Alec Webley | Embrace whimsy with eight legs

One of the most worrying trends I have observed at Penn is the tendency of its student denizens to take everything seriously. (I will skip lightly here over my brief yet torrid love affair with student government as Undergraduate Assembly chairman.) Yet more ridiculous examples (maybe) abound. Few readers of this paper will have difficulty recalling a student group election that seemed to them as important as the election of the President of the United States. We’ve all had that class project that seemed to presage the end of a career before it began. And – I may be pushing the envelope here – more than a few of us have played in a sports championship that seemed more important than life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.

As lovers of sport championships everywhere know, the latest World Cup ended with two winners: one was the conventional winner, Spain. The other, of course, was Paul the Octopus. Paul, for those of you who have been neglecting your cephalopod studies, is an octopus in a German aquarium who made, by selecting mussels in appropriately labeled boxes, seven correct guesses as to which teams would win in Germany’s matches this World Cup, and then correctly guessed the winner of the grand finale (yes, he went eight for eight). Paul became an overnight sensation, in part because he was more accurate than almost all pundits, and in part because, unlike a human, he was incapable of saying something stupid, rude or offensive (if only this were true of politicians).

These attributes alone cannot wholly account for Paul’s popularity, however. Much more of his speedy entry into the zeitgeist can be accounted for by the beautiful, innocent whimsy of his situation. With his doleful eyes, totally uncomprehending of the importance attached to his “decision,” Paul selected and devoured his weekly prophetic mollusc indifferent to the hushed whispers of the surrounding reporters and the snapping of thousands of photographs, cool like an eight-armed President Barack Obama. It was, in a word, ridiculous – and because it was ridiculous, it was delightful.

Paul the Octopus stands – or rather swims – for not just taking trivial things trivially, or even more tritely for “taking things in perspective,” but for approaching them with a sense of whimsy and a delight in the absurd. All too often we spend the entirety of our year consumed in what we feel is serious, important or tragic.

Never is this more clear than in the summer. Once a time that allowed students to decompress from the stress and constant work of the year, the summer has now not only become as busy as the academic year but for many, it also carries higher-stakes. We impose on ourselves twice as much stress as is healthy during the year only to escalate it to four times that amount in our 18-hour-a-day summer jobs. We believe that if we do not massively over-perform -- whether in research, investment banking or whatever other field -- our chances of future employment (and possibly life itself) diminish significantly.

It is clear that the stakes in a competitive job market are necessarily high; the tragedy is that with those high stakes have come a fanatical devotion on the part of almost everyone to seriousness unbecoming to our age. The dull suits of corporate culture ought not to be the daily diet of the young.

So let us become absurd. A little bit absurd. Let our student group elections be filled with joke candidates, let our class projects contain amusingly hidden anagrams and let our sports teams win, but if they must lose, do so with style and good humor. And on our last day in our summer job, let us complement the corporate dress code with an outrageous hat.

After all, if an octopus can win at life by doing nothing but picking eight correct teams through his selection of dinner, we’ve got it made.

Alec Webley is a rising College senior from Melbourne, Australia. He is the former Undergraduate Assembly chairman. His e-mail address is awebley@sas.upenn.edu.

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