A Daughter's Letter Home

Dear Mom and Dad,
It has now been three months since I left for college. I have been remiss in writing this and I am very sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. YOU ARE NOT TO READ ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU ARE SITTING DOWN. OKAY! Well then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out of the window of my dormitory when it caught fire shortly after my arrival are pretty well healed now. I only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately the fire in the dormitory and my jump were witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the fire department and the ambulance. He also visited me at the hospital and since I had no where to live, because of the burned out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It's really a basement room, but it's kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to be married. We haven't set the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the love, devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has some minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. This will soon clear up with the penicillin injections I am taking daily. I know you will welcome him into our family with open arms. He is kind and although not well educated, he is ambitious. Although he is of a different race and religion than ours, I know your often expressed tolerance will not permit you to be bothered by the fact that his skin color is somewhat darker than ours. I am sure you will love him as I do. His family background is good too, for I am told that his father is an important gun-bearer in the village in Africa from which he came. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or a skull fracture. I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged. I do not have syphilis and there is no man (of any color) in my life. However, I am getting a 'D' in History and an 'F' in Science and I wanted you to see those marks in the proper perspective.
Yours, Your Loving Daughter.

110 College Lessons

1. Quarters are like gold.
2. Be creative in the dining hall.
3. Flipflops become as important as soap, shampoo, etc.
4. You will never find so many excuses for a bucket.
5. Asleep by 2:30 am is an early night.
6. New additions to the food groups: Mountain Dew, Doritos, Ben & Jerry's, Ho-Hos and Oreos
7. Make sure your alarm clock has back-up batteries.
8. Duct tape heals all wounds. (If not, scotch or masking tape will suffice for awhile.)
9. Showers become less important.
10. Sleep becomes more important.
11. Two meals a day are standard. One for some!
12. Recycling becomes synonomous with laundry ("Oh, my jeans can last until Christmas...there's only a *little* bit of mud on them...").
13. You can never make too many meals in a hot pot (or pizelle maker).
14. 10 minutes is more than enough time to get ready for your first class (not that this is anything really new).
15. Going to the mailbox was never an ego booster/breaker before.
16. It takes more than one person to carry your laundry, books, trash, or alcohol.
17. If the lecture hall is big enough, get someone else's notes.
18. You begin to nap again (also not new).
19. Your bill in the bookstore will almost equal tuition.
20. Isn't it amazing that the book your professor wrote is always required for his class?
21. Labs used to be fun.
22. T.A. used to stand for teaching assistant, now, for terribly articulated.
23. Squirt guns equal stress relief.
24. E-mail becomes your second language.
25. Frat parties are exactly like they are in the movies.
26. Ten-page papers used to sound impossible, now they're a Godsend.
27. You never realized so many people are smarter than you.
28. You never realized so many people are dumber than you.
29. Professors are like celebrities: you see them, but they never see you.
30. Western Europe could be wiped out by a horrible plague and you'd never know, but you could recite last week's episode of "Friends" verbatim.
31. See every movie under $3 that your campus provides; it's actually proportional to the amount of money you have.
32. Roadtrip whenever possible.
33. Pick up all new lingo.
34. Bum rides, money, notes and snacks as much as you can get them.
35. Don't burn bridges, especially if he's good in Biology.
36. Plain pasta never constituted a complete meal before.
37. The health service attendants are there because they couldn't make it in a real hospital, never ever forget that.
38. Forget putting the toilet seat down,you just pray that they flush.
39. Frisbee becomes a contact sport.
40. Care packages rank up there with birthdays.
41. College girls are the same as high school girls, just with more freedom...and no curfew.
42. It was never this bad when you got sick.
43. Pop a vitamin and breakfast is covered.
44. Learn to love your roommate, especially when he leaves you the room.
45. You always thought that worshiping the porcelain god was just an expression...it's not!
46. You'll learn more about male genitalia than you ever thought necessary, guys talk more about that than women and sex put together.
47. Beware the freshman 15, or in some cases, the freshman cup size.
48. Even though the beds are long, they are also extra narrow.
49. Things that were a huge deal in high school are now commonplace.
50. You never thought you would share so much about yourself with people you have known for such a short time.
51. Computer games go in and out faster than the latest fashions.
52. Any game can be made into a drinking game.
53. Disney movies are more than just classics.
54. Find one thing you like in the dining hall and go with it.
55. You will hear more stupid nicknames than you ever thought possible.
56. Phone calls almost never happen and when they do, you just don't get the messages.
57. Cereal makes a meal any time of day.
58. Keep your high school term papers; nowadays, everything is recycled.
59. ATMs are the devil's advocate.
60. Beware the boy in the Care Bear toga.
61. You almost forget how to drive.
62. You'll drink anything if it's free...
63. People still cheat, it's just more technologically advanced.
64. You get really good with excuses for skipping class.
65. The girl you're going to marry may live right next door, so keep your stereo down.
66. Ordering food at 1 am is a common occurence.
67. You never realized how cool you can be.
68. TV becomes a bigger time sucker than ever before.
69. You realize how great your hell summer job was once you get to work study.
70. Keys have never been so important, yet you seem to lose them more than ever before.
71. You meet the type of people you only thought existed in the movies.
