If I take four classes every term for the rest of my time here, I should be able to fulfill the distributive requirements in only five years. I've been working very diligently trying to learn all fields of human endeavor as prescribed by the different requirements, and here's what I've learned: international trade is good, "bienvenidos" means "welcome" in Spanish, don't drink from laboratory glassware, and we're all just brains in vats cajoled by an evil neurologist with electric probes. I've also learned that the distributive requirements are beating around the bush; mistaking the Tree of Knowledge for the Forest of Life, if you will; thinking that the Elephant of Experience is nothing more than its trunk of books.
How did I come to this epiphany, you ask? I was asking that Cray supercomputer we have -- yes, the nutrition kiosk in Thayer -- for the amount of iron in General Tso's chicken when it all suddenly became clear. Dartmouth has many requirements: Physical education, foreign language, nonwestern? Yes. Personal hygiene, etiquette, common sense? No.
I can (slightly) tolerate brown teeth and public displays of affection, but I've always held a bitter grudge against people who are in a perpetual, self-preserving state of oblivion. These people seem to be floating around in impenetrable bubbles which protect them from all subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints. I used to make it my cause to pop these bubbles and set their hostages free, but by some homeostatic process these bubbles resist any violent attempts at exploding them, so I gave up.
I now content myself with passively observing these folks and writing their names on my lists. To avoid letting any personal feelings contaminate my objectivity, I include justification for their inclusion on my lists in the form of specific and (without exception) humorous examples of their obliviousness. At the risk of losing my most enjoyable hobby, I'd like to recommend that Dartmouth begin requiring common sense in all those upon whom degrees are conferred.
The school strives to install the most delicate and intricate circuitry in our heads, but doesn't provide us with the common sense to adapt our circuits to new challenges. For all intents and purposes, we've become no better than our friendly nutrition kiosk. We can quickly recite large quantities of information so long as the question is phrased exactly as how we learned the material. We are quick with understanding explicit relations, but inept at deciphering implicit ones.
I'm not sure of all of the specifics about how this would work. Perhaps a pass fail test. Perhaps subliminal messages in the Food Court music. Electric shock is a possibility. No exemptions would be granted. No doctor's notes. No slipping through the cracks. I can picture everybody petitioning that the requirement doesn't apply to them, but the nature of common sense anemia is that it requires common sense to detect it. In other words, the more devoutly you believe in your common sense, the less likely it is that it exists.
My current vision is of a new distributive requirement (suggestively abbreviated CLU). The CLU would be the hardest distributive to satisfy. Maybe a CLU with a lab component (abbreviated CLA) would be required as well. The CLU (or CLA) wouldn't be satisfied academically. Maybe we would all be subjected to hypnotic regression and our most embarrassing secrets would be published in The Dartmouth -- solving two problems if you ask me. If we become more and more self-aware by public embarrassment and our feelings of isolation, why not perform hypnosis on a wholesale level to boost our awareness to new levels? Maybe it would have the added benefit of melting away the glaciers of portentiousness that encase us all.
But then again, maybe it's more humane that we don't have a CLU. If we can drift through life without any effort and little care, why change? Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Well, he's dead. Not very reassuring considering that he's dead. Maybe we should forget the new distributive and just eat our lotus in peace and forget our worries. I'd be able to graduate in five years without any hitch. I'd be the best damn qualified person to be a nutrition kiosk that money can buy.
