Last title didn't work. Maybe this is sordid enough.
My university is a microcosm, this much is true, not that it tells you a lot about the cosmos, not that it will expand your ontological horizons, not that it facilitates in the transfere of useful information.
I learn more at nightclubs.
I learn more lining up for cigarettes at my local 24/7 convenience store.
The billboards aren't the only things on campus to exude image and the faint odour of ink and too many transactions.
There's an underground economy of style that has an intangible currency. Something about a certain clash of colour and the angle keratin is cut at.
This economy is ever shifting...almost tidal. It could be that there are alignments and houses and cards that factor in somehow, but one can never be sure. The occult isn't spoken about and many on campus think that the word archaic has something to do with spiders.
You can never learn all that much about this little microcosm, though it's through no lack of effort on the part of staff and PhD students. We sit a battery of tests thinking they're for assessment, and it would be true to say that they do assess us, but just not in the way we imagine.
Last month, in Psych, they administered personality tests and gave the results the next week. Students were amazed at the accuracy of these tests until they were told that they had all been given exactly the same results, irrespective of their answers.
Along with proving the Barnum Effect it also proved my theory that university students are avid readers of Astrological compilations of personality types and hence, have been well conditioned to believe all and any tripe that is fed to them in a drab room by men that obviously can't afford food, clothes or haircuts.
The students represent the exact inverse - can afford the food, haircut and clothes, just not the time needed to innoculate oneself against being duped by those who can't.
For a moment i thought the Mac Psych department had actually started the study of something revolutionary and vital for our development as a society and culture - do university students actually have personalities, or are they merely walking career suitability files that check employment websites and suppliments to follow the movements of their relevant salary packages?
I overestimated the strength of their ambition - they just wanted to see if we were dumb. The means and standard deviations moved against us. The graph didn't look promising either, even though the correlation between this level of gullibility/blind trust in authority figures and healthy economic figures came as a relief to us all.
It looks like those salary packages are just going to keep on going up and up.
So...how many bubbles has that been so far?