Swarthmore College - Halcyon Yearbook (Swarthmore, PA)

Page 23 text:

Look, kid, Norm, you ' ve got the wrong outlook on life. iL i) O.irr.l, you ' re rij rit. I ' m wasting rny time busting tail for a lousy ' .H. I ' ve gOl -i whole world to sec, and I ' m going to do ii . . . right after I study organic. Damn Bird!

Page 25 text:

6:35pm: One of the great agonies of S. Moron ' s life was cigarette smoke. In concentrated doses, over a long enough period, he found that it para- lyzed him mentalK and physically. He knew he had to find some way to ball up his courage and face those rude clods who insisted on puffing in public. But he was hardly a reformer, and he saw no justification for spoiling the pleasure of people if their smoke did not particularly disturb him. He de eloped an intuitive hierarchy of cate- gories as a guide to when he might and might not protest. In planes and the nonsmoking cars of trains he was always self-righteous in de- manding that his air not be fouled. He was equallv adamant when someone joined him at a table in Sharpies and made a move to light up a cigarette. But other situations were not so clear cut. S. felt that if he joined a friend whom he knew to be a smoker, he would thereby obligate himself to put up with the smoke. His solution to that problem was to avoid those friends. And what if he joined a table where there were sev- eral people he didn ' t know who turned out to be smokers? S. decided that in that instance silent suffering was in order. And he had never mus- tered up the courage to ask a certain professor to snuff out his pipe during class. Unfortunately, S. ' s was a strictly rational for- mulation, not built on an awareness of how the people he berated might respond in any given situation; and so it was not foulproof. One morning, awaiting the start of a lecture, S. de- tected some obnoxious fumes. Turning around, he saw that the seat behind him had been taken by a blank-faced Amazon who was simulta- neously chewing gum and smoking like a chimney. Feeling very confident about this par- ticular situation, S. said, Excuse me, but would you put your cigarette out? When class starts, smiled Ms. Chimney. But the smoke is both- ering me now, whined S. Moron. So move, snarled the adversary. Dutifully S. collected his books and shuffled to the back of the room. 21