Spring Break officially begins for me next week, so I’ve decided to take a break from some of the more cerebral postings that I typically do. Instead I’ll be switching it up with photo blogs, cool online things, weird quizzes, secret codes — whatever comes to mind.

Today, I’m celebrating my success in finding a store in the nearby Triangle area that carries inexpensive corncob pipes. A special thanks goes out to the CVS at the corner of Tryon and Holly Springs in Raleigh for hooking me up. I inaugurated it with a little klip dagga and kratom this afternoon.

As I was walking out of class today, I started wondering about how to truly beat this oppressive feeling once and for all. Most of you don’t have a clue what I mean by this. You either aren’t paying attention, or you’re distracted with things that won’t matter to you in a hundred years, or you’re into doing drugs every Friday and Saturday night at your local bar just to relieve the tension and get you in the mood for another Monday. This feeling is kind of like boredom, prolonged tension, quick reversals of happiness and sadness all mashed together. And it’s really heavy, and it never really goes away. If there was a word for it, you’d probably hear pop psychologists convincing you that you have it (and need lifelong drug treatment to get rid of it). You ever hear a really, really old person say, “it’s been a good life” like they’re trying to convince themselves they lived through 100 years of this feeling and seen all of their closest friends die? Maybe it’s kind of like that.

I’m of the mind that the oppression and the distraction that keeps us from dealing with this oppression come from the same source. You can call it the Devil or whatever, but you get the idea of what I’m getting at. The following things were on my mind as possible solutions as I walked out of the College of Management and headed to the parking garage:

Resignation. I could take a few extra bottles of sleeping pills with my bottle or two of malt liquor tonight. Thinking about it, that’s definitely a NO. Committing suicide signals that you let the world and the uncaring assholes in the world win.

Spreading the word from the wilderness. That’s kind of what blogging is like. A person gets a blog and talks about inane shit. People read it or not. So what? People think that you’re a nut case, possibly because you’re talking about being baptized and how someone’s coming who will change the game in a big way. And it ends with your head getting cut off. John the Baptist was kind of like Cassandra. I’m sure a lot of his friends listened to him, laughed, and said “Whatever, John!” The important part of this, though, is John knew someone was coming that would change the game in a big way. He could have said he was that person, but he knew he didn’t have the balls for it. In business terms, this might be referred to as lacking competencies, and not as lacking balls.

Striking the root. Yeah, that’s like the Henry David Thoreau quote. A lot of folks are attacking symptoms, or institutions, or politicians like that’s the end goal. Now I just need to find out how to do my best Barry impression, you know from the Saturday Night Live sketch that I mentioned in the post titled “The Intense Pressure,” and start killing the Devil.

As I got to my car, wondering how it could be so cold and windy today, I thought to myself that I’m spending so much time getting these mad business skills by taking classes in strategy and marketing. And now I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m contemplating embarking on a campaign that is more apt for militant theology students. Let’s hope strategic management in business translates well to this task.

It seems like my strategic management class has inspired me to think outside of the box a lot lately — probably way too far out of the box, and in the wrong direction, but thinking in general is good, right?

Anyway, during each class session we have a discussion about the strategic issues in a case study covering a particular industry or company. Last night’s case was on the airline industry in 2002 and Delta’s options for dealing with the threat of low-cost carriers like JetBlue or AirTran. Before the case discussion, our instructor said she was going to tell a joke about airplanes. It must have been a short joke, or my hearing problems may have come back, but I missed it.

That did happen to remind me of a joke about airplanes, though. I heard this joke from a psychologist who specialized in the psychology of women (a very beneficial thing to know, I’ve found), and it goes something like this:

A women’s studies professor is boarding an airplane on her way to a women’s studies conference. After she finds her seat and gets situated, the captain comes on the loudspeaker to introduce the flight crew.

“This is your captain for today’s flight. My name is Sally Smith. Your co-pilot today is Jenny Johnson. Your navigator is Missy Matthews.”

The women’s studies professor is amazed to find that the entire flight crew were women. She stopped the stewardess and asked if she could go to the cockpit to meet this all-woman crew. The stewardess chuckled and responded, “Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t call it the cock-pit anymore.”

Yup, that’s women studies humor for you. I was feeling almost ornery enough in class last night to raise my hand and ask if I could tell a real joke about airplanes. In retrospect, my impulse control won out last night. Too bad that didn’t hold true tonight.