------------------------------------ Note 11 Something *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 4:47 pm graper / newauth / unidel Dear Friends: You know, life can be a real drag even when you're having a good time. Yeah. There's this guy who really gets me down, man. He's a philosophy major here at the university, and like he's a real strange one. I mean, one day I walk out of a class and he's standing there by the door and asks, "What you doing, Dave?" "Taking a course in APL" His face gets all squished up like I just put a tiny drop of lemon oil on every single muscle cell of his body and says, "Oooh, a Computer course!" Now what am I supposed to take from that, huh? He says it like, "Oooo, a Kum-peUT-er Course!" in a fruity sort of way and I have to derive some sort of subjective meaning from it like: "Think you're tough, taking a Computer course, huh?" or "Well, taking a course for commoners, eh?" ---------------------------------------- Response 1 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 4:55 pm graper / newauth / unidel or something like that. And while I'm still processing his last tidbit, he says, "Well, existence is such a joke anyway." Hah! I had him there! "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" I asked. Then this girl came up and the two walked away. He has plenty of women for some strange reason. He kept walking away, oblivious to the fact that his philosophic garbage had given me a case of mental constip- ation that I have yet to work out. The hell with him. How are you? Pretty good, I hope. As for me, well, I don't know. That story, "The Terminal" is still being worked on but I'm working on it at home so as to get it finished before typing the rest of it in. I don't like the bits and pieces way I have to put this stuff on PLATO sometimes. Hey, I. . .just a minute. What? Alright. Do you know there are people here in the PLATO place who ask ME how to turn on the terminals or get help or stuff like that ---------------------------------------- Response 2 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:09 pm graper / newauth / unidel every now and then? I think it's marvelous. Could you hold on? I'll get right back to you. Your Friend Dr. Graper ---------------------------------------- Response 3 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:22 pm graper / newauth / unidel Dear Friends: Could you hold on a little longer? I've got this terrible problem right now with this thing. . .dammit, I can't stand these little things!! You know, tiny parts to wristwatches and screws to eyeglasses and stuff like that! I'm telling you, I have problems with this stuff. I guess it just might be that it's an overcast day and things are really just not running right. Why, the day before yesterday I showed up for my first class in Statistics and the professor hands out a test which catches everyone by suprise and then says, "This is not a joke, this is a TEST." I look at it and it starts asking me for "Poisson Values" and other related bull and the blood in my arteries begins to squish a bit too fast and sweat forms on my hands and I begin tapping my feet nervously and everyone else in the room whips through it like nothing and I don't know the answer to a single damned question and then ---------------------------------------- Response 4 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:27 pm graper / newauth / unidel Pouff! Suddenly I schizophrene into the third person. I am no longer taking the test, I'm merely watching him___ take the test. . . Ahh, looking at the blank paper I begin thinking up pretty numbers for him to put in the blanks. Why, I think a twelve would look nice there. . .a fifteen thousand would go fine there. . .no, make it more precise! Fifteen thousand point three two! Everybody is handing in the tests! Guess I'd better hand his in too!! The sweating is long gone, the blood flows nicely, the brain is quiet and stable as I have him put the paper on the professor's desk. . .whoops, almost forgot to sign it. . .there. . . .ah. . . .. and out the door I float. There are people outside the door, arguing about which were the right answers. They all have short hair, horn-rimmed glasses and business and accounting books on top of their statistics books. I have music books on top ---------------------------------------- Response 5 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:35 pm graper / newauth / unidel of my statistics book, have long hair, wire-rimmed round glasses and a distant look. I must have really stood out in the crowd. No-one will talk to me, but like, that's life man. Tomorrow I have to show up and see what I got on that test and have the professor get gruff and grumpy: "All those who scored lower than a 65 on Friday's test should seriously think of dropping the course." I'll look down on my test paper. I got a three. "These people should definitely drop: Charles Hansen, John Thompson, Karl Rosenfeld. . ." I write PEACE + LOVE on my desk. The girl beside me with the short hair cut stares at it, expecting something like that all along. "Jean Civikly, David Graper. . ." I'll stand up with the others and walk out of the room, publicly disgraced before strangers. Too bad. But what the hell, it wasn't a required course anyway. Strange, I knew enough statistics to take the psychology department's second year statistics course. ---------------------------------------- Response 6 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:41 pm graper / newauth / unidel I don't know. Maybe I should make a more dramatic exit. No. If you were there, I probably would, but not for so cruddy an audience as a bunch of sophomore business majors. Damn it, little things really bother me. That's what made me give up playing with electronic stuff. I mean, all those tiny little parts, tinier little IC legs that get bent and bust off and even tinier transistor leads that bust off even easier and. . .blah. Too bad about that statistics course, I certainly could have used it. But, that's life. You go into the administration offices of any of those business departments and they really have quite a strange frontier attitude. "Shape up or ship out" sort of stuff. Man, if I was a business major I'd be getting straight A's in all my accounting courses, forgetting about writing and piano playing, study deep into the night every night, get awards for being the best Business student, get continual job offers from Dupont and Sperry Rand and all those other companies and be voted all sorts ---------------------------------------- Response 7 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:46 pm graper / newauth / unidel scholarships and money and buy a .357 magnum and a shotgun and two high powered rifles and climb up onto the top of Smith Hall and wait for the 12:00 between classes rush and possibly kill 100 people before finally being killed myself and get my picture on the cover of Time Magazine and Newsweek with a picture of me firing down at a helpless nun with the big caption: WHY??_____ written across the bottom in red and have a memorial plaque built where I shot from and where I was killed and so on and everyone would ask, "But he was a straight A student and seemed so good and right!" and the people on news-shows like 60 minutes would have my parents and friends on for interviews and they would always ask why and my friends would always say stuff about how they sort of wondered about me all along and my parents, especially my mother, would get real emotional and say that it all started when I stopped going to church or something and that I could really ---------------------------------------- Response 8 of 8 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 2/11/79 5:54 pm graper / newauth / unidel have been something great if I hadn't shot all those people and maybe, just maybe, people might think twice about wasting their college careers on being business majors. Excuse me, I'll be right back Your Friend, Dr. Graper