A big wave of relief sweeps over the student body after finals week.
I come to a standstill on my recreational abuse of speed, cease and desist reading about wave-particle duality for days on end and lapse back into old sleeping habits. Students pick up some of the human characteristics they jettisoned during dead week again.
Even the chancellor puts a moratorium on his awful spam mail about the University’s impending financial collapse. But when the action dies off, and there are no summer classes or job prospects on the horizon, the kids get bored.
Some will binge drink and go to Fred’s to start fights at the billiards table. The conscientious and international students will review their schoolwork for the term and scour the market for even the rumor of an unpaid internship at some startup company that is germane to their major.
But “we all hurry to the same end,” as some Latin translation once said about the subject of death. In this case the final destination is just the doldrums — not as fateful, but something to brood over at night, for sure.
To this end, LSU offers a bunch of “leisure courses” during the summer and spring months that probably just about everyone except for a small sample of inveterate campus “go-getters” and alcoholic graduate students is completely unaware of. The extracurricular ruse works to get undergrads out from their slothful ruts during the off-months of school.
Before I was unexpectedly hired to a data-gathering company for a seasonal job across Louisiana, I registered for a leisure course on “mutual funds,” for interest’s sake.
Why not? A little constructive group seminar on fiscal matters never hurt anyone’s professional resume. And if a little mutual funds introductory lecture didn’t set the woods on fire or usher in a bright new career in value-investing for me, well, it was only $49.99.
And as long as you’re not some poor rube who whips out his credit card every time one of those Ultimate Gym infomercials comes on at 4:30 a.m., you have to expect something short of miracle results at that kind of cost.
Even if I learned nothing, no one outside of my immediate family and spiritual adviser had to know that I spent the better part of four hours staring intently at remedial-level stocks vs. bonds pamphlets to the monotone of some 70-year-old armchair economist droning on about financial risk analysis.
So, I gladly registered my classes and rested on my laurels until what I thought would be July.
By chance, I managed to receive a $10 student discount in my confirmation email of the registration.
“All right,” I thought. “Things are looking up already. Maybe Krugman was onto something after all.”
These classes would give me the backstory I needed to finally justify my passionate hatred for that loathsome toad Alan Greenspan, and basically everyone else in that vein who still worships the bull like some Tibetan monk on Wall Street. I would be laughing at sophomore-level arguments for Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics in no time.
But unfortunately the classes still didn’t begin until July.
That’s right, folks — another month of eating chili out of a can on the floor of my unheated apartment before the cash flux really kicked in.The leisure courses FAQ states that registration is open until the day classes begin, which if memory serves me, varies per class throughout the summer and spring sessions.
But since I’ve only enrolled and haven’t attended either two hour session of my money class, it’s anyone’s guess about whether I’ll reap the benefits for dropping $50 on this gig. Heck, it’s cheaper and somehow less demoralizing than the $87 “Interior Decorating with Feng Shui” and not as far off into left field as the unexplainable “Getting Paid to Talk: An Introduction to Professional Voiceovers.”
But with the classes pending, and the 18-inch mark nearing for this column, I can’t speculate much further. So this will have to be the bummer of a cliffhanger you get until a little after July 4. It’s nothing personal to the campus readership; these things are just business.
—-Contact Trevor Fanning at [email protected].