EDGAR ALLEN POE WAS A JUNKY, OR HOW TO AVOID NAKED BUS DRIVERS He went scurrying along the tilting deck of the sinking ship, frantically trying to put his life jacket on with one hand while waving with his other to the man on the bow of the ship, who stood calmly sipping at a martini. "Hey! Hey you! The ship is sinking! Hurry up!" Slowly the man in the white dinner jacket turned, sipped at his martini, and asked with a lifted brow, "Hurry for what? It isn't my ship!" If this is your first quarter in college, you need to worry. There are plenty of things to worry about even without the added load of a full college curriculum. If you've been here for awhile, you undoubtedly have run into the professor whose "philosophy is law, gospel doctrine, and eternal truth" all indisputably rolled into one. This article should be of help to us all if we can decide where to arbitrate a line together. Kindergarten is the place where we learn to do everything on the floor we learn to say good-bye to our parents, how to sip 80-day old milk through a collapsed straw, how to choke down a nasty ole stick-in-your-throat, gag-ya graham cracker without any water, and how to add one and one and get a two, whatever a two is. Grammar school lays the groundwork for everything that will follow in life reading, talking, adding, and even the rudiments of self defense. We read some groovy stories by people like Thisnelda Birksnak who specialize in the pedantic rigors of "Run Spot Run!", and then we advance to junior high school where the girls have to learn how to burn water and make a chocolate cookie look like Custer's last stand; the boys build Boeing 707's in shop and learn how to wear a jock strap. Even high school is a swinging place for budding young learners. If you're lucky you don't have to take an English class from one of the P.E. coaches, or any math classes from the M.I.T. president of the class of '08. You do, however, get to learn such grand things as algebra, how to make a dress, how to roll your skirt up at the top so your mother won't know that you're wearing it four inches higher than it was when she saw you at breakfast. All the guys go out for football and learn how to put the make on "good old what's-er-name" with the high suntan line on her leg by the "show and tell" method learned way back when. Some of the kids get cars, and some even have jobs, and everyone learns how to kiss and hug behind the curtain on the stage in the auditorium, and so school is just another place to be during all the months except the summer because that's where everyone else is. Until, one bleak and wan morning, the alarm goes off at 5:30 and you get up in a mad charge to be first in line at that greatest of all intracollegiate sports, Freshman Registration! Right! So tell me, what is the difference between Sociology 5 and Psychology 186? Why are some of the classes MWF and other TThF and other Daily, and what the hell is a TBA? You see who about changing your major? And where in tarnation is 546-C? Oh yeah, that's where they have upper division tent-peg driving, in the mushroom cellar below the white mice cages in the firing range under the Physical Science building. I know. Thanks a lot. Then you finally get to class and begin to see why everyone makes such a fuss over the value of a college education. You get to find out all the gnatty little secrets about thousands of famous people things like Alexander the Great was a latent Homosexual, (ooh!), and Edgar Allan Poe was hooked on opium, and all the time science has been coming up with a groovy new theory that the earth really isn't a sphere at. all but is just a two dimensional planar body suspended in space from a long golden chain hooked to the sun and its extra-terrestrial pals in the sky. And the requirements for your minor say you have to take a class called Philosophy One (and your bishop doesn't advise you to enter that field anyway) from a professor so-and-so that everyone ogles at whenever you mention his name and he proceeds to tell you that you 4 really aren't an entity at all; like, "Who says you haven't got twelve arms just because you can't see the other nine," and then your psychology prof tells you why your mother loves your baby brother more than she loves you, and all about how your id and ego and super-ego play cute little Freudian games with your personality (they even have classes that teach you how to keep score in this wonderful game), and you come out knowing for sure that you are a chronic paranoid schizophrenic with severe ego-involvement conflicts with your mother, and a bleeding peptic ulcer. So how do you sort through all this garbage? What of all this myriad of facts is worth remembering and what isn't? Does the bookstore sell a magical crystal ball that will decipher all this mumbo-jumbo into something worth $115 a quarter and $600 a year for a fancy cave with three other flunkeys? No, but the staff of Probe does have the germ of an answer to your problem. This purports to be a cosmopolitan magazine. It serves you best when you go out of your way to let us know all the little secrets you've found out about how to draw the "Accept-Reject" line across the subject matter of some of your classes. If you write, paint, draw, act, read, or even breathe, then Probe has something for you. We try to include articles on everything from the function of fixated nitrogen in the photographic process to the hidden motivation behind Shelley's anger at being rescued from drowning. Make no mistake about it, you need to interpret life for yourself. That is both your right and your obligation. Your interpretation of life is just as valid as anyone else's if it's honest Voltaire and millions of dead American servicemen attest to the value of this concept. We need to know how YOU interpret life, so prepare what you think and believe, and then lend it to us so we can share it with someone who doesn't have one of his own. Probe was established for your benefit it is the official magazine of this college and we aim to probe the most meaningful parts of life that you make available to us. Do your share in building up our campus. Submit to Probe. David G. Yurth Editor-in-chief 5