By Dave McLean
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose an education. Choose a family. Choose a big fucking student loan, choose eating, laundry, utility bills and electrical malfunctions with your home computer… choose acs 5 and wonder what the fuck you’re doing at school on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in the Atrium, watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing first years pretending to know it all. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a two-bit job that doesn’t interest you, but you thought would be a good career choice. Choose your future. Choose University.
Choose classes. Choose your course load. Choose an advisor. Choose waiting in a line for whatever it is you want: parking, books, food, help, advice, medical assistance. Choose a big fucking student loan. Choose Computer Science 203. Choose out-of-date professors who still haven’t learned to inspire, but do great research to pad the university’s pockets. Choose an administration in tune with student needs, one that diverts attention from itself by placing blame for higher tuition on a bigger scapegoat, the Alberta government, who eventually pawn it off on the feds.
Choose your politics; choose a Students’ Union and four vice-presidents to represent you. Choose the candidate with the most experience, choose 10 points of vision, choose the platform that promises everything, but can’t come through or never intended to. Choose a leader of high moral character who represents students, or at least says (s)he does. Choose tuition abolition and pay taxes through the nose. Choose events of character with no attendance. Choose apathy. Choose school spirit. Choose two part-time jobs to make ends meet and let people tell you why you’re apathetic.
Choose snow, winter and -25 degrees. Choose walking across campus over highly polished ice sheets fit for curling. Choose being locked out of your own student building because the heating system can’t melt the ice. Choose the winter blahs combined with three midterms and a group project due on Friday.
Choose reading week; choose it because otherwise you’ll go nuts. Choose drinking yourself to oblivion in the Den because you chose a big-fucking student loan. Choose Leon the Frog as your favourite mascot and leader in moral support; choose hopping from floor to floor reading his story, wondering why you never did anything that cool. Choose painting the rock. Choose the Info-commons because the labs in Social Science are caught in the past.
Choose your future. Choose sucking-up and kissing-ass when you finally graduate. Choose making the right contacts and knowing the right people. Choose schmoozing and lunches and coffee and meetings. Choose $25 grand a year wondering what the hell you did to deserve this. Choose grad school and LSAT’s and GMAT’s and honours theses. Choose schmoozing and lunches and coffee and meetings. Choose chumming with the Dean and being friends with the Boss. Choose marriage. Choose a mortgage. Choose interest rates, cable TV, credit cards and long term debt. Choose democracy. Choose Internet access. Choose consumer goods. Choose life. Choose death.