A thought occurs: Frank Zappa was right! Yeah, yeah, Stravinsky is, like, totally radical, dude. But no, I mean he was right about college. The brilliantly mustachioed avant-rocker had a famous quote about institutions of alleged higher learning: “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

Everyone is so quick to label the attendance of university as an “educational” experience. Two years ago, I took two courses, Physics 116: Relativity and French Studies 280: Love and Sex in French Culture, both of which I apparently received an A in, and neither of which I remember a damn thing about. In fact, the only reason I even know I took those classes is because I went to SPIRE and looked at the handy-dandy “course history” menu option. And the only reason I looked at my course history on SPIRE is because I’m graduating in a matter of days – I should really figure out exactly when – and I’m trying super-duper hard to answer the question, “What the f*** have I been doing for the last four years?”

Attending four years of college and receiving a piece of paper afterwards seems to be more and more requisite for being a “productive member of civilized society.” This seems so obviously ironic – I won’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve spent the last four years honing nothing but primal degeneracy. Some try to dress this up with pamphlet-friendly phrases like “finding yourself” and “self-discovery.” The following is a list of things I’ve “found myself” doing over the last four years:

–          Purposefully neglected studying for finals in order to sneak onto the awning roof between Hamlin House and Johnson House to spend an entire afternoon drinking screwdrivers and playing guitar.

–          Written two professional letters of recommendation for colleagues filled with profane gusto and graphically violent half-truths.

–          Stayed awake for a personal best of 57.5 hours straight in order to counterbalance world record amounts of procrastination, only to sleep through several days’ worth of classes afterwards.

–          Staunchly defended, while in the workplace, the ethical merits of telling young children to “f*** off.”

–          Watched the sun rise over Orchard Hill with a mouthful of Egg McMuffins, periodically relieving myself on a fire hydrant in front of several friends like an inebriated Boston terrier marking his territory of idiocy.

“Finding yourself” at college is analogous to learning how to build a clock by smashing it on the floor and then finding all the tiny pieces that fit together. We spend four years destroying ourselves in what are hopefully the most fun ways imaginable so that we may learn how to properly reassemble ourselves.

But there’s something incredibly fulfilling about laying out the tarp and decimating oneself, and then diligently finding all the pieces and putting the whole back together. Finding all the tiny gears of the smashed clock and figuring out which ones are supposed to lock in, and where, is so much more difficult without a manual. However, if and when the task is complete, it’s a self-contained task, a miracle of singularity.

In the first semester of my final year here at UMass, I took a course called Writing about Pop Culture with Professor Ralph Whitehead, who is, amongst other things, a gentleman, a scholar and, for lack of a better term, a total bro. The course mainly consisted of meeting with Whitehead for about 45 minutes once a week to discuss Neil Diamond, Batman, Hunter S. Thompson and, if time permitted, maybe some of the stuff I was writing about for his class. The latter mostly consisted of thinly veiled Chuck Klosterman rip-offs and manifestos on why I’d prefer to be subjugated by Doctor Doom than saved by Superman.

When we met for the final time, he said he thought I was a decent writer and that I would get an A in the class, but he confessed that he didn’t teach me anything. And he was right. And that was the moment it all clicked – because despite not being “taught,” I had indeed “learned.” It was the kind of educational process that had actually been happening for four years without me ever realizing, and it’s a very necessary one in preparation for the “real” world – it’s the kind of education where the lesson plan, the homework, the curriculum, everything was dictated by me, the student. To turn an overtly pretentious phrase, it was all very ‘meta,’  I was finally educated about the process of self-education, if that makes any sense at all.

It made me realize the fact that, in spite of that dense list of degeneracy above wherein I successfully and forcefully dissected any sense of civilized human life, I’ve also taken the proper steps to successfully reassemble myself over the years. Through nobody’s will but my own, I’ve happily given up my many of my nights and weekends over the last four years to writing for The Daily Collegian, which not only padded out my resume quite nicely, but also introduced me to several people I never would have otherwise had the fortune to become dear friends with.

And instead of taking an easy last semester, I elected to work two jobs, one as a correspondent for The Recorder in Greenfield and the other composed of two editorial positions at The Collegian, while maintaining a full-time undergraduate schedule. This undoubtedly was a strong point in my cover letter when applying for a full-time copy editor/writer position at The Berkshire Record, and it’s probably a pretty big reason why they hired me, too.

All of this – and compared to many of my classmates and fellow Collegian-ites, this is small time – was done not because it was on a syllabus or because it was assigned for a grade. It was simply an answer to a question. Not a question on an exam or one to be answered by raising my hand, but one I asked of myself: what am I going to do with my life, or, perhaps more poignantly, what do I want to do with my life? Simply stated, I want to write. I want to write about everything; I want to write about broad topics like human interest and social justice and cultural evolution; I also want to write about very, very specific things, such as how Muse has surpassed U2 in the grand scale of arena rock bands but no band in the last three decades has surpassed the feat of U2 releasing “The Joshua Tree” AND “Achtung Baby” within five years, or how Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp for piano was probably the world’s first heavy metal song.

But in the grand scheme of self-generated inquiries, that’s pretty small time, as well. For instance, I always used to think a tough question coming out of college was going to be the oft-recited “how much money do you need to sustain happiness?” This is actually a very simple question to answer, as most resourceful college students would probably reply “not much.” But if you happen to have the choice between two jobs and want one more than the other, a variation of that question arises: how much money are you willing to be unhappy for?

Of course, in addition to some of these more melancholic ruminations, college is a time for much more joyous things that also build character – specifically joyous, character-building things that you should completely get out of the way in college. I know for a fact that I’ll always enjoy telling my kids, or whoever’s offspring is in my immediate radius, how I threw up so hard once in the streets of Northampton that it left a permanent mark outside the Thai place across the street from Fitzwilly’s. As a 21-year-old college student, this is an exciting life lesson and a riveting story for later; as a 31-year-old member of the workforce with a 401k, however, this would probably be a fairly unsavory no-no.

So, you want my advice? Well, my initial advice would be to not take my advice, because I’m still at an age where it’s still somewhat hilarious to puke in public. There, I said it. But, if you really want my advice, it’s this: smash your proverbial clocks while you can. As fun as it is to tear oneself apart for four years or so, it is similarly dignifying to be able to put oneself back together again afterwards without the manual to guide you.

And plus you get to smash stuff. Hulk smash puny clocks – that’s for Shores.

David Coffey is a Copy Editor and Assistant Arts and Living Editor. He can be reached at [email protected].