WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 4, 2002
4A - THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
OPINION
SA
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2002
Jay Krall
editor
864-4854 or jkrail@kansao.com
Brooke Hesler and Kyle Ramssey
managing editors
864-4054 or bhesler@kansan.com and
kramsey@kansan.com
Laurel Burchfield
readers' representative
884-4810 or lburchfieldkanan.com
Maggie Koerth and Amy Potter opinion editors 864-4924 or opinion@kansan.com
Amber Agee
Eric Kelting
retail sales manager
864-4358 or
advertising@kansan.com
Amber Agee
business manager
864-4358 or advertising@kansan.com
Malcolm Gibson
Malcolm Gibson
general manager and news adviser
864.78678 or malcolm@kansan.com
Matt Fisher
sales and marketing advisor
864.7666 or mfisker@kansan.com
Free for All
Call 864-0500
Free for All callers have 20 seconds to speak about any topic they wish. Kansan editors reserve the right to omit comments. Slainderous and obscene statements will not be printed. Phone numbers of all incoming calls are recorded.
For more comments, go to www.kansan.com.
too many people try to plan their entire lives based on what is true right now.
First off, I would like to let everyone know that hippies don't exist anymore. And if you were a hippie, you'd be dirt poor, and you wouldn't have enough money to decorate your bedroom in bed sheets and pretty colors. People think that if they like psychedelic colors, '60s/70s music and drugs, that they can call themselves hippies. In conclusion, I hope the Kansan never prints another picture of some girl arranging pretty flowers in a colorful room.
Hey, guys, check out my room. It's so colorful. Man, I'm such a hippie.
Isn't it about time for online voting in the Student Senate elections in April. Real online voting, not fake.
At Quinton's, I've observed that there are lots of dudes wearing shiny black shoes.
This is extremely important, and we need to print this right away. I've got a friend named Laura, and she can definitely lick her elbows. I think everyone on campus should know that.
To the prime-number-volume-number girl in the Free for All, that's not weird at all. Personally, my volume has to be on multilies of five.
I'm still searching for my Sharon Osbourne.
too many people try to plan their entire lives based on what is true right now.
This is for the guy who said he couldn't get home because the speed limit was 65 in Iowa. Well, if the idiot would do like everyone else does in Iowa and drive faster than the speed limit, then maybe he could get home. I'm from Iowa, and I don't suck. You suck.
I just wanted to tell the girls wearing the floppy hats that they're out like yesterday's dirty laundry. Floppy hats are out like yesterday's dirty laundry. Thank you.
I think I've been playing Nintendo for far too long. I just tried to drink the flashlight
This is to the person who's sick of the Mizzou sucks comments: If you were a real KU student, you would never get sick of hearing about Mizzou and the extent of their suckiness. So in reality, you suck, too. Oh yeah, by the way, Mizzou sucks, Mizzou sucks, Mizzou sucks, Mizzou sucks.
Do you remember when you were, like, 7, and the biggest badges you could think of was Atreyu from The NeverEnding Story?
Yeah, well. I rented it this weekend, and all I could think of was how much he looked and sounded like Natalie Portman, and that's not very bad.
I'd think it'd be fun to date a homeless chick. She'd stay over a lot.
This is to the hot Joe jeep that followed us all the way from Wichita. Will you go to my semiformal this Saturday?
This is blissbemy, I'm from Missouri, and my own birth mother, just told me that she likes Mizzou's Tiger stuff better than the Jayhawk decorations. I can't believe this. This is terrible. She wants me to go to Mizzou now just because she likes the Tiger better. How can I live like this?
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Yo, Nick and Kirk, why don't you guys spend a little more time on your game and a little less time reading your own press clippings? Oh yeah, Mizzou sucks.
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The girls of KU are about as hot as the KU basket*ball team was against NIT competition. Oh, snigibility-snap, girls.
I see a lot of girls of KU around, and I just wanted to tell them that they're just about as hot as my grandma. And that's not very hot.
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I just want to say to everyone who is reading this, you know what?
Thanksgiving break, any break, Christmas break, whatever, your parents know when you're drunk. Don't go home drunk' cause you have to talk to your parents, are around them when you're drunk. Anyone who thinks their parents don't know when they're drunk, their parents are being naive for a reason, purposely. They know when you're drunk. They're pretending not to know, Good Lord. Anyway, anyone who thinks their parents don't know when they're drunk, you're living to yourself.
Your parents have been in college, too.
They know when you're drunk. Trust me, I found this out from experience.
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is, like, the greatest movie ever. Except for the snake. Damn. I hate snakes.
I was calling about a lost or kidnapped lawn gnome. I is approximately 2 feet tall, made of cement and answers to the name David. I would appreciate any information. Please get back to me. Thank you.
K-State sucks
too many people try to plan their entire lives based on what is true right now.
I just wanted to know if you guys could help me find a job. Because I need a job, If you know a place that I could work where I have limited responsibility and make lots of money and don't have to do very much work, why don't you just let me know that?
You know what I think the most wonderful thing about the Free for All is? You can call in and just admit that you're a stoner. I smoke pot. isn't that wonderful! ? I smoke pot. I smoke pot. I smoke lots of pot.
(sung) Oh there's no place like home safe from GSP where I don't have to eat the nasty food. If you want to be happy in a million ways, then don't ever live in GSP or Corbin Hall.
