[Originally published October 2009]
| I spent the better part of today talking to people about school, in both Hartford and New Haven (thankfully much more the latter), and at some point I mentioned “underwater basketweaving,” as an example of a particularly narrow and useless major. The fellow I was talking to laughed, because he’d often used the term in the same way. It turned out that we’d both been doing it for a long time, and neither of us knew why.
A bit later, it suddenly came to him. We both went to the same school around the same time, and he recalled that in fact, that was available while we were both there. It was some art elective, obviously, or the sort of class that pre-med students take because it’s relaxing and completely outside their major. Every school has a few classes like this, where you’re not sure how some professor talked the school into allowing it. I doubt anyone will readily admit it, but I’ve long suspected they’re there partly as last-minute pick-me-ups, which is silly but defensible. Many students will pack their major early, leaving room for more electives in their last year or so. This leaves more breathing room for the intensifying demands of their core study, and also more flexibility for the unkind things that happen in the infernal bowels of course scheduling computers. There’s nothing quite like finding yourself in your last semester, right on schedule or even a few points ahead, only to find out that that one really sweet elective you wanted is either filled up or right on top of your practicum lab. Guess you’re not graduating on time! And all these other classes are suck! But hey, what’s this? Exploring Patterns of Limb Retention in Hellenic Statuary? I’m not in Classics, but hey, three points is three points when you’ve got one foot out the door. Sure, what the hell. Someday I’ll unexpectedly surprise my doctor friends when I explain why Vishnu’s got six arms. In fact, I love this class. Or sometimes, someone decides halfway through their joint disciplinary in Women’s Studies and Pre-Socratic Poetry Devices that they’d like to be able to eat and have a roof over their head at some point and that waterproof clothing that doesn’t smell is actually pretty good, and runs to the Liberal Studies counselor to do something — O god, I don’t want to spend my life standing outside the local coffeeshop acting like I don’t regret every choice I’ve made up this point. Help! Toss a few Poli-Scis on the barbie, season and turn, and now you know where that harpy in Human Resources came from, and why she knows so much about how to stew and can eggplant even though she can’t operate a spoon. Pick-me-up courses are lifesavers. They’re not really good for anything by themselves, unless you need to fill a few awkward seconds at Olive Garden after Bob from accounting let one fly during the boss’s toast, or against all odds your niece mentions something about 16th Century Dutch tea trade while visiting. I mean, that stuff does happen. Mostly, though, it’s the matriculate context that imbues these oddball throwaway courses with actual value. At least half the time, it really is nothing more than three points, right now. And half the rest is, One more minute of Theories in Criminal Intent and I’m going to kill someone; I need to squeeze some clay for awhile. Often, it’s what they’re not that’s worth it. Yet we can’t escape the original logic behind all this. These courses weren’t dreamed up by officials for these reasons: the Dean of Academics doesn’t actually care if you graduate on time, as long as you do before he retires; and the Dean of Students doesn’t mind if you take out a few other students on your way out (or down, or whatever). And even though it’s the most clearly logical explanation for everything that goes on at college, there really is no giant cosmic clown running everything behind the scenes for his own obscure purposes: that’s just a joke, no matter what your friend in Philosophy says. (Everyone knows that Phis are stoners. I mean, have you ever really read that stuff? They’re also extremely unfunny — as in, the diametrical opposite of funny. Mostly because they think jokes are supposed to make sense. The only time they ever come even close to being funny is when they think that anything else is supposed to make sense.) The truth is much more bizarre: Someone thought it was a neat idea. More than one someone, in fact. It takes several someones, all of one accord, to decide that Expressions in Cheese is genuinely not a worthless and awful idea, before it enters the back pages of the Spring course catalogue (where you will always find these, like sparkly little booklice, because otherwise no one will take them). Someone, somewhere, at some bright moment in the not-so-distant past, was consumed by a thrilling epiphany that the soul of humanity’s long spiritual trek from the vedas of Ancient India to the Milwaukee Polka Fest, is found in dairy products coagulated by stomach scrapings and mould. Oh, and if you show up drunk for this class, you are so fucking booted, and you can explain to your folks why you’re coming back here in the fall. Face it: you love this class. While it’s easy to overlook most of these as inscrutable, boring, or both — or squint your eyes and see it as Artsy Thing You Need to Graduate or Beer, Wine, and Spirits: Awesome, Or What, Dude? — the fact remains that whatever you think of it, someone else honestly feels this is the best. class. evar. and you are extremely privileged that it’s available to your unworthy mind. This person is almost always the professor. And that’s why the professor hates you. Because he knows you don’t love this class, his cherished personal gift to the Humanities (and pretty much every other major, including some that don’t really exist), and he hates you because he knows that at some point, inevitably, you’re going to let slip that you think he’s got an ugly baby. An ugly baby. You monster. You don’t deserve to be here. Or anywhere. Or even alive. And that’s the real reason people avoid these classes. Because unless you really are somehow majoring in Fantastically Odd Shit That No One, Not Even My Fiancee, Wants to Ever Hear About, you are unworthy to be taking this class. You can’t get on the professor’s good side, because he knows you’re there for every reason except the only valid one. And that’s why we try not to know anything about them. There was something about Underwater Basketweaving that just wouldn’t fade from the mind, though. I mean, yeah, it’s a delicate, time-honoured craft demanding patience, focus, and skilled dexterity, but so is Pulling Up Your Pants, when you’re in college and it’s late on a Friday night. Hell, Finding Your Way Around Campus is practically a whole major in itself. (With a concentration in Getting a Great Parking Spot. I recommend LOST 317 – Strategies in Tickets and Fines.) It was just so odd somehow, so random-sounding, like Journey in Breakfast Cereals. Yet fun-sounding, too. You could just imagine all those almost-grads, plunging their hands into washtubs in glee, bending away to the dulcet singsong of a tiny middle-aged lady who discovered to her delight at some point that she could stay in school forever if she came up with something that she loves, and could do better than you ever will, and that you’ll gladly swear you love if it means that you don’t have to come back. I actually have little concrete idea what went on in that class. Maybe it was horrible. And I don’t know what happened to it. These courses never stick around for very long. Maybe the old lady died or something, but I think it’s more likely that they all depend on a certain amount of ignorance about them, and once word gets around, that’s it. Or maybe there’s a constant supply of new wonktastic course notions that never stop coming, and while most of them die, one or another gets the leg up and the old lady gets the heave. I don’t know. All I can say is that that course name has stuck with me all these years, even as I can’t remember the name of any course I actually took. So, I’m thinking of maybe taking Mystic to Montauk: Whaling Shanties of Long Island Sound. I hear Professor Greybeard’s a slide, man.
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Invisible Accordion 