When you are young,
and it feels like you are invincible,
it’s because you are.
From this moment forth, you will never die.
YOU are the first stirring of a new world, smuggled across every border, transcending every ideology, evading all control.
What was in front of everyone’s face you made visible. What was on the tip of everyone’s tongue you gave a name. All the words they wish they could speak, all the life they wish they could live— that is you.
YOU fight like they wish they could fight.
YOU love like they wish they could love.
You never submit or compromise
You are free in all the ways they wish they could be.
You needed it, exalted it, made it breathe and stir. Freedom is your dominion, that reality under this one. And you told us to burn it, burn it all away— “your fake reality! your false ideologues! your rampant obligation!”
“You have a right to a public trial by a jury of your peers! You have a right to remain silent! Your freedom is bestowed. What about the right to live life like you won’t get another chance? What about the right to have reasons to stay up all night in urgent conversation, to look back on every day without regret or bitterness? To feel like your life matters?
“You have to make these rights, because freedom is an act. You must birth freedom from your soul into this world anew every day. You have an opportunity to make the blind see, and the forgetful remember. You have the opportunity to show people it is alive in this world, and teach children not to merely survive, but live.
“One hundred thousand of us can found a new civilization, one hundred can transform a city, two can write the bedtime stories our children have been waiting to hear—and sow the seeds for millions to come. When one of us denies public opinion and the protection racket and drops everything to live as she has dreamed, the whole world receives the gift of that freedom. We create new relations between ourselves and a cosmos that is suddenly ours. If we risk our lives, it is because we know only by doing so can we make them our own.
“These days can be difficult, even terrifying. Don’t be so timid— you are not alone. There are millions of us waiting for you to make yourself known, ready to love you and laugh with you and fight at your side for a better world. Follow your heart to the places we will meet. You are the blood rushing through my body. You are the oxygen in my lungs. You are the tears running down my cheeks. You are my future. I love you more than life itself.
“You are the journeys that I take through lush green fields in my mind. You are the respect which I deserve. You are the poems I write and put into my shoebox. I know you will never break no matter how impure the world is. Follow your heart to the places we will meet. I will miss you until then.”
Purchase and intentionally age soft drinks before giving them to someone. The drinks will retain their bubble and taste, all the while becoming cerebrally carcinogenic dietary saboteurs.
Using images from the SELENE craft, Moon researchers have found a giant hole (hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet deep) in what they think is a lava tube. The lava tube provides protection from meteorite strikes, cosmic rays, UV radiation, and harsh temperature variations, so it is an excellent candidate for further exploration inhabitance. Although the hole is probably the product of a tube collapse approximately 3.5 billion years ago, today the lava shield does not appear to be prone to collapse.
In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy.
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How to become a professor
There’s one sure-fire way to broadcast that you are an academic giant who knew what he was doing in school: Become a professor. For most people, becoming a tenured professor at an Ivy League school is a journey that takes over a decade. Not for you, though. You’re going to be a professor by the end of this article. Here’s how:
1. Throw away all of your clothing. Replace it with tweed. Tweed everything. Socks, underwear, belts, gym shorts… if it’s not tweed, it doesn’t touch your body. Unless it’s that hot philosophy graduate student, Kira Newman.1
2. Buy a pipe that you can suck on pensively. Walk to your local college campus, locate its quadrangle, or “quad” for short, and stroll around with one hand behind your back, the other holding your pipe. Approach students on the quad and offer some professional advice like, “No, no, you forgot to add a constant of integration to the end of that expression,” or, “I just got the craziest new idea for a class to teach next semester, do you want to hear it?” After you have a reputation for yourself, gain their trust by one day dropping everything you are carrying and playing a round of ultimate frisbee. A professor playing ultimate frisbee will be such a profound image to their young sophomoric brains that it will be burned into their neural pathways forever, and word of you will spread across campus like that of ebolavirus through a remote tribe of African rainforest monkeys.
3. Once you feel comfortable with this system, it’s time to start teaching. Many animals just assume the first creature they see is their mother. Similarly, most college students will assume whoever shows up on the first day of class is the professor. Arrive a few minutes early, stroll to the front of the room, and say, “Okay, okay, people… settle, settle. Come on now. Immanuel Kant’s not going to debate himself.” Grasp a piece of chalk and write your name on the board. Give it a firm underline for good measure and declare your name. Write the name of the textbook on the board, and tell them how important this class is to their lives. When the real professor shows up, no Harvard doctorate or campus security officer armed with pepper spray and a taser will be enough to take your authority away from you. “Your first assignment is to tackle that imposter!”
4. After you pull this maneuver seven or eight semesters in a row, the university will be ready to admit defeat. You’ll get a cushy endowed professorship with a corner office and a somewhat shy but efficient personal assistant with pasty white skin. Sit back in your comfortable tweed desk chair, suck on that pipe, and plan your sabbatical.
5. Remember the motto, “publish or perish.” Many professors spend five to eight hours per day on writing and research, but not you! The easiest thing to do is to plagiarize articles originally written in another language. If you’re interested in archeology, import some academic magazines from China. For computer science and design, try Japan! Brazil and Spain produce excellent scholars in the arts. So few people read out of their own language that no one will ever know.
6. When attending parties and other social events, let your clothes speak for you. Wearing a shirt from a well-known bastion of intellectualism can be the only statement you need. When someone says, “Oh wow, you went to Cal Tech?” respond with, “I took a few semesters there before finding my calling in building orphanages in Tibet.” Make sure you know what the motto of the school you are wearing is, in the off-chance that somebody else went to that school too. For example, if someone asks if you are a fellow Harvard alum, respond with their motto, “Vertias!” If you are asked what your major was, say “physics.” Everyone will be in awe, and no one will be able to ask any questions that could blow your cover.
Remember, academia is perhaps the most poorly designed system in the world, but it’s got too much tradition behind it to change now. Everything is about GPA, honor, and how much ivy you have on your walls. So with these tips and a quick wit, you too can show off your massive intellectual dick by mentioning that you are a tenured professor at a prestigious college!
Lineage: Faking It: How to Seem like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself.