Well, the first week of school is just about wrapped up, so by now we should all have a pretty decent"" (as you Wisconsinites say) idea of what we're in for and which discussion sections have enough hotties in them to make attendance worth the while.
Since, in the end, all the learning that will transpire between now and Christmas will be boiled down to a single letter, at this point in the newborn semester basically all of us fit into one of two categories.
Although right now we all sit together at the apex of the grading curve, the difference is in which direction we face.
Either you're the type of person who fancies herself on top of a zero right now and are going to have to claw tooth and nail for every freakin' point, or you're the type who considers himself sitting on a cool one-hundo and each paper, test and problem set is a greedy baby's momma out to chip away at that fat stack. Well, I got news for both of you: It's all downhill from here.
Just like your step-mom always told you, you're going to fail. And everybody is just waiting to see exactly how you go about doing that.
Prepare as much as you please, your phone is going to run out of battery and you'll sleep through that exam. Work as hard as you will, your group partner will get high and forget to do the PowerPoint. And no matter how many Kaplan courses you take or office hours you attend, it's not going to change the fact that your brain is just too dumb and fat to work right.
Chances are that no matter what you do, you're going to end up with a report card not even Chuck E. Cheese would reward, chock full of big Ds for big
Drain on the family income.
But there's hope. Unlike success, which you just have to be born with, the key to failure is trying. If you don't try, you can't fail.
I'm sure we all had a T-ball coach tell us at some critical stage in our development that we were failing to win because we weren't trying. But he didn't realize we were only there to whack a ball with a bat and get treats for it after.
He might as well say that I failed the 100-meter freestyle because I didn't try. Now, if Phelps wants to spend 10 hours a day for 10 years trying to win that, hats off to him; he better win like 20 golds. But me, I'm happy not wasting that many gulps of this blessed cup of life trying to succeed at any single task. And I do that by not trying to.
This modern commerce-driven competition college supposedly prepares us for expects us to excel at one thing, at the expense of adequacy in many things.
The only sane way to stick it back to the Man is to exemplify utter ineptitude at anything. Not because you do suck at life - which you very well might - but because you didn't try to suck, or to succeed for that matter.
Now I'm sure there's an angry mob of go-getters out there reading this getting ready to burn me at the stake for trying to spoil all your get-up-and-go so early in the semester.
Therefore, it might be appropriate here to defend my position so I don't come off sounding like a complete burnout looking to spread my smoldering ruin to the bright sparks of today's youth. But I'm not going to try. And not because I might fail - which I may - but because I'm out of space.
So screw all you haters, I'm right, you're wrong; don't try hard at school. Especially if you're in any of my classes.
Are you one of those ""Be the Best That You Can Be and Try, Try Again"" schmucks? Tell David, or someone who cares, at dhottinger@wisc.edu.
