In Punt Formation

FOR CENTURIES students at Cambridge have punted on the Cam, spending their leisure hours guiding their flat, square-ended boats past the stately spires of King's and Clare Colleges. Dartmouth students also spend some of their most memorable hours punting, though punting on the Connecticut requires neither a boat nor much effort.

Punting, in today's parlance, means taking off time from preparing for tomorrow morning's Mideast history examination or next week's 18th-century poetry paper to pursue less demanding activities or, if you wish, to waste time. The papers and magazines may be full of frightening accounts of contemporary students rapacious for learning - and for admission to medical or law school - but the truth is that today's student has elevated timewasting to an art form.

The old saw "practice makes perfect" has seldom applied to anything as well as it does to wasting time. Fall term freshmen, intent on beginning their college years with a minimum of frivolity, are terrible punters. Some are even said to schedule their time. But upperclassmen, especially those enjoying their final weeks at Dartmouth, are past-masters. They know all the secrets, even the short cuts that allow more time for wasting time.

Some might suggest the ultimate in wasting time is to list the best ways to waste time. But making this list, perhaps the most comprehensive inventory of timewasters ever assembled, is the only activity for which this otherwise listless senior can muster the inclination on a summery Saturday in late April. So here, in no particular order, is a connoisseur's compen- dium of time-wasters:

1. Wishing you were somewhere else. This time-waster, particularly popular when those inimitable New Hampshire mornings offer temperatures in the -30 degree range, usually occurs somewhere in the middle of what is then inappropriately called the College Green. The preferred alternate locations usually are Duke or Rice — and sometimes the Lesser Antilles.

2. A cup of coffee and a glazed doughnutat Lou's. Many students call this all-time favorite the most singularly worthwhile feature of a Dartmouth education. Lou's doughnuts just might be the best doughnuts in North America and wondering what it would be like to join Al Foley, Herb West, and Eddie Jeremiah on Lou's wall is always worth a good 15 minutes.

3. Visiting the Tower Room. The Tower Room, Dartmouth's answer to a Gerald Ford speech on world order, never lets an experienced time-waster down. This Baker Library location has the further advantage of providing a mid-afternoon dozer with good punt protection. "Did you make much progress on Vanity Fair this afternoon?" your unsuspecting friends ask. "I wanted to read a few chapters," you reply, "but I -had to do some work at the Sleep Research Center."

4. Checking your mailbox. This is both a dependable time-waster and an act of selfdefense. The hike from the Tower Room to the post boxes in the Hopkins Center, if done in the proper leisurely manner, can take about five minutes (both ways!). Not only does that waste time, but there's always the chance you can work on a football weekend bonfire or the Winter Carnival snow sculpture. It is important to check your mailbox often. Students who check them only occasionally - say three or four times a day - are often said to require help carrying the letters, magazines, and notices for lectures on Urdu dialects and Marxist dialectic that have, like the circus clowns in the miniature car, been stuffed into their small mail boxes.

5. Tea in Sanborn House. Although this time-waster can only be done at certain hours, it is the only stop on the time-waster tour that mixes evasion with esoterica. The British, perhaps the best time-wasters in the world, advise savoring each drop of tea and any mannerism even mildly affecting the British way of doing things is highly regarded in Sanborn House. Besides, there are few better ways of wasting time than talking about poetry in the late afternoon.

6. Explaining the Dartmouth Plan. It was once said that the 19th-century territorial struggle over Schleswig-Holstein was so complicated that only three people ever understood it: one was dead, another had gone mad, and the third, Lord Palmerston of Great Britain, had forgotten. It is much the same with the Dartmouth Plan. No one really understands it but trying to explain leave terms and summer requirements is an excellent waste of time. You can count on 20 minutes if you're trying to explain it to a Dartmouth alumnus and at least a halfhour (and an invitation to apply again next year) if you try to explain it to someone you hope will offer you a job.

7. Thayer Hall. The College dining hall is such a good place to waste time that some English majors think T. S. Eliot wrote a poem about it. It offers a veritable cornucopia of time-wasters. If eating a delectable serving of chicken fingers isn't enough of a waste of time, you can always linger over your seventh cup of coffee, your fourth grapefruit, or your third Hood's Rocket.

8. Looking for a job. Everybody knows students cannot find jobs these days, so looking for a job is a guaranteed waste of time. It is, however, an excellent way to practice filling out the kind of forms the unemployment office requires. The shrewd student will exploit job-hunting as an opportunity to learn his Social Security number by heart.

9. Sitting in the sun. President Hopkins once said there should be time in every undergraduate's year to sit in the sun. Let it be said that there are many of us who have propped ourselves against a tree on Butterfield Beach who agree.

10. Complaining you don't have enoughtime. An old stand-by, this is one of the most efficient ways of wasting time known to man.

11. Miscellaneous time-wasters. What list of time-wasters would be complete without noting pizza runs, thumbing through the Freshman Book, telephone calls, crossword puzzles, trips downtown to buy a ball-point pen, vacuuming your room, playing beer pong, talking about Nietzsche, and wondering how old Luis Tiant really is?

12. Reading "The UndergraduateChair". Any comment on this item would be purely a waste of time.

"... a connoisseur'scompendium of time-wasters..."