Project 2

Nick was beginning to get very tired of sitting around with his high school friends during the summer¹, so, having few other options, he enrolled at the University of Texas as a liberal arts and engineering double major. When he arrived in Austin, everything went as expected until he saw two small scrolls fluttering around his dorm room. There was nothing “so very remarkable”² in the papers moving about his room (Nick was sometimes quite messy), but these pieces of parchment seemed to have a definite path in mind. As Nick watched these faded, formal-looking documents, they began almost strutting around on their edges – rustling and crackling for attention. Nick began to chase the first one around, noticing part of a phrase - “College of Liber—“ - artfully wrought on the paper’s surface as he positioned himself to catch it. Finally, Nick lunged at the capricious thing and managed to grab it without crinkling it. On its surface he read:

This certificate confirms that

William Nicholas Padon

Has received a bachelor of arts in the College of Liberal Arts

And is entitled to the rights and privileges granted thereof.

Nick was quite astounded since he wasn’t supposed to receive his degree for another four years, but he became even more bewildered when the diploma bent its corner towards his ear and whispered, “Come with me and I’ll show you the meaning of beauty and art – not to mention some fun, fun, fun!” As Nick heard this, the document started tugging him wildly out of his dorm, skipping and jumping with reckless abandon down the street, through the UT campus, across a bridge, and into the bubbling waters of Waller Creek! There Nick found himself in the company of a most peculiar group of people.

In the middle of the flowing stream was a longhaired Plan II girl named Eve, who was wildly munching an apple as she kicked around water and screamed “Anarchy! Chaos! I hate rules!” at the top of her lungs. She was splashing water on a boy who kept falling asleep in the creek as he was reading his biology textbook. His face would dip down until he actually began inhaling the water, and then he would jump up spluttering and slowly sink back down into the pool again³. Eve continued to splash the boy and even began spitting pieces of the apple onto his book, screaming, "How's that for biology! You might as well be studying mortuary science or mobile home construction!" She then danced a jig in her fishnet stockings and proceeded to sit on the boy.

Nick’s attention was then diverted by a large-eyed girl who was weighed down by a sack of trash at least three times her size. Her dark brown hair sprung out of her head in a profusion of coils and ringlets, and the whole nest of it was littered with gum wrappers and pieces of paper that had been soaked in creek water. As she was cleaning the area around the bank, she tentatively approached him with a proffered piece of trash. “We’re having a trash party. Would you like some?” she asked imploringly.

Nick shouted, “This is insanity! What are you people doing here? You’re not making any sense.” He was appalled at the situation, but he was even more startled when a white-bearded professor with a garland of leaves in his hair crawled down from one of the trees. The professor raised his hand solemnly – achieving an eerie quiet from the rambunctious group of students – and pointed at Nick.

“WHAT?!” yelled Nick, making a move toward the professor. Nick was certainly not drunk, and he took offense at such an outrageous insinuation. But the professor was not to be accosted; he had busied himself by taking digital pictures of the somnolent boy who was nodding in the water. At this point, the Liberal Arts diploma bounded up and caught Nick by the arm, laughing and saying, “Of course! He mentioned being drunk...I can't believe I almost forgot; but I often forget things - no matter! Follow me!” as it pulled Nick away from the fray. Glancing back as he was being whisked away, Nick saw Eve and the large-eyed girl trying to cram the sleeping boy into the enormous trash bag.

The tittering diploma dropped Nick off at the entrance to a fraternity house in the west part of campus. As Nick trod through the littered entranceway, he pinched his nose at the smell of cheap, stale beer and cigarettes. He opened the door to the house and was greeted by six inches of amber, fizzing liquid flooding out of the threshold and sloshing around his ankles. He dipped his finger into the stream and tasted the stuff. “Ugh! That’s the worst beer I’ve ever had!” he cried.

“You’d better get used to it…(hic)…if you want to be in a fraternity…,” slurred a voice from inside. As Nick peered through the gloom, he saw two bloated, bearded seniors each lying on a pyramid of empty Keystone Lights. They were both dressed in plaid shorts and undersized pink polo shirts and could only be differentiated by the thickness of their hair. “It’s all we can…(hic)…afford, so quit your moaning and have one,” the hairier one said, tossing Nick a warm beer. Not wanting to be rude, Nick began sipping politely at the drink. The less hair-covered senior said with satisfaction, “Life just isn’t fun without a beer, don’t you agree?” The hairy senior retorted, “Contrariwise, life just isn’t fun without football, don’t you agree?”

Nick was at a loss to respond to them (and to the use of “contrariwise”), so he replied, “I like beer AND football,” hoping to please both the fraternity members. Immediately they both sprang up from the piles of beer and extended their hands in greeting.

“You’re our kind of guy,” they chanted in unison. “I’m John,” said the hairier one. “And I’m Jon,” said the less hairy one. Nick shook both their hands.

“We’re frat guys!” they shouted, slapping high fives and then each chugging a beer. “Let’s show him a good time, eh?” They pulled Nick into their truck, put an open beer in his hand, and sped away to the Horseshoe Lounge.

