Karma kicked my can

So tonight I had to get dressed up and head downtown because the president of my college was in town on a big fundraising/PR jaunt, and a classmate of mine was giving her a dinner in a shmancy private club.

Now if you've been reading this blog at all regularly, you will probably remember how little I enjoy

1. getting dressing up

2. heading downtown

3. behaving the way shmancy clubs like people to behave

because I'd much rather wear jeans, hang around the house, and burp and fart as much as I want.

Not to mention that before the dinner I met with someone from the Development Advancement Euphemism-For-Give-Us-Your-Money Office. This was to allow her to ask me for money, and allow me to tell her I don't have any.

Now while I had her in a receptive mood, i.e., before I told her I had no money, I was quite eloquent on my determination not to listen to a fucking word about my college's new engineering program or my college's new $60 million science building.

They are so proud of these things, and they won't stop bragging about them. And I don't give a shit and want them to shut up.

First of all, I don't really care what they're doing now. Hey, I got my B.A. and apres moi, le deluge, which is kind of a stupid way of putting it because my B.A. isn't in French, but whatever.

I'm also kind of ticked off over what I consider to be a colossally unfair allocation of assets. This whole engineering/science shtick is being taken advantage of by a minuscule amount of students. In the past four years they have graduated 100 Engineering majors. Twenty-five a year. Meanwhile the vast majority of students are still majoring in Government, English, Psychology, and Art History. Hello? It's a woman's college.

I can't help feeling a little resentful that wads of money are being spent on a tiny number of students. Even though I know that donors are picking up the cost, and anyway, English majors are way more cost effective than Engineers. We are the cheapest dates ever. (And yes, I probably do mean this in every way.) I mean, shit, nowadays we even have Project Gutenberg, so you don't even have to buy us books. We can get all the old stuff on line for free.

But anyway, for a variety of reasons I want people to shut the fuck up about engineering programs and talk about something interesting, instead. Like John Keats.

Well, my friend had place cards for the dinner. A classmate of mine and I went into the dining room to scope out where people were sitting. And guess where my pal placed me?

NEXT TO THE PRESIDENT.

And guess what the president wanted to talk about?

THE NEW ENGINEERING PROGRAM AND THE SCIENCE BUILDING.

OK, kids, this is where you learn something from the socially adept likes of Poppy Buxom. My solution to situations where people insist on boring me comatose about my college is to

1. cut my food into minuscule bites roughly proportionate to the percentage of students who are majoring in Engineering, and to

2. drink wine proportionate to the number of students who are majoring in the Humanities.

Which meant that dinner was low on protein and high on ethanol. Which is the way I like it.