He asks for one last time “diving around in it like a porpoise, burrowing through it like a gopher, and tossing it up and letting it hit me on the head.” He does this, and then the Beagle Boys, deciding it’s their money now, give it a try.

They hit the money like a solid brick wall, and are knocked out cold. Scrooge has time to recover his money.

His nephews ask him how he managed that.

“Well, I’ll admit,” says Scrooge. “It’s a trick.”

Scrooge was SPECIAL!

Not least of these is that the “human doings” are what give others the luxury of majoring in “friendship, respect, trust and love.” Even a good dog can accomplish those things. Building a skyscraper or even designing a part for a copy machine takes a little bit more.

You want some advice? Here’s some random and poorly-organized thoughts:

As far as a college degree, find something you like that also has a reasonable chance of employment. Believe it or not, there’s lots of things like that.

Then keep your eyes open. Don’t be afraid to change course. Believe me, you will. Maybe several times. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. ER’s degree had little to do with his eventual work. Neither did mine. An amazing number of billionaires don’t have college degrees at all. Scrooge McDuck started out as a shoe-shine boy.

It doesn’t hurt to look at job listings and see what they want. But remember, those are things they want to see. They do hire people without them if they’re impressed. I’ve talked my way into most of my jobs, and did pretty good at them.

Don’t spurn McDonalds. I’ve never worked fast food, but I’ve worked some low-end jobs. It’s a living, especially when you’re young, and not the dead end you might think in some cases. My best friend in high school worked up through McDonalds into management, and is now running the food services at a large university. I suspect entry competition is a bit tougher now, though.

Try to avoid schools and degrees that require you to go a quarter million dollars in debt. This is not something that’s easy to dig out of.

You can get as good an education in most things at the non-fancy schools as you can at the Brand Name ones.

Keep your own counsel. Think about what you’re told. Think about everything. “Common sense” is a valuable starting tool. At college, believe it or not, being a professor does not, like being the Pope, include a Certificate of Infallibility. Particularly in less-rigorous subjects. If you’re taking a political history class, be aware that you are going to be getting a lot of bullshit. There are large sectors of academia that could survive nowhere in the outside world. You’ll know them when you see them. Even business is rarely taught by successful businessmen.

You are living in an age where finding things out for yourself is easier than ever before, but keep in mind that there’s going to be a lot of bullshit there, too.

Truth, like the position of an electron, can never be fixed solidly. But you can get closer and further away. Anyone telling you “there’s no truth” is selling something. People sell ideas too, not just products and services, and money is not the only coin people want from you.

You will learn more in your first five years out of college than you did in all of your schooling. An amazing amount of basic survival skills are never addressed in schools. The most useful thing I was taught in high school, other than math skills, was how to type.

Don’t get discouraged. I wish to hell I knew what I know now when I was 19. Probably the oldest wish in the book. The irony is that, really, there’s no way to transmit it, not even to my own kids, although I do the best I can. Life needs to be lived. I do know that a lot of things I worried about back then turned out to be a lot less important in hindsight.

When you are my age, you will also look back at yourself at 19 and wonder how you got so worked up about things. Hell, I wonder how anyone allowed me out without a leash. This is true of almost everyone. You’ve got a lot of room in front of you yet.

Own your own life. It can be done.

Stay in school, VRB. You owe it to yourself. It doesn’t matter if your degree isn’t in a marketable field, who knows what a “marketable field” will be when you graduate? Twenty years from now? Take it from me, I studied Astronomy in college. I wound up as a city planner for county government. During my life I’ve also worked as a manual laborer, maritime navigator, public relations shill, air photo mapper, scientific programmer, remote sensing specialist and a computer cartographer.

A degree in French will get you a job as a management trainee because it’s seen as a rite of passage, an indicator of social class, a guarantee that you are disciplined and moderately intelligent–that you can learn. If the Human Resources departments and Daddy Warbucks of this world don’t care what your major was, why should you lose any sleep over it?

Study what you want, what you enjoy, and even if you never use it you will have the satisfaction of knowing you have a good understanding of at least one branch of human knowledge, thus you have an appreciation about how complex and wonderful the branches you DON’T understand are.

It will also do wonders for your pride and your dignity. No matter how much you are sneered at and abused for your lowly professional position, you will always know you know something beautiful and of real value, whether it be Middle English verb conjugation or crustacean taxonomy. If you study something useful, like dentistry, you may wind up spending your whole life forcing yourself to work at it and keeping up with it. That’s fine if you enjoy dentistry, but hell if you don’t, no matter how much they pay you.

But there’s more than just what you learn in your field. In college you’ll be exposed to all those other fields of knowledge your fellow students are struggling with, and the fraternity of teachers that preserve and pass on the accumulated wisdom of the race. You will become part of the community of learning, an unbroken chain of scholars and universities that stretches back to Medieval Europe: perhaps the greatest single cultural achievement of Western Man.

You may be in the last generation to get that chance, right now the one percenters are doing everything they can to turn the university into a taxpayer-subsidized training program for business, one that is primarily designed to ideologically indoctrinate the worker bees in the commercial ethos and to create a specialist surplus in every technical field so that salary costs can be kept under control.

Being a student now may have its challenges, and it may seem a nightmare. It certainly sounds a lot scarier than when I was your age and doing the same thing. (Actually, when I was 19, I was flunking out of school, worried about getting drafted into the infantry, and whether Mary Ellen was pregnant.) If it makes you feel any better, if I could I’d swap places with you in a heartbeat.

Good Luck, comrade. And give ‘em hell. This old fart envies you.

If you want to make money, choose a solid major in a needed program. Then add a foreign language.

If you want to develop an appreciation of the world in which we live, choose something like foreign policy, history, and add a foreign language.

If I had it to do it now I’d choose a major which gave me a familiarity with Africa and learn Swahili. That’s a remarkable trade language which is used in a number of countries. North Africa is going to be a hot zone followed by East and West.

Whatever you do, if you don’t have a goal you will likely flounder, be unhappy, and not do well at anything.

And if you think you will become a billionaire, astronaut or President, give it up. Those are driven people with incredible discipline and a lot of luck. People talk about Newt Gingrich being lazy. He may be, and he has a Ph. D. in Economics, has been the Speaker of the House and is smart as hell. I should be so lazy.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Have a goal, something toward which even the most boring day can be considered a step toward it, and then move.

I can honestly say that I have no idea what to do about this situation. But then again, I’m only 19 years old, so what do I know?