At the Lounge, Nick’s eyes began to smart from the clouds of smoke in the place, and he wandered over to a group of cute-looking girls who were smoking cigarettes faster than they could light them. As he approached, the sea of girls

parted to reveal a tall blonde with a three-foot cigarette demurely held in her manicured hand.

“And who are you?” she asked Nick sternly⁴, taking a drag from her cigarette.

“But you’re not in a fraternity, are you?” she interjected, blowing a perfect blue smoke ring in his face.

“So you’re nobody,” she said decisively, and all the girls tittered in agreement.

Nick indignantly responded, “I am somebody. This is ridiculous. Just because I’m not in a fraternity…”

But Jon came up behind him and thumped him on the shoulder, saying to the girls, “Yeah, this is our boy Nick. He’s probably going to be in our fraternity. He likes football, beer, that kind of thing. Go on and introduce yourself, Nick.”

The girls immediately started shouting all their names at Nick, and the tall blonde girl swished up to him and put her arm around his shoulder. “I had no idea you wanted to be in a fraternity. That changes everything,” she said, raising one eyebrow. But Nick was pulled aside by John, who told him that he shouldn’t be hanging out with that particular girl because she was Jon's girlfriend. John let Nick know that going out with a fraternity member's girlfriend was something of a faux pax in the frat world and he also advised him that going out with fraternity member's younger sisters was also taboo. The consequences of doing such a thing, John explained to Nick, included all sorts of unpleasant hazing. As he started to talk about hazing, Jon overheard the conversation and quickly strode up to Nick.

"Our fraternity doesn't haze," he said with a firm smile and a firmer punch on John's arm, which made John bristle and glare belligerently at his friend. Nick was slightly alarmed at the intensity of feeling between the two boys, but the crisis was soon defused when one of them offered to buy the next round of drinks. Jon and John continued handing Nick beers and making football jokes until Nick felt quite inebriated. They dropped him off at his dorm with some loud calls of “Yeah man! You took ‘em down like a champ!” and Nick proceeded to fall asleep immediately in his bed.

He was awakened early the next morning by something tugging on his ear and whispering in a papery voice, “Oh dear! Oh dear! We shall be too late!”⁵

“What time is it?” asked Nick groggily, his head pounding from the night before.

“It’s time to solve problems and write equations, of course! How else can you become an engineer?” demanded his engineering degree.

“But my liberal arts degree took me to a fraternity house yesterday,” moaned Nick. “And I have quite a hangover…I think I’ll just skip today.”

“Nonsense! We will walk in a dignified manner as always! Come on, equations are waiting,” it chided, pulling him out of bed and into the street.

The degree rigidly marched towards the mechanical engineering building, humming multiplication tables to itself as it dragged Nick in tow. “Today we have…let’s see…” it muttered, looking into its memorandum book⁶. “Ah, yes! ‘Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’⁷ Followed by Whysics and Worm-o-dynamics. Quite a full schedule! We’re bound to do a lot of doing today.”

“Of course you haven’t!” glared his degree. “You’ve been cavorting around with those artsy-types. Besides, anyone enrolled in Worm-o-dynamics or Whysics is so busy that they don’t have time to talk about classes. But you’ll soon find out what they’re about…”

As the degree said these words, Nick glanced up at the huge square box looming in the distance. The building was painfully uniform; its monotony was only broken by bar-covered windows every couple of yards.

“Nonsense!” cried his degree. “It’s practically a garden of scientific discovery. The place is rife with machinery, experiments, and theoretical models of all kinds – the opposite of nonsense. A scientific garden, I say!”

Nick looked doubtfully at the dull, brown face of the building, imagining the revolving doors to be some huge mouth that would swallow him into its dark recesses, warping him into some kind of antisocial drone. “Kind of an anti-garden, if you ask me,” said Nick, reluctantly following his degree into the dark heart of the place.

Hours later, Nick stumbled out of the box, bleary-eyed and brain-fried after six straight classes; he wanted to go back to his dorm to be alone. As he and his engineering degree wearily walked through the door, Nick’s liberal arts degree pounced on him, pulling on his right hand and giddily urging him to attend the newest art exhibit and go out drinking with some friends. The engineering degree latched onto his left hand, reminding him that he had huge amounts of Whysics homework to do, as well as an early class the next morning. Both degrees continued talking at the same time, steadily rising in volume and pulling harder on Nick’s arms. Nick’s head began to spin, and he looked incredulously at the current situation. He couldn't understand how he had gotten himself involved in such conflicting activities. All he had wanted to do out of high school was be a normal college student, have some fun, and do well in his classes; instead, he was scrambling for an advantage in either of his majors, and he was more stressed out than he had ever been in his life. What was it all for? Why was he allowing himself to be mastered by these things?

“Why, you’re nothing but pieces of paper!”⁸ cried Nick, grabbing both degrees and tearing them up with quick motions. After he threw them off his balcony with an odd sense of satisfaction, Nick settled down to write, wondering about his past and his future – his college-life⁹ and the mysteries it held for him. Musing on the past days’ happenings, he began to scratch out a poem:

1. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister…” -Carroll 11

9. "...remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days." - Carroll 127