Free When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris Page A

stickers: “I Hold My Horses for Ivy League Schools,” “My Son Was Accepted at the Best University in the United States, and All I Got Was a Bill for $168,000.” On and on, which was just so . . .
wrong.
    One of the things they did back then was start you off with a modesty seminar, an eight-hour session that all the freshmen had to sit through. It might be different today, but in my time it took the form of a role-playing exercise, my classmates and I pretending to be graduates, and the teacher assuming the part of an average citizen: the soldier, the bloodletter, the whore with a heart of gold.
    “Tell me, young man. Did you attend a university of higher learning?”
    To anyone holding a tool or a weapon, we were trained to respond, “What? Me go to college? Whoever gave you that idea?” If, on the other hand, the character held a degree, you were allowed to say, “Sort of,” or, sometimes, “I think so.”
    And it was the next bit that you had to get just right. Inflection was everything, and it took the foreign students forever to master it.
    “So where do you sort of think you went?”
    And we’d say, “Umm, Princeton?” — as if it were an oral exam, and we weren’t quite sure that this was the correct answer.
    “Princeton! My goodness,” the teacher would say. “That must have been quite something!”
    You had to let him get it out, but once he started in on how brilliant and committed you must be it was time to hold up your hands, saying, “Oh, it isn’t that hard to get into.”
    Then he’d say, “Really? But I heard —”
    “Wrong,” you’d tell him. “You heard wrong. It’s not that great of a school.”
    This was the way it had to be done. You had to play it down, which wasn’t easy when your dad was out there, reading your acceptance letter into a bullhorn.
    I needed to temper his enthusiasm a bit, and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide. The Princeton program was very strong back then, the best in the country, but it wasn’t the sort of thing your father could get too worked up about. Or at least, most fathers wouldn’t. Mine was over the moon. “Killed by a Princeton graduate!” he said. “And my own son, no less.”
    My mom was actually jealous. “So what’s wrong with matricide?” she asked. “What, I’m not good enough to murder? You too high and mighty to take out your only mother?”
    They started bickering, so in order to make peace, I promised to consider a double major.
    “And how much more is
that
going to cost us?” they said.
    Those last few months at home were pretty tough, but then I started my freshman year and got caught up in the life of the mind. My idol-worship class was the best, but my dad didn’t get it at all. “What the hell does that have to do with patricide?” he asked.
    And I said, “Umm.
Everything.
”
    He didn’t understand that it’s all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that raises its head and nods like a cobra when you’re sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it’s even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. He thought that all my classes should be murder-related, with no lunch breaks or anything. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t work that way.
    I’d told my parents I’d major in killing them, but that was just to get them off my back. In truth, I had no idea what I wanted to study, so for the first few years I took everything that came my way. History was interesting, but I have no head for dates and tend to get my eras confused. I enjoyed pillaging and astrology, but the thing that ultimately stuck was comparative literature. There wasn’t much of it to compare back then, no more than a handful of epic poems and one novel about a lady detective, but that’s part of what I liked about it. The field was new and full of possibilities. A well-versed graduate might