| Autumn Arrives
If you spend all your time indoors, you may not have noticed that autumn breezed in last week. But if you've been out and about, you've noticed by the cooler weather and rain we've seen in the last few days. Even though the afternoons have been quite temperate, evening temperatures have dipped down into the 60s, forcing some of us to unpack winter clothing, wish the vents in our rooms spread heat instead of air conditioning and stir up a mug of hot chocolate. Some out-of-state students might not understand how Southerners could shiver so much in this weather. But the cooler weather has been a nice change to the grueling summer days that we've experienced the last couple of months. No more hot steering wheels. No more sweaty foreheads. And no more dry grass. Since Fall Break's coming up next weekend, now is the time to take advantage of the weather. Take a break outside. Enjoy the sunshine and the breeze. And don't forget your favorite blanket for a picnic or two with some friends. And as if some didn't know, mid-term exams are here, too. Take advantage of this situation. Instead of stressing yourself out in a small dorm room, take the books outside. Sit under a tree and watch the squirrels as you study the history of the French revolution or principles of accounting. Before sitting in you air-conditioned lecture hall or classroom, ask your professor if he or she would not mind teaching class outside. Sitting under the sun and feeling a cool steady breeze against your skin always makes a physics class seem much more pleasant. Take advantage of all these opportunities that the new season brings. In other words, don't wait for the trees to change color.
Bill Gates losing out on life The economy is good, so the job market is booming from one side of the nation to the other. A TCU graduate with a major in philosophy and a double minor in art and underwater basket weaving can quickly get multiple job offers. Still, the competition for the best jobs is keen. Employers' choices may include a seasoned, experienced older woman or the college graduate with nothing but enthusiasm and a freshly earned degree. Wouldn't you think that youth has the advantage? It is written in the Bible that youth should excel. I Timothy 4:12 says, "Let no one despise your youth, but set an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity." Andrew Postman, author of "What's in an Age" points out that men and women accomplish great feats at practically every stage of life. Mozart gave his first concerts at age 6. Anne Frank composed her diary at 14. Buffalo Bill was a Pony Express mail carrier at 14. Tommy Hilfiger opened his first store at 18. Ella Fitzgerald sang professionally at 18. Today anyone younger than 20 has visions of wealth in the "dot-com" age. Time magazine recently ran a cover story on the benefit in finding a niche in technology. Certainly the greatest success story here is William Henry Gates III. He co-founded Microsoft at age 19. Gates has a combination of great intelligence, aggressiveness and being in the right place at the right time. This made him the richest man in America. Gates is a college drop-out! In historical terms, he gave momentum to the technology revolution. Gates and Paul Allen developed BASIC, the language for the first microcomputer while they were undergraduates at Harvard University. He dropped out of college and risked his then-small fortune to write an operating system for computers. Not since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone has an invention influenced society as greatly as the personal computer. There were more popular computer operating systems on the market at the time Gates came along with his MS-DOS. The first really popular computer was a Osborne Vixen. We called it the "Ozzie," and it ran with a C/PM operating system. At the time C/PM was state-of-the-art and International Business Machines (IBM) wanted to license this operating system for the C/PM personal computer (PC) operating system. The C/PM patent was owned by a young couple in Albuquerque, N.M. When IBM executives scheduled a meeting with the couple, they skipped the meeting to fly their private plane to Dallas for a round of golf. Gates took advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime when he formed a partnership with IBM. He was in the right place at the right time. In fact, Gates did not even own MS-DOS. He purchased the operation from another firm in Seattle and reformulated it to the exact needs of IBM. Gates has the big bucks, but he lacks other important things in his life. Gates does not believe in God. It is not worth his time to go to church. "I believe in myself," Gates said. "I have no religion. I don't go to church. My kid(s) probably won't either." He just does not have the time or the priority for God in his life. In the June 14 issue of Time, Gates said, "Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot I could be doing on a Sunday morning." In this troubled world, I would like to see people like Gates, who are abundantly blessed, acting more thankful. Perhaps no one in America will ever again be personally worth $100 billion like Gates. However, the youth of today can have lots of fun trying!
