Way back in March, I went to a pre-registration event at my school. There were students on hand to advise me as I mapped out my schedule, making sure I met my minimum requirements and answering my every question. My major falls under the college of business, and I was delighted to learn that business majors can take geography for a science credit.

"Geography," I thought. "That would be interesting. I can never find anything on a map." I asked the student advisors which professor I should take to fulfill my 'science' requirement for this semester. They both selected the same one. 'He's a great guy," they said. "You'll love him. It's the best class I've taken at this school."

Lying fuckers.

My geography professor has the mad scientist look down. He wears a lab coat to both lectures and labs (despite the fact that we're not dissecting anything because it's a geography course). He's tall and lanky and old. How old, you ask? This is his thirty-second year teaching at my school. That's my geography professor. Oh, I almost forgot. He has the demeanor of Frank Costanza.

It took me awhile to figure this out, too. I knew he reminded me of someone, what with the red herring stories about his time growing up in Michigan, the nonsensical or un-punny 'jokes' and that grating tendency to ramble on about mostly nothing for fifty minutes three days a week. He never really gets mad, though. I guess he's like Frank Costanza after some anger management classes.

As if the 'lectures' (my, aren't we throwing words around today) weren't enough, there has to be a lab with this class: an additional two hours each week. Like I said, what are we going to do, dissect a globe? There is no need for a lab in a geography course. Well, I suppose there are probably some amazing geography-related computer resources the university could spend my technology fee on, and that would be a cool hands-on way to learn about the world. But Professor Frank is crazily anti-computer. Weirdo.

Turns out I would've preferred taking a scalpel to a Hastings than participate in our actual lab activity for the week. Professor Frank decided it would be a fun geography lesson to meander about the campus and look at the variety of trees we have. This may not seem like an unreasonable request until you consider that, with the heat index, it's an even one hundred degrees outside.

And this man asked us to traipse around campus for two hours studying plant life, most of which withered and died before our very eyes, which you'd think might have been a clue to him that it was damn hot outside. (And don't email me all, "It's 135 in Dallas." I don't care. 100 is hot for here. Say it with me, kids: 'It's not the heat, it's the humidity.' Which is why my back is sticking to my chair like a Post-It note as I write this.) So maybe the foliage was never in any real danger, but the Geography Death March was a little assy.

Adding insult to injury (read: extreme sweatiness), we couldn�t really hear much of what Professor Frank had to say. He kind of mumbles on a good day, and the acoustics in the great outdoors aren�t what they used to be, so basically he was moving his lips but he could�ve been saying, "I like it when they massage my toes with butter" and we wouldn�t have known the difference.

Mercifully, the torture didn�t play the full 120 minutes, but he couldn�t let us go early without first trying to get us killed. We had trudged all the way to a far corner of campus that I�d never seen before (on foot anyway), but that wasn�t far enough toward hell. He pointed at one more tree, which was planted in the median. That�s right. The median. Of the road. "I want us all to go stand over there and look at that tree," he said.

First off, as far as I�m concerned, it doesn�t count as a tree until it�s at least four feet tall. Second, there is not shit in University Town save for the university itself and a Wal-Mart, so naturally the flow of traffic would be around the university. This man, this crazy old man, was asking us to wander aimlessly out into traffic on a fairly busy (well, for University Town) street in the middle of rush hour to stand on some grass in the middle of the road and look at a tree for twelve seconds.

Of course we all did it, because we�re all lemmings. It�s good to know there are so many independent thinkers among my classmates. I can only report that, thankfully, no one was killed.