10 Pacing is everything. Serious attendance now will only lead to rampant before-noon drug use later. Skip tomorrow’s econ lecture to insure that you make it to the midterm.
9 Boy, you must have had some serious beer goggles on last night to bring home that whale of a partner whose squishy, corpulent mass is now strewn across you, breathing into your ear like a choking car muffler. To avoid a hernia, let sleeping blobs lie, catch some more Z’s and send a nice e-mail later to your Intensive Spanish TA.
8 The teachers are just trying to play with your mind, don’t you see!
7 In the time you’re wasting learning about modern European history, you could probably be having menage-ad-infinitums with many desperate, sex-starved Rumpus editors.
6 Are you worried about getting into that English seminar? Don’t worry, you won’t.
5 Besides, the word on the street is that Harold Bloom lures unwitting student lackeys into his house before he kills them, stuffs them and uses them for make-believe tea parties where Shakespeare and Harold Bloom are discussed extensively.
4 Since the editors you love are canny enough to figure out that Harold Bloom isn’t teaching this semester, come write for Scene instead of doing weird science with the other bearded EEB crazies. Rock journalists create gods.
3 Because of its exciting atmosphere, so unusual to Yale academics, shopping period is the only time when students can hit on professors. To do so, you must wait outside the lecture hall, leaning against the wall James Dean-style and politely offer to smooth the ruffled feathers of that crotchety, white-haired expert on bird languages whose students all left. Who can refuse an easy “A” and a television miniseries?
2 Free-style rapping with the Flower Lady on the corner of York and Elm.
1 Yale’s shopping period is in fact a reality television show along the lines of Fox’s just-debuted “Temptation Island.” Here, as there, booze abounds, and if you drink enough of it you might be tempted into attending interesting-looking classes. Many will fail, but the lucky few who stay glued to their computer screens looking at Internet porn for the duration of our two weeks walks away with the opportunity to compete on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”