College is a time for questioning what you believe; it is a time when your thoughts are challenged in the classroom and in life. Nearly three years of college existence have shaken my belief down to its very nuggety center. I have cast off earlier assumptions and hold every belief that has survived this gauntlet near and dear to my heart, which is amongst the nuggety filling in my center.
I now type here before you, calling to you to lay down your assumptions, perhaps on a sofa or an ottoman, and examine them closely as I myself, after 40 nights and 40 days of trial in the desert where only the dry rock and heat accompanied my anguish, have also done.
For example, there is a famous baseball player-though he mustn't be that famous since I can't remember his name-that does not believe in dinosaurs. Really, this is a bad example because this poor man is just lying to himself. I mean, there have been not just one but three Jurassic Park movies.
Perhaps a better example is my mother. She does not believe in puffins. Puffins, as you may recall, are those lovably soft, felt-like birds that are always on rocks overlooking the ocean, touching their multi-colored beaks as they stare affectionately into the eyes of one another-assuming, of course, that you believe in puffins.
Closer to disbeliefs with which you might be familiar, my roommates don't believe in cleaning. A friend of mine does not believe in the Dark Energy that is at this very moment accelerating our universe with negative pressure towards an uncertain future of possible causal isolation and a world without chocolate bars. Craziness aside, I think my point is clear that even what a normal person would call the most fundamental beliefs are often questioned by non-believers.
Prepare yourself for my blasphemy: I do not believe in dry-clean only, tofu, or the United States Postal Service.
One who only reads the tags of one's garments and does not question authority will be led to believe that were they to place the smallest drop of moisture on his or her dry-clean-only apparel they would cause international DOOM. My friends, this is in fact not so! Just last week I threw a dry-clean-only sweater into one of the campus washers provided at an extreme cost to the student body by our misery student government. In went the detergent, in went the sweater, and, to be cautious, I also threw in a fire extinguisher. Forty minutes and several loud noises later I can say without a doubt that there was no DOOM on any of the shriveled threads that I was able to scrape from the sides of the washer walls.
Now, on to tofu, that staple of people who don't eat tasty things like animal insides, animal backsides, and animal sideways sides. It is a biological fact that if it looks like glue, and tastes like glue, it's definitely glue. My friends, far from being vegan, tofu is horse hoof. Every time you eat one ounce of tofu, you eat the feet of approximately 300 formerly-smiling emotion-feeling prairie-dancing, Mr. Eds.
Of all things I don't believe in, the thing I don't believe in the most is the United States's supposed Postal Service. You're trying to tell me that individual postmen and postwomen, in their starchy uniforms and boxy cars, traverse this country like Kevin Costner did in that one movie in order to deliver papers and parcels at a fraction of the cost that it would take you or I to arrive, by boat, plane, or car, to the intended destination that is the completion of this sentence? Would it not be more economical to instead utilize a transcontinental system of tunnels equipped with shoots and ladders through which an interconnected network of neighborhood gnomes might more quickly and efficiently distribute our mail? Indeed, how could this NOT be the case? Wait a minute, Mr. Postman . . . .
Now be off! Question what you know, or think you know. Don't be afraid to do your own laundry, do be afraid of what you eat, and use FedEx.