PSU Magazine Spring 1993

tick her off, I would say, "You know, I think Reardon and Wheeler would have something to say about this clogged garbage disposal as a cultural allusion about the fall of Greece." About the eighth week, I entered the hysteria phase of returning to school. This is the point where you say, "I am going to quit after this quarter. I am going to build a fishing cabin and live in it and never think about Aeschylus or Plato or Wheeler or Reardon again." I remember, at this point, turning in the rough draft of my term paper and thinking that I would drive to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. I would be the only person in Fort Lauderdale on spring break with a wife and kids, but I would drive to spring break wearing one of those beer hats with the two straws. This phase, too, passed. And then, I waited for my grades. The only comparable experience in adult life to waiting for your grades to come in the mail is meeting with your accountant on April 14. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would say to my adult friends about my grades if they asked. Then I decided. If I got Cs, I would claim that I got mono halfway through and had to drop out. If I got Bs, I would say, "Oh, I did okay," and change the subject to our respective yard work. If I got As, I would kiss them like Bugs Bunny. In retrospect, I think the final motivation for heading back to college was seeing the movie The Paper Chase. In the movie, a student from the University of Minnesota-my former school where I am still on double secret probation-joins the freshman law school class at Harvard. He becomes obsessed with his professor, Professor Kingsfield, who is played by John Houseman. The student, named Hart, begins to date Kingsfield's daughter. At one point in the movie, Kingsfield says to Hart, "Mr. Hart. Here is a dime. Call your mother and tell her there's a serious question about you passing this class." Well, I didn't date Reardon's or Wheeler's daughter, but I did make reference to this movie in class, and Wheeler replied, "Mr. Ohman. Here is a dime ..." Finally, in The Paper Chase, Hart gets his grades and throws them into the ocean-he must not have been paying his own tuition. I have considered what immediate effect my return to school has had on my cartoons. Well, first, in order to get to a 1 p.m. class on time, I have to finish my cartoon an hour early three days a week. That's an immediate effect. Second, my cartoons seem to have more Ionic columns in the back– ground than they used to have. Third, I read where Marilyn Quayle said that Dan tries to read Plato's Republic every summer, and I thought, ''I'll mail him my notes and final exam so he can go back to reading Golf Digest." And fourth, I think I'm going to be doing a lot more cartoons on Measure 5. I don't know if I'll actually get a degree. My goal is to become a junior, for now. So, if you see some sophomoric cartoons in The Oregonian, now you know why. They're drawn by a sophomore. D (Jack Ohman is the editorial cartoonist for The Oregonian.) PSU 15