I happened to overhear a mother speaking about how good her son was at soccer this afternoon. He was standing right there. And she spoke of all the awards that he had received and about where his team was traveling and everything else you could think of. He was still standing right there ... with a grin this time, though.

The conversation eventually turned to college selection and these types of decisions that she foresaw in her son’s near future (he was only about nine or 10 years old). Apparently she only knew one thing: he was going Division I. And apparently that’s where the benchmark rests. Anything less than Division I athletics is weak or something. The little boy turned and nodded his head in affirmation. Sure, there are no full paid scholarships and there aren’t thousands of fans that come out to watch each night. There are certainly no SportsCenter highlights on the line either!

Why bother? Why bother heading into musty old gym early on a Friday morning to lift weights and run sprints? The bottom line is the fact that there is so much more to sports than the material things that come with it. It’s not about the money or the notoriety or the perks. It’s not about the scholarship either. It’s about competing each and every day against yourself and the others whom you call teammates. There it is. An athlete around here can make up as many excuses as he wants as to why he isn’t playing at a higher level. It might be a freak injury, a lack of exposure, or even a lack of height, but the bottom line is simple. It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter that you aren’t playing on ESPN each night. The competition is the same, the games are just as close, and the athletes are all there.

Not only does this love and dedication need to be recognized, it needs to be rewarded. Not through anything material, just through academic credit. I realize that people have said their bit here and there as to why credit should be given for sports just as it is in the theater. I say forget all of those arguments. Let’s just do it on the basis that it’s the least we can do as an institution to help these students out that go out and represent the college and sweat for many hours out on the diamond. Three credits out in the trenches would make a lot more sense than three in a class that has no application to real life situations or potential job application. We’re talking experiential learning in it’s finest sense.

I’m too poor to be a hippie. Hippies of today aren’t like the hippies of yesteryear. There is a new breed of hippie, and they are taking over high schools and shopping malls all over the country like swarms of locusts devouring corn crops in Wyoming, only with dirtier hair and worse hygiene. This new breed of hippie is different from their parents. They don’t care about wars and human suffering like hippies of the past did (or pretended to). New-breed hippies only care about two things: (in no particular order) drugs and Phish.

Like Columbine and most other tragic events involving the young and naive, we can blame the parents. It’s really all just a matter of genetics and simple DNA. All the old-school hippies of the ‘60s grew up and became investment bankers, lawyers and Republicans. They bought some Don Johnson hair gel, slicked back their scraggly hair into a nice tight little two-inch ponytail and started going to Bananarama concerts at the Martini Lounge. Their anguish and desire to demonstrate was replaced with Apple computers and gift certificates to the Gap. The world was changing and the hippies changed with it. That’s OK, no big deal. The war was over and we didn’t need hippies anymore. Women could go back to wearing bras and feel safe that their brassieres weren’t contributing to a fascist regime or the downfall of feminist culture. The world was simple again and everything would be OK. Everything was OK until the old hippies turned yuppie and decided to start breeding. In a strange scientific twist, the hippie gene morphed with the yuppie gene to produce a mutated hybrid or special blend hippie, which we see today. And during the time of Flashdance and leg warmers, the world (unwillingly) welcomed this new and deadliest breed of humanity to ever exist, the rich, preppy hippie.

Thanks to its special blend of genetics, this neo-hippie adapted quickly to its habitat and has proliferated greatly, overtaking the earth and destroying everything in its path, most notably the mall. Where jelly shoes and glitter belts once reigned supreme, only faint memories and bad junior high yearbook pictures remain. The mall is now littered with long patchwork skirts, ugly clogs, bandannas and hemp necklaces - all of which cost a pretty penny, but don’t worry, nothing is too much for a hippie on the pursuit of world destruction. I don’t know about you, but I liked it a lot better when the rich snobby kids ran around with permed hair and pastel cardigans tied around their shoulders. At least in the olden’ days rich kids were proud to be rich and dressed the part. The hippies just mess everything up. They’ve gone undercover with their hemp bags, no-back shirts and patchwork pants. And they pay a lot to look that dirty and smell that bad. Have you seen the price of patchouli oil lately? Stop complaining about gas prices - these hippie kids are gonna end up on hippie welfare before we know it, paying for pot with food stamps and a smile.

But, of course, hippie welfare will never happen. That is just a dream of mine, a silly fantasy. I forgot - these kids don’t have money; their parents have money. The following is an excerpt of how a hippie really thinks: "How much are Phish tickets? $40. Oh, OK, well, I’ll just go to 15 shows this year, then. I’ll get on my laptop and search on eBay to try and find cheaper tickets. Of course I’ll ask my parents to borrow their Lincoln Navigator so I don’t have to take my crappy little Jetta all over the East Coast with my six other hippie friends. If I ask my parents for $200 in gas money and for ‘emergencies’ then I’ll have plenty of money for the good mountain-grown premium blend so I won’t have to suffer with the bad smack."

Am I exaggerating? No, I don’t think so. I’ve seen it happen too much. And why aren’t rich hippies considered to be sell-outs, the way punks are? This whole Phish phenomenon is a little too peculiar for me. Jerry dies, and next day the hippies are turning their SUVs around and following Phish now. Just like that. Couldn’t they have set aside a time for mourning or something? Oh, no way, then their buzz would wear off. Gotta get moving and follow the new chumps. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about Phish is their ice cream. And I don’t think that they were responsible for the marshmallows and little milk chocolate fish. Really, the fate of all this is in God’s hands, and he’s not on my side, either. People got all upset recently about God being portrayed on the cartoon "God, the Devil & Bob" as looking too much like Jerry Garcia. Sadly, God does look like Jerry Garcia, and he made his son in his own image. Have you seen pictures of Jesus? Are you telling me Jesus is not a hippie? The sandals, the loin cloth, the dirty scraggly hair. Jesus didn’t come back for Easter. He came back to follow Phish’s spring tour.

Time stands still in Clarke 215. Literally. The hands of the clock have been stuck at 2:38 and 35.5 seconds since January. So here I sit, learning about the wonderful world of monopolistic competition in Mr. Garraty’s microeconomics class while time in the outside world ticks on. Only problem is, I have no idea how much longer I’m going to have to sit here. That really bugs me. When the door is open, I can look out and see the clock on the wall in the hallway. Then I can get a rough estimate of the time, give or take 10 minutes. But even that is no longer accurate.

The clock is about two hours and 20 minutes fast. Actually, all of the clocks in Clarke read that same time (the ones that are still moving, anyway). I dare you to find a clock on campus that is set to the correct time. You may find a few, but not many. Let’s go a step further: I dare you to find two clocks on campus that read the same time. That’s pretty hard, too. "It’s frustrating," said junior Jennifer Dupnak, "because you never know what time it is." Sometimes you can’t even find a clock. Quite a few classrooms and labs lack a timepiece. That means you can show up a little late, and chances are no one will notice. So there is a good side to all this. But it goes both ways. A professor can keep you a little late and blame it on the clock (or lack thereof).

And there’s the chapel clock. Even it does not have the correct time. At least it didn’t the other day. You never know about things from day-to-day here at VWC. Some students have given up trying to find the right time. "I don’t really care," said senior Jamie Jarman. "You learn to ignore them (the clocks)." So, if you can find a clock that is not incorrect, stopped or missing, you are a very lucky person indeed. Seems that the college could afford to repair, replace or reset the clocks on this campus. Sure, build the new student center. Remodel the library. But don’t forget to set the clocks! Time may keep marching steadily along in the rest of the world, but in Clarke 215, it is eternally 2:38:35.5.