Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2009 … wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

But I have a lot of column left, so I will offer you more. The rest of my advice, though, is a wholly owned subsidiary of my experience, and may or may not have any applicability to yours and may or may not get you into a lot of trouble.

Stop to consider that in 10 years you are very likely to be married, living in your own house, driving your own car, working a job you hate to help pay the babysitter. Yeah, you’ll have a kid, too.

Stop to consider that the following 10 years will go by faster than the previous 10, and the next 10 will go by even faster than that. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

Don’t count the minutes, count the memories. If you can’t remember, pretend you can and laugh when everyone else does. It’s easier that way.

You are as fat as you imagine. Everyone else is fatter, though, so it works out.

The future is a story you tell yourself. The past is the same. The present is the only thing you can be sure of, but you just missed it worrying about the other two.

Get to know the Serenity Prayer.

Beware of fads; it will soon become clear that Barack Obama is just another man and that Twitter is just another way to sell you something.

Your Roomba is stupid, too.

Guys; don’t intimate that you totally dig her outlook on life and wish more people had her sense of humor when really you just wanna be all up ins. Gals; don’t be surprised when you fall for it.

Bag it before you tag it; wrap it before you tap it; bundle before you rumble; yadda yadda yadda. Just use one, all right?

Run.

Jealousy is not conducive to happiness. Sometimes you’re better than everyone, sometimes you suck more than Sasha Grey. The point is to not care about it either way, because no one else cares whether you have a bigger truck or a more stylish messenger bag.

Really, they don’t.

See that? I just lied (they do care, but that’s because they’re jealous, which means you’re better, which means don’t worry about it). Be careful about that – lying – because the Internet isn’t going away.

Speaking of the Internet, Google has rendered “I don’t know“ an unacceptable answer. Google also makes it very easy to pretend to know a lot of stuff and write columns about it.

Keep your love letters and your bank statements; one never does know when supporting documents and/or blackmail will be necessary.

Guys; take a yoga class. It’s good for you and the girls are flexible.

Gals; take a yoga class. It’s good for you and at least the guys totally dig your outlook on life and wish more people had your sense of humor.

Never figure out what you want to do with your life. If you do, your life will be boring and routine. Instead, figure out what you want out of your life, and let the rest evolve.

Get plenty of calcium. And fiber. And exercise. And vitamins. And water. But not too much. But more than you get right now. Just not a whole lot more. In fact, here, buy this book; it’ll explain everything.

At some point, say the following out loud and in public, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass … and I’m all out of bubblegum.“

A few minutes later, start yelling, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Watch the movie KIDS.

Be kind to your knees; bend them for no one.

Be kind to your back; lift from your knees.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t (with thanks to Proposition 8). Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t (with thanks to now-free Viagra). Maybe you’ll get divorced, maybe you’ll make out with the waitress on your 50th wedding anniversary (with thanks to your spouse). But no matter what you do, do it with passion. We can’t control much, if we can control anything at all, but we can decide how to respond to our life’s circumstances.

You are the marble and the Michelangelo.

Really, how fucking unnatural are mirrors? Humans spent tens of thousands of years without them, and now suddenly our psyches are supposed to make sense of looking at ourselves all the damn time? The challenge: Try to go a day without looking at yourself in a mirror.

Then try a week.

Dance. Film yourself. Fall. Put it on YouTube. Get famous. Make no money. Get depressed. Dance.

Remember that Google has rendered “I don’t know“ an unacceptable answer? That counts for directions, too.

Take it easy. And if it’s easy, take it twice.

Go ahead and read beauty magazines; just be sure to openly and loudly criticize the models‘ feelings of low self worth while in the checkout stand.

Do not buy the magazine.

Ask your parents (or legal guardian) one totally random question per week. What was 1978 like? Who did they see at their first concert? How did people get around before the Segway?

Be nice to your roommates; there’s no guarantee that toothbrush of yours won’t end up in the toilet and then back in your mouth. As System of a Down says, “Need the ones you love/ love the ones you need.“

You’ll meet new people after you graduate. You’ll move someplace different. You’ll work on novel projects. Know your roots. Do not forget your old friends, old apartment, old work. More to the point, do not burn bridges; scorched earth is a blunt and crude way of limiting the energy you expend maintaining a relationship.

The shit’s chess, it ain’t checkers.

Go to another country. Mexico doesn’t count, and Canada counts as half. Iran counts double. North Korea is an automatic win.

Cook.

Accept certain inalienable truths: earnings will fall, politicians will start wars, humans will run out of fresh water. And when you get old, you’ll rationalize it all by pointing out that you can hologram-conference with your Army buddy fighting for the Amazon in Brazil for free after 6 p.m. on weekends and that makes it totally worth it.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Conservatives are going to kill the social safety net if it’s the last thing they do (and it will be).

Get a tattoo.

(But not while you’re in one of those other countries.)

If someone is selling their advice, it means one of two things. Either they made it big and are just looking for a way to fill time and stroke their ego, or they didn’t make it at all and are just looking for a way to fill time and stroke their ego. The only way to know is to use Google. When you do you’ll realize that Jim Cramer beat the market from 2005 through 2007 by 4.6 percent. Then reality beat the market by 56.8 percent.

The lesson: the safest advice is the stuff no one wants to sell because the safest advice is to not buy any bullshit, which is what everyone is selling.

Even me, I’m sure.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

K.C. CODY really does want everyone to wear sunscreen. Any final thoughts can be directed to kccody@ucdavis.edu.

This past Memorial Day weekend I did something I’ve never done before. And no, I didn’t take three consecutive body shots of three different liquors off the bellies of three different sorority girls for three days straight; I wasn’t on houseboats, sorry to disappoint.

Instead, I went to Raging Waters. But more on that later.

Before I did that, I nerded it up and wracked my brain over what to write for this column. Sitting alone in front of my computer screen, slowly draining a Sierra Nevada Summerfest, I tried to think of an engaging, clever way to tie off all the loose ends of my two-year career as an Aggie columnist.

I was failing. Miserably.

I started and stopped, did and undid, copied and pasted and cut and cleared. The words weren’t right, the ideas incomplete and the feelings too confused; and as