72. You learn to sleep with light, noise, extreme temps, and roommates snoring.
73. You don't have to cover your textbooks anymore.
74. You become a juggler with the balance between school, friends, girls, activities, work, parties...
75. You live for chicken finger day at the cafeteria.
76. People that were geeks in high school seem okay now.
77. You begin to realize that college is about the ideal lifestyle, except for those pesky classes.
78. You get good at rationalizing on whether to do homework or not (usually not).
79. Procrastination becomes an art.
80. Jeans may be worn as many times as the wearer desires (for example, see # 12).
81. The only reason you ever dress up is when everything else is dirty.
82. Your parents start to tell you stories about their college days.
83. With all the wealth of knowledge around you, you start to feel like you're on intellectual welfare.
84. Going to the mini-mart is a major treat.
85. Amount of alcohol consumed is directly proportional to grade point average.
86. You have two kinds of shoes: everyday shoes and party shoes.
87. Classes: the later the better.
88. The cute girls actually talk to you now.
89. Care packages make it all worthwhile.
90. The longer you're there, the less you talk about home.
91. Always wear your safety goggles, they're not kidding.
92. You just don't learn last names.
93. Your teachers just went from Mr. and Mrs. to Prof.
94. That calculator Tetris and Duck Hunt come into play even more than in high school Physics class.
95. Card games never lasted for hours before.
96. Vacuuming happens every semester, if you get around to it.
97. Boys will dance in college.
98. People who never talked to you in high school are now your best friends when you come home.
99. You are never alone.
100. You find out what beer sludge is.
101. It's amazing how late you can stay up doing absolutely nothing, yet falling asleep in class or in the library takes an average of two seconds.
102. You spend a ridiculous amount of time pondering the mystery of whether the cafeteria Lucky Charms are the real thing.
103. People magazine is your deep philosophical reading material.
104. You begin to subdivide your room into sections such as den, library, etc. to make it sound like a house.
105. All you have to do to make new friends is have mom send up some cookies.
106. You never realized how quiet your house was.
107. Dishes aren't dirty enough to wash until they have bugs and/or mold in them.
108. Printers only break down when you desperately need them.
109. You get along so much better with your family now that you never see any of them.
110. Your life will never be the same again.

World According to Student Bloopers

One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted together the following "history" of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eight grade through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.

• The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.
• The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked "Am I my brother's son?" God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Issac, stole his brother's birthmark. Jacob was a partiarch who brought up his twelve sons to be partiarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.
• Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fougth with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.
• Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns -Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in "The Illiad", by Homer. Homer also wrote the "Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.
• Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.
• In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athen was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought the Parisians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.
• Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History call people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlic in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March killed him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyrany who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.
• Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harlod mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by George Bernard Shaw, and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.
• The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.
• The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted "hurrah." Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
• The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. Shakespeare never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors. In one of Shakespeare's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miquel Cervantes. He wrote "Donkey Hote". The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost." Then his wife dies and he wrote "Paradise Regained."
• During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and the was called the Pilgrim's Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their was hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porposies on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
• One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their pacels through the post without stamps. During the War, Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
• George Washington married Matha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Them the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.
• Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, "In onion there is strength." Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also signed the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assassinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.
• Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called "Candy". Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.
• Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
• France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish gorrilas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon's flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear him any children.
• The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. He reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign. The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick Raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code for telepathy. Louis Pastuer discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturailst who wrote the "Organ of the Species". Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.
• The First World War, cause by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.