GRITZKE'S VIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Don't plan your whole life by one college advising session
Life is full of surprises. Each day brings new challenges and new ways of seeing the world.
COMMENTARY
Something about today might change the way you see tomorrow, and it is impossible to see what might happen a week, a day, even one hour from now.
Because we cannot know what is going to happen in the future, we have to decide how we live each day.
Sara Zafar opinion@hansan.com
The problem is that there are too many factors that come into play for us to decide now where we will be even a few years down the line.
The majority of people who try to plan life out too soon find themselves unsatisfied with their life paths.
There is a solution to this puzzle, but in order to reach it, we have to face a few obstacles.
We succeed in these institutions in order to get a good job that pays lots of
We get into a good college to graduate in four years with a good GPA and move on to graduate or professional schools.
One of the first obstacles we have to overcome is our preconceived notions about the way life is supposed to be. Everyone has these ideas, and most of us, consciously or not, let them rule our choices and decisions.
We do well in high school and participate in numerous activities to get into a good college.
money because money makes us happy.
This notion works in the opposite direction as well, keeping people down because their ideas of success appear out of reach if they can't seem to keep up with their peers.
If we are always supposed to do well in whatever we do, failure can seem an impossible roadblock on the path to happiness.
This is only one of countless examples.
The problem is that there is no right way to be.
Everyone finds his or her own way of living, and it is all right not to fit perfectly according to an arbitrary mold of perfection.
Whoever said that we have to pick a major that effectively decides the rest of our lives when we have only been alive for 20 something years?
I know several people who continue their undergraduate education beyond the prescribed four years and are not unhappy.
Why must we constantly be inundated with ideals of money and prosperity going hand-in-hand with happiness?
Many well-educated people choose to go back to the simple pleasures in life, renouncing the big house, the five cars, the swimming pool in the back, all because they have realized that happiness is what we make of our situations not what our situations make of us.
No one knows what tomorrow carries with it.
It is foolish to try and base our actions on situations yet to come, because a single moment has the power to change our entire way of life.
We must remain open to the possibility that we aren't always right in what we set out to do, and as much as we remain open to ourselves,we must remain open to others.
Allowing other people to be wrong once in a while is necessary if we want to be happy.
The bottom line is that there is no bottom line.
What we think is correct now might not be the same later. We should prepare for the future, but not decide our life in a single advising session.
Once we realize that life can't be planned for, we really learn what living is.
Zafar is a Wichita sophomore. She has not chosen a major.
Grads:strut your stuff down the hill now, not in May
ATTENTION DECEMBER GRADUATES: Wondering whether you should return in May to "walk down the hill"?
I have an idea: Walk now.
But for December grads, the University holds no official walk down any hill.
"Walking" is a KU commencement rite of passage enjoyed by thousands every May.
No saunter down any slope.
Granted, the purpose of the May pilgrimage is to reach the epic ceremony at Memorial Stadium, which in December would be decidedly void of cheering parents or even live grass.
No amble down any incline.
grads, most professional schools at KU hold no December ceremony.
Sarah Smarsh opinion@hansan.com
Though the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hosts a fledgling ceremony at the Lied Center to honor fall
Thus, rather than forego The Ultimate KU Tradition, many December grads parade under the Campanile and down Lawrence's most beloved grassy knoll during the spring before or after their actual graduation.
But hear me out.
Still, "walking" may not ring true for those who either still have one semester to complete or have already been whoring themselves at job interviews for five months.
The event provides a sense of closure for many fall graduates whose college conclusions were lost, perhaps painfully, amidst the holiday season.
GUEST COMMENTARY
We worked as hard as those blasted May graduates, but our image paints us the bad kids, the slackers, the Johnnycome-lately heathens who could have graduated last spring if only they hadn't been smoking doobage when they
should have been studying physics.
Well, some of us simply were working our behinds off as double-majors or self-supporting students.
Furthermore, some December grads actually are finishing early.
But we are nonetheless the renegades, the rogues, the rebels who have spat in the face of the traditional four-year college template.
Treating spring graduates as the
Sure, December graduates, you might return in May to "walk," and to explain all day that "actually, I graduated last December."
norm is incongruous with the explol ing numbers of December graduates, which reached beyond 1,300 last year.
But I invite you to go out like the nonconformist you are. Walk down the hill with me at 4:30 p.m., Dec. 15, after the Lied Center ceremony and reception.
Gain timely closure to your tradition-filled KU tenure.
Plus, you're thinking, it will be freaking cold.
You never went to Late Night with Roy Williams so why should you walk down the hill?
OK, maybe you aren't the KU traditionalist ('What in God's name is 'Rock Chalk Revue'? Is it part of this so-called 'Student Senate' I keep hearing about?").
But wasn't it cold when you drank beer on a Kentucky Street porch in February?
How about when you careened down Mount Oread on a scrap of cardboard after the Great Ice Storm of 2000?
And when you camped out for basketball tickets or waited for a bus to carry your lazy freshman self from Murphy to Naismith during fall finals?
See, you really have been party to time-honored KU acts of idiocy. How about one more?
Yes, it will be cold. Heck, it might even snow.
Bring a scrap of cardboard
Smash is a Kingman senior in journalism and English.