Legacy

Matt gets pushed around.

Dear Almost Graduates,

Your time has come. May is just around the corner. Graduation: that special day where you don a $50 sheet for six hours and wait for some guy you’ve never met to call your name. That $7 piece of paper is all you need for your mom and dad to announce to the world you’re their favorite and take you out to Olive Garden — because when you’re there, you’re family.
You’ve spent your entire four years at the University doing what others tell you. You’ve followed your counselor’s advice for so long, you’ve missed out on the fun parts of life. Here are a few things you should have done to lighten up your last year as a kid.

Join a fraternity or sorority

The reason you grimaced at the group of drunks tripping every two steps on the way to The Varsity is simple: you were green with jealous rage. In the back of your mind, you would have loved to be 16 shots into a Saturday night on the way to a Molly Ringwalds concert.

General Patton once said, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” It’s your senior year! You should have gone out in a blaze of vodka-soaked glory, not in a blaze of sleepless nights in Middleton Library. Guys, you should have joined a frat. Girls, you should have joined a sorority. But if you still didn’t believe you had time to join the Greek family tree, you could have created a new branch.

Just like the rag-tag crew in Old School, you could have been the founding father of Delta Kappa Delta Tau Delta Ass and been crowned “The Godfather.” Weeks would have been filled with events such as Vaseline-sponsored wrestling matches. Days would have been blurs as you drank so much you slept with your professor’s mothers or fathers.

But insomnia in the library won out. You might graduate Magna Cum Laude, but you won’t have the patch of Delta Kappa Delta Tau Ass on your cape.

Travel to a nudist colony

If Delta Kappa so-and-so didn’t quite work out as you planned, there would still have been something missing in your daily life: nudity. Lots and lots of nudity.

Sure, you could have tried to win the attention of the opposite sex. You could have taken them out to dinner and tried lines such as, “Hey babe, we could talk about the Vietnam War all day, but I would just like to take you home and display the real Tet Offensive … in my bedroom.” But you were never good at charming banter in the first place.

Instead, you should have spared the opposite sex the trouble and headed for a nudist colony. I’ll admit — it wouldn’t have been all ham and eggs. Nudist colonies aren’t populated  with the siblings of Halle Berry and Clive Owen. It’s usually the place where Miles Davis-listening, acid-taking hippies retire. At least you wouldn’t have been alone.

Grab some books!

In school, teachers advised you to read such books as “The Holy Bible,” “The Purpose-Driven Life” or something written by William Shakespeare. You missed out, mon frère, on all the masterpieces of contemporary literature like “Of Mice and Men,” “Catch-22,” “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and the most important of all — “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

This last semester, you could have figured out whatever the hell John Steinbeck was trying to describe. You could have spent hours wondering where the sidewalk ends. You could have acquired even more life insight by reading Eric Carle’s six-page epic.

On your final paper, the quoted passages from your latest library picks could have bumped that high D to a low B. For the question on the Political Science 4897 class on economics and political deterioration in the Middle East, you could have compared America’s greedy ways to the caterpillar’s desire for more apples.

Your professor might have given you a funny look when she handed your test back, but before she admitted her disapproval, you could have said confidently, “I got it from Eric Carle,” paused, then, “You’re welcome.”

Sign up for leisure courses

After your ill-advised essay in Poli-Sci 4897, the counselor reminded you that you did not fulfill all your electives. You could have taken ballroom dancing. You could have enrolled in the judo club.
Hell, you could have chosen Jogging 1000. But, you took History 4109, a.k.a. Millard Fillmore’s Presidency.

During ballroom dancing, you could have learned moves to spice up your dance-floor etiquette. Instead of the peppermill or the shopping cart, you could have done something from a Shakira video.

In the judo club, you could have learned how to finally win the annual Christmas dinner political discussion by pile-driving your entire family into the yard. If one of them came back for air, you could have done the signature “Atomic Elbow” and yelled, “What now, conservative?”

In Jogging 1000, you would have shed pounds, exercising two times a week with a new best friend. You wouldn’t have had to carry out a Hefty bag full of books from Chimes Text; you could have bought a new pair Nikes and gym shorts.

But you locked yourself up in your room, memorizing lines from Millard Fillmore’s inaugural speech for the one and only test of the semester.

Good idea. He was as relevant to the United States as Shakira is to pop music.

Admit Defeat

Almost-grad, you might think these would have been worthy options. Heck, you might think you should have taken my advice your entire life.

The truth is, you only have a few days left before you enter the real world — that place where the day begins at 5 a.m. to the Armageddon-like blast of your alarm clock.

All you need now is a platter of the finest, greasiest breakfast from Louie’s.

Paying $15 for a stomach-full of chicken-fried steak and eggs is exponentially less expensive than joining a fraternity, traveling to a nudist colony, catching up on literature and taking a full load of leisure classes.

Now, that’s a glorious start for the beginning of the end.

Yours truly,

Matthew Sigur
Student Adviser