David Becker is a graduate student at Brite Divinity School. He can be reached at (evadgorf@aol.com). Phish-ing for uniqueness You hear a lot of snide comments about how TCU students are apathetic, self-absorbed, ethnocentric and concerned only with the clothes they wear and the parties they attend. "Well, who really cares what outsiders think, anyway," I thought to myself the other day as I checked my Polo shirt for any errant food crumbs and went to ask a friend about what his plans entailed for the weekend. "People who aren't at TCU just aren't as good as we are, anyway." But as I scanned the crowd on the way to class, I began wondering whatever happened to the people who marched to the beat of a different drummer, the people who don't fit the typical TCU student mold. There's a lot of J. Crew and Gap walking around - where's all the tie-dye and bell-bottoms? TCU lacks the anti-establishment factor. Where are those people who use terms like "Fight the system" or "Don't let the man get you down"? Where are those people who aren't just another brick in the wall? Well, last Friday I found all of them. They're following Phish around the country and are having a far-out time doing it. After Jerry Garcia died, those people who had tuned in, turned on and dropped out for the past 30 years suddenly realized there probably wasn't a market for hemp necklaces and pipes in the corporate world. Indeed, they were forced to find another band to follow, another band to encompass the notion of free thought and other groovy ideals. What they found were four guys from Vermont who still jammed in the spirit of good music. They all breathed a collective, counter-culture sigh of relief because what they found was Phish. So I took another journey into a realm that few people my age have seen, and I traveled down to Austin to witness again the Phish phenomenon firsthand. One of the aspects I love about these unconventional shows is the unconventional people who go to them. A carnival of Haight-Ashbury proportions congregated before the show. Most wore beads, blew bubbles and wove flowers in their long hair. The smiles were big but the beards were bigger, and those were just the girls. After the show, my friend won two backstage passes, and I was exhilarated to accompany him into the inner sanctum of Phish phrenzy. But the most I got to talk to the band was when I told drummer Jon Fishman, "Great show," as he walked by me with a beer. He said, "Thanks man," as he moved on to a group of girls. I'm fairly certain I alleviated any anxiety he might have had about his performance. I also learned an important lesson that night. Bands primarily have backstage passes to hang out with women, and I didn't quite qualify. They don't want to talk to a bunch of guys about tapes or music.But the backstage area gave me an opportunity to converse with some of the more die-hard Phish-heads, most of them being guys walking forlornly around like I was. So as my new hippie friends moved forward into the horizon of the Houston show, I bid them goodnight and headed back to the drab reality of Fort Worth. We're all conformers in one way or another, but they had simply found something different to follow than the usual mainstream. I realized that we all need a little bit of adventure in our lives; we all yearn for a little shakedown of our surroundings. We all need to hit the road once in a while and not look back until we suddenly realize that we're 50,000 miles away from home with only a veggie burrito to eat for breakfast. I returned to TCU with worries about a marketing assignment and bills to pay. My closet was in desperate need of a tie-dye shirt. I thought of the people 200 miles away who were gearing up for another Phish show, and I thought of the different world I had just left a few hours ago. What a long, strange trip it had been.
Kevin Dunleavy is a junior advertising and public relations major from Spring, Texas. He can be reached at (kduns80@airmail.net). Letter to the editor Rebellion at 'cookie-cutter' TCU limited to tattoos and body piercings I was shocked to see how out of touch Michael Kruse's article from Sept. 23 was with the TCU population. Does he not understand that the most attractive thing about TCU is that it is a safe environment where we are not challenged and are allowed to live as we did in high school? If we as TCU students want to rebel, we don't organize or vocalize. Rather, we get tattoos or a body piercing or a Nine Inch Nails patch to show that this cookie-cutter school has failed to completely homogenize us. So, Michael, if you love this school as much as we who sacrifice any true individuality in pursuit of conformity (which, as we all know, is the root of all happiness and good things), quit trying to make us things that we are not - aware, responsible, rebellious or willing to stand up for something on principle rather than advantage.
Mark Pettus junior English major
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