A Fatal Mistake

VERY RARELY CAN a person recall the exact moment of the life-shattering mistake which ruined his or her life, and even more rarely can he or she pinpoint the exact moment when the reality of that mistake came crashing home. I can do both.

One fine spring day toward the end of my freshman year I picked up a pen and wrote the words "English and American Language and Literature" on a piece of paper.

The realization came one night at the very beginning of my sophomore year when I was invited to a cultural event in which my department could strut its stuff--a poetry reading. Although I had heard a great deal of praise for the reading poet, described to me as the "darling of the English Department," I did have some misgivings. The collection of works from which he was to read had been composed in his bathroom, "one poem per sitting," and was titled "Grunts." Nevertheless, I was determined to keep an open mind.

I was wrong. After a great deal of introduction and adulation, a short, middle-aged man who looked like a cross between Bozo and Einstein shuffled up onto the stage, mumbled something about critics being ants, and withdrew a well-worn copy of his latest work.

"My first poem is a political yet non-partisan piece I've appropriately titled `O Nicaragua!':

The hair on your breasts disgusts me

Yet draws me screaming to your altars

As a pig without credit; as a HORse without LOve.

Crustacean lips that would see

And phallic ears that would kiss, hear

Your downy bellows fill with milk.

That is no place for Tupperware!

Where callous cows sing dirty ditties

While Mad Matisse Dances Dostoyevski

And Pat Boone hangs howling on the creaking cross.

Do I contradict myself (i do not, but i do; and doing, don't)

Here is Death's other tanning salon; here

I sit, admiring my nether-face in the mirror below.

When the log rolls over, we will all be dead.

When the log

When

We

Dead.

Flush."'

I bet you think I realized my tragic error somewhere among this tenured lunatic's aforementioned and subsequent rantings. You're wrong. I realized it after he finished his last poem--something about watching his cat eat a slug--and the people around me gave him a standing ovation.

The wild applause not only shattered my hope that this man was an impostor and the real poet was tied up somewhere in a closet, but also confirmed what I had already begun to fear.

I'm in the wrong department.

I soon discovered just how boring it was to write paper after paper about the use of the word "the" in "Song of Myself" and such rot and have often cursed the fateful decision which led me into courses where I had to read Pilgrim'f Progreff or anything by Ezra Pound.

People in other departments and other walks of life have wasted little time rubbing salt in my wounds--from a freshman roommate who snickered "English, eh? Goin' for the big bucks, ain'tcha?" to my financee parents, who equated my joining the English Department to joining a motorcycle gang as far as their daughter's welfare was concerned.

I THOUGHT I was alone in my suffering, but experience has since taught me that everyone here is in the wrong deparment. The problems of each student within his chosen curriculum are nothing compared to the derision he suffers at the hands of students from other departments.

Stereotyping has attached a dreadful stigma to every concentration. At a typical party you might hear: "Oh, you're an Economics major. What position do you play?" or "Irving there is a Computer Science major. He's going to make a lot of money, but he's not a real person." or "Nancy is a Gov jock. Not bad looking for a fascist, eh?" or even "Watch your wallet; Bruce there behind you is a Pre-Med."

A wily person can use these stereotypes to his advantage. An astonishingly higher number of Harvard Pre-Meds appear at Wellesley than have ever passed through any Cambridge laboratory. On the other end of the spectrum, a friend and I once fended off an attack from a squad of Lesley co-eds by telling them we were Fine Arts and Urdu majors.

If all of this seems rather a bit too negative to you, let me be the first to say what a good thing it is that all Harvard students are concentrating in the wrong areas. In fact, what I'm doing now demonstrates an important positive aspect of this deliberately and deliciously inefficient system--it gives people something to complain about other than the food.

Nothing is more fun than a group of people complaining about their majors, rather like soldiers in a hospital comparing their wounds. "I'm an English major" is roughly equivalent in such language to "I've got gangrene," while "That's nothing, I'm an Ec major" corresponds indirectly to "I got hit in the head with a bazooka." "Well, I'm a Pre-Med" means, of course, "I'm slightly wounded, but I survived by throwing my buddies on a live grenade."

Being in the wrong department also leads to incredibly creative adaptations and variations on success. If there's any possible way to a large, secure salary and fame, a Harvard student can find it. If that means being paid to read lines about buttocks to a crowd of undergraduates, then more power to him.

FLUSH.