I go to college. I am a student of higher education. I have a book bag from Gap and a map of my college campus, and for seventy dollars per year they let me park in the parking garage.

I pay, no—strike that—my husband pays an exorbitant amount of money for me to go to a private college with an excellent reputation and a parking garage. When I say exorbitant I mean stupid. My husband forks over stupid amounts of money for my education.

Why?

Because I sleep with him.

Oh, you mean—me. Why do I go to college?

I go to college because when I’m done I’ll be able to get a good job working for an evil corporation that will suck my life’s blood out of me like a giant tick, thus turning me into an empty, fluttering sack of desiccated skin stuff, while that very corporation crushes the “average American” under its evil feet like Godzilla stomping Tokyo.

I am an English major. Can you tell?

And thus we come to the crux of the higher education dilemma.

Parents (or in my case, a sugar daddy) spend stupid amounts of money so that students of higher education can go to school where they are told, often and emphatically by famous authors who never GIVE their books away but always take CHECKS OR CASH for their books, that making stupid amounts of money is both greedy and the moral equivalent of beating up five-year olds for their Halloween candy. These same students are then encouraged to graduate, with honors, so they can make stupid amounts of money, which is cool as long as said student donates stupid amounts of that greed money back to their colleges.

It’s called the alumni association.

Higher education is like one of those Chinese thumb traps, where you stick your thumbs in a tube of cheap, brightly colored paper and pull. The harder you pull, the higher your tuition will go.

I’ve fooled everyone and outsmarted the evil Tokyo stomping corporations. I never plan to graduate or get a “real” job.

For thirty years, I’ve listened to folks whine about: their rotten bosses, their rotten jobs, their mind numbing work related responsibilities, their crap salaries, their crap retirement, their idiotic co-workers, and lest we forget—the crap evil corporations which crush us all by importing Chinese thumb traps from China, forcing us to buy them with their clever marketing ploys which they learned how to do by hiring COLLEGE GRADUATES WITH DEGREES IN MARKETING.

End the proliferation of evil corporations now! Don’t go to college! Be a stay at home mom and paint the baseboards! Because that’s as NON-PROFIT as it gets.

Bang a drum in a public park and demand to be paid the same amount of money as, oh let’s go crazy here and say, a lawyer.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, as a student of higher education, it’s that societies can never have too many lawyers or too many drum bangers . . .

. . . or kiosks selling Chinese thumb traps imported from China where they shoot the factory manager when the Ministry of Embarrassment finds out he’s been using cheap, lead based inks and dyes to cut corners and pocket the difference.


Linda (Will Work for Free) Zern












 

It’s a recurring criticism of college life and academia that they don’t represent “real life.” It’s true. They don’t. The mental ballet of the Socratic method of question and answer, the delicate give and take of knowledge given and received, and the glittering fire of minds forever changed are rarely experienced outside the college classroom . . . at . . . oh say, Target.

College is a rare and civilized moment in life, but it is not “real life.” It is a utopian fantasy of what we might wish life could be, might be, if only we didn’t have to get into a sub-compact with bad catalytic converters, pull onto I-4, and commute—anywhere, ever.

However, in defense of the academic experience, I am prepared to discuss in depth what I believe is a little known course of study in “real life” preparation available on your college campus. It’s called Parking Lot, A “Real Life” Prep Course—110.

Parking Lot, A “Real Life” Prep Course is a comprehensive course of study designed to prepare a student for every major “real life” scenario. It’s all out there, in the parking lot—injustice, competition, inequities between socio-economic classes, and of course, hit and run crime. The parking lot at your college campus is a Petri dish of “real life,” and before a student cracks the first classroom door they are out there in the parking lot exploring, experimenting, navigating—getting tickets.

“Real life” is full of bloody, medieval competition—also hemlock.

Competition, defined by the big red dictionary on my desk, is a “striving or vying with another or others for profit, prize, position, or the necessities of life; rivalry.”

The necessities of life include: oxygen, water, ketchup, mustard and a decent parking space within a two-mile radius of Orlando Hall.

Therefore, vying for a parking space is like a daily pop quiz in “real life.”

Out there in the parking lot, cars circle like a swirling flock of vultures waiting for the subtle signs of a retreating vehicle—the glint of a taillight, the subtle shift of a bumper, the erupting blare of thumping music from someone’s trunk, and it’s game on. Seven drivers converge on a single empty space—striving, vying—flipping each other off.

There’s less profanity in a Tarentino film. I can think of few other courses of study that prepare today’s college student for the “real life” Machiavellian maneuvering of the corporate boardroom or the gossipy cesspool of the water cooler than the competition for an exceptional parking space at Rollins College. It’s a student’s best way to get ready for “real.”

Linda (Put Your Blinker On) Zern






 

I walked onto our back porch, caught a whiff of what surely had to be a molting skunk, and started searching for the offending stink monster.

But something about the smell was strangely familiar, a smell that quite possibly qualified in certain states as a toxic chemical spill under EPA regulations. That was no skunk smell.

That was an odor that came into your nose but got trapped in your throat, forming a solid lump of stench next to your left tonsil. It was the smell of musk, rut, and lust. It was the smell of the goat next door, a Nubian buck goat with a head like a cinder block and a "come hither" look in his eye, and it was rank.

I could hardly complain, however, because I enjoy comic relief the way some people enjoy the smell of an aftershave called, "Sex Panther." The goat fell in love with a donkey. The donkey objected violently to the prospect of being the object of buck lov'en. Mr. Medina, my neighbor, objected to the donkey trying to bite the head off of the goat. Mr. Medina chased the goat, who chased the donkey, who ran for its sexual purity.

I laughed. Then I coughed. Then I choked. Because there is nothing in this world, like the smell of a big goat in big love.

Linda (Hold Your Breath) Zern