Now I’m not suggesting that having read the canon will at all help a Columbia graduate find employment in the monstrous, technocratic, soulless capital omni-structure.  At best, the only professional result of reading great literature will be decades of regretful mourning over your shrunken soul which, trapped in the dead-end life-suck tailspin you’ll inevitably enter to pay the bills, can no longer recognize or appreciate meaningful human experience.  Indeed, the real career benefits of books reside entirely in their physical nature, as big heavy things with pages.

    First, you can use a book to make your briefcase/purse sound heavy.  Any CEO who catches the “new guy” (that’s you) traipsing through the lobby with a rattling briefcase will be thinking, “That fucker’s expendable.”  You’ve got to convince people that you’ve got more in there than a stapler and a bagged lunch from Mom.  Put a few books in your briefcase and toss it onto every surface you can find, just to let bystanders know you mean business:  accounts, faxes, secret prototype widgets… who knows what important items are making that clunk?  Only you, clever ex-literate!

    In today’s business world, the quality of your physical appearance, i.e. the extent to which you could kick someone’s ass or have hot sex, is also extremely important.  For men, this bias leads to neglect of the scrawny.  Thankfully, you skinny Columbia men can stuff your clothes with books.  To create the impression of more body mass, a white-collar gentleman can slip a few CC treatises down the front of his shirt to create a barrel chest.  Or bulk up those biceps a little by sliding some paperbacks up each sleeve.  All of a sudden, the top brass upstairs are calling you “chief,” “champ,” and “killer.”

    Ladies know the aesthetic pressures of corporate America quite well, but the use of books can give them advantages they never imagined.  First, an observation: most women are smaller than most men, and most tall women are either beautiful, envied, or both.  The subconscious power associations of height are too good to pass up, so women in the workplace should sit or stand on top of books at all times.  Tall Tammy corners you at the copy machine and tells you to stay away from “her” earnings project?  Stand on five math books and she’s eye-level with your middle finger.  Pervert Pete comes into your office to call you his “little kitten?”  Sit on Plato, and with new confidence tell Pete you’ll never sit on him.

    Gender issues aside, what really ought to count in the workplace is skill in your field.  Books again come in handy for tricking people into thinking you have skill in your field.  Whenever knowledge of a specific professional issue would impress the boss, get one of your books and wrap it in a new cover as if its contents pertained directly to that issue.  In conspicuous locations around the office, open this book and stare at its words intently.  When your boss asks you what you’re reading, show him the “title”:  “Organizational Paradigmatic Restructuring,” “How to Shut Down an American Factory” or “Loud Asshole: Why We Must Fire Ted.”  Your awe-struck superior will say, “Oh, yes, I‘ve been reading that as well,” and give you a promotion, while your soon-to-be underlings will clamor to know which professional journal told you to buy that book.  Journal?  Just go staple a bunch of old college syllabi together and charge your colleagues for a “subscription” … those unread state school buffoons!

    You may not have the drive to use books in creative ways to improve your career prospects.  That’s fine.  It’s fine if you decide to stick to your routine a little longer.  See if you can find a position that challenges you by following the rules, showing good character, and working hard.  Then when that fails, you can see that books will help you one last time.  When you hit the breaking point, when the miserable, meaningless life you chose crashes through your mental walls of self-deceit and your mind’s eye pans over yourself at the age of 37 sitting in a windowless break room or regional conference or annual performance review, you’re going to need to attack a bunch of people and office appliances.  And not just attack – bludgeon.  This would be a good time to have a giant schoolbook, because books can maim and destroy.  Now science students may be at an advantage since their books are almost uniformly mammoth, but for graduates of the humanistic sciences, several useful works come to mind.  The complete works of Shakespeare are easy to find and heavy enough to break bones.  Classics students can use a Greek-English lexicon from Strand (1800 pages, twenty dollars) and make hundreds of cornea-piercing paper ninja stars.  And a Holy Bible hurled through the windshield of an executive’s Porsche is quite a statement.

    But let us suppose you are one of the talented few who can rely on wits alone to get ahead in business.  You rise to the top of your field and defeat your competitors thanks to sound business sense alone.  Yeah, but then you get bored, and so to fill the hollow void within you, you decide to defraud your customers, the government, your employees, everyone.  Your justification: fuck them.  At this point, books will once again come in handy as you sit in white collar prison, as they did in your lost youth, for intellectual stimulation.  And still to kill people, if you want.