Here is a tip on how to get good grades in your English paper: Never say anything about a book that anybody with common sense would say.
Choosing a college major
English: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of before class.
Here is a tip on how to get good grades in your English paper: Never say anything about a book that anybody with common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.
Philosophy: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
Psychology: This involves talking about rats and dreams.
Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, and then trained my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor.
If you like rats or dreams, and above all, if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
Sociology: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is by far the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: “Methodological observation of the sociometric behavioral tendencies indicate that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrymatory.”
Planning ahead
The day before my graduation from Soldan High School in St Louis, the principal called an assembly. He wanted to say farewell informally, he explained, as he reviewed our years together. There was hardly a dry eye among us as he concluded, “We will remember you, and hope you will remember us; more importantly, we want you to remember each other. I want all of you to meet in this very auditorium 25 years from today.”
There was a moment of silence, and then a thin voice piped up, “What time?”
Career choice
A father is asked by his friend, “Has your son decided what he wants to be when he grows up?”
“Yes, he wants to be a garbage collector,” replied the boy’s father.
His friend thought for a moment and responded, “That’s a rather strange ambition to have for a career.”
“Well,” said the boy’s father, “he thinks that garbage collectors only work on Tuesdays!”
