Conspiracy Theory

This is a throwback for those of you suffering from finals madness right now...

"No Sleep til...(duhn duhn) Brooklyn," the immortal words of the Beastie Boys, and the catchphrase that best sums up finals week, not just at F.I.T., but all over the world. Students are stressed out, sleep deprived, and carry trendy bags under their eyes. Sound familiar? Of course it does, every college is the same. In fact, now that i think of it, it's the whole college setting that breeds lunacy, finals week just adds to the excitement.

Growing up they brainwash you to think that a college education is necessary if you don't want to be yet another homeless person on the streets of New York. So, your senior year in high school, what do you do? You apply to college! Because if you don't, guidance counselors, teachers, parents, and everyone else on God's green earth is breathing down your neck to get those transcripts in the mail or else...you won't have a future. You will never amount to anything.


As graduation approaches, you actually feel like you made a good decision because you can't wait to get the hell outta school, not to mention your hometown. You're sick of the same old people and the same small minds. So, August rolls around and you go off to college, and the insanity begins. They throw you into a mock real world setting with a bunch of strangers, some of them old enough to be your mom, some young enough to be your little sister, and some stupid enough to be your dead dog. Next, they load you up with 18 credits and TONS of work. Textbooks become your mortal enemies. They sit mocking you while you attempt to read a bloody passage that's in the foreign language of "educated." And don't even think about money, that becomes a thing of the past. All of a sudden you are fantasizing about the change you found in the payphone today instead of your significant other. Looks to me like we college students become quite close in comparison to the homeless of NYC.

Now of course, college isn't all school, expensive books, and professor's dirty looks. There is a plus side- partying. Now not only are we subject to cheap, disgusting cafeteria food (FIT failed health inspection not once but twice), but even our nightlife is a reminder that we are poor, college students. Keg upon keg is filled with Beast, the cheapest possible beer you can find. Once your drunk enough, it tastes like hell with an airconditioner, so you really don't mind all that much. But there are some times, in which you are about ready to lick the sweat off of one of those homeless people just to get a taste of a nice, cheap vodka that you still can't afford. So, please tell me how people consider college to be the best possible option?

At the close of every semester, students are fried zombies, missing hair from stress, ready to jump from a window, and shaking from two weeks of IV caffeine drugs, but we are stupidly happy. We look foward to the month off. It's not worth it though, because the break ends too soon and we are thrown into the same routine again in the spring.


So, finally after four hellish years, you graduate. By the time you get out of college, you are so traumatized that you actually think the four years of college were the party capital of your life. If you call snorting lines from a textbook while the strobe light of your computer screen glares in your face, and the lovely bass sound of your fingers drumming on the desk a party, then count me out. But, it's still exciting because you have a college degree, so it's easy to finds a job, right?? Wrong. Not to mention you'll probablly be paying off the loans from school for the rest of your life.


I am still clueless as to why it is necessary to get a college education, so I'm thinking along the lines of this being yet another one of the government's schemes that we aren't supposed to know about. The technical definition of conspiracy is, "The act of joining in a secret agreement to be unlawful or wrongful or an act that becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement." The government's secret agreement is that college is a means to fry people's brains so that they are too oblivious to realize what is going on in the world around them.

Upon graduation, students are legally insane. They are too brainwashed with thoughts of their major, getting a good job, and money. They are unable to function beyond these thoughts. Therefore, they have no time to think about what's going on in the world around them. Let's go back, waaaaaayyyy back, to the days of the Depression. Everyone sat around their radios and admired what FDR had to say. They hung on his every word. These days, you couldn't get anyone to watch the President on television, unless it was the resurfaced, pornographical video of Bill and Monica. What's wrong with this situation? I'll tell you what it is; it's the damn need for college education that everyone has beaten into their heads from the time their head appears in the birth canal. And, frankly, it pisses me off...


**Several hours later**

After peeling my face from the keyboard, I got to thinking. Maybe there really is no government conspiracy. I mean finals week is approaching. Maybe this is a product of finals week lunacy. It has been a long, caffeine saturated, sleep-free weekend.