OK, I actually have this guy's permission to print this. This is an amazing peice of literature.
Author: Dave LaFonteese djlafont@students.wisc.edu
Hey, I know that you are probably constantly bombarded with top ten
list type forwards and stuff, but try reading this, I wrote it tonight and
am sending it out across the known universe:
PARALLEL REALITY
XIII
It is around this time of year that overachieving high school
seniors, after months of repeated pestering from parents and relatives about
selecting a university to attend, usually make the difficult decision to
bludgeon their families to death with wooden ladles. Some, however, usually
those lacking readily accessible wooden ladles, opt to take a more arduous
route; some choose a college. Of course, there is no time to visit every
interesting university, particularly since most campuses are inconveniently
located apart from each other, sometimes far apart, often days by car or
weeks by camel. To make this dilemma a little easier, I shall humbly guide
you through a tour of one such campus, the University of Wisconsin -
Madison, selected pretty much because I've never been anywhere else.
Our tour begins with the southeast dorms, a collection of high-rise
towers on the edge of campus. These dorms consist of a multitude of dorm
rooms, similar to the lockers you may remember from high school, only
smaller. Most rooms are populated by freshmen, a curious race of beings>
that spend most of their time playing cards, drinking beer, and drinking
beer. This lack of a variety of leisure activities is somewhat
understandable, since dorm residents can cram only a meager number of
possessions into their rooms. As a result, rooms are fairly similar in
setup, generally consisting of two beds, dressers, and desks, and a
microwave atop a VCR atop a stereo atop a televesion set atop a
refrigerator; some sort of variety is possible, however, as some students
elect to place their VCR over, rather than under, their microwave. Nothing
more can fit in these rooms, and only a small nothing at that.
Leaving behind the drunken screams and smell of vomit, we arrive at
State Street. State Street is kind of the heart of the university, except
that it's bigger than a heart, way bigger. Also unlike a heart, it has a
bunch of stores and people scurrying all over it. The best word to describe
the people you'll meet here is `balanced', and the best prefix is `un'.
These colorful denizens ensure State Street's status as a melting pot of
paranoia, schizophrenia, Lithuania, and really expensive coffee. Because of
them, much of the real commerce of the area occurs outside the shops and in
the street, where ambitious high school students sell drugs, and less
motivated English majors, to supplement their other earnings, sell pocket
lint.
Recently, State Street was thrust into the local spotlight when
Governor Thompson declared the street to be Wisconsin's first Hippie
Preservation Zone, which means that State Street hippies may no longer be
hunted, at least not without a valid license or excuse. Long prized for
their colorful tie-died pelts and the hallucinogenic effects of snorting
their fingernail clippings, hippies come from the 1960s, where they listen
to music, watch lava lamps, smoke pot, hitchhike, paint rocks, protest
against `the Man', consume LSD, and have orgies, often all at the same time;
removed from their natural habitat, however, they mostly just ask for spare
change. This preservation zone is part of a larger statewide hippie
relocation program, in which most hippies are being deported back to the
1960s. The program has not been very successful on the whole, as
bureaucratic difficulties in cataloging all hippies, assessing their
eligibility, and reversing the flow of time have instead brought the result
that most of them are being thrown into a big pit just south of Rhinelander.
Okay, we spent way too much time at State Street, so just like any
quality tour we're going to whip right by other points of interest in a
half-assed manner. Going right by Memorial Union and other very interesting
areas we arrive a Bascom Hill. If State Street is the heart of UW Madison,
Bascom Hill is the spleen. A spleen with a twenty degree incline, that is.
Bascom Hill is just one of many non-horizontal sections of campus, except
that it is even more non-horizontal than most. Students who have classes on
the hill develop strong leg muscles early on in the school year, before they
simply say "To hell with it!" and skip lectures. That is, until the first
warm day of spring, when every single male student walks up and down the
hill repeatedly, gawking at the half-naked women sunbathing on the slope,
hardening their calves and, uh, other things. There are some really old
buildings too.
One would think we're proceeding west but no! we are in fact now at
the Humanities building, which we would have toured earlier if only I had
the willpower to cut and paste. The Humanities building is an ancient
fortress, complete with archers, horsemen, and knights, all banded together
to protect the venerable castle from its arch-enemy, All-That-Is-Not-Anal.
To enter, one must present the two symbols, of the humanities major
brotherhood, a two line poem and an eight page analysis of it, including a
discussion of the sexual orientation of the poet. We will not enter, as I
am not prone to writing long unimportant papers. I'm much too busy for that.
Now we arrive at Grainger, a processing plant where freshmen are
inserted at one end on a conveyor belt. On their four year voyage on this
belt through the building, they are transformed from yuppie larvae to
businessmen, after having suits surgically attached to their bodies and
their personalities scoured away with Brillo pads. After emerging from the
building, they are dumped into a truck and taken to various cities around
the globe, where they make lots of money, control the world, and scratch
their heads in puzzlement while reading Dilbert cartoons.
Taking a right onto Charter we run into Sterling Hall, the home of
those most dashing of students, physics majors. We've been lucky this year
to have a large number of graduating students in this department, continuing
a twenty year trend of increasingly good physics major harvests. Most of
this increase is attributable to the recent installation of a photograph of
the sun, which many Sterling Hall inhabitants have only read about.
Contrary to popular belief, physics students are allowed Outside
occasionally, but usually opt to simply look up the www.outside.com webpage
on the department Pentiums. All humor aside, though, Sterling Hall was the
site of the university's greatest tragedy in 1970, when, at 10:00 pm on the
first Saturday night of the spring semester, a bomb exploded, killing every
physics major and graduate student UW Madison had.
We could proceed to the Engineering section of campus, but what the
hell for, I don't speak Japanese. So I think I'll stop the bus here. I
hope this tour has been informative and all that, or at the very least less
painful than it was for the last tour group I led, which I sacrificed to
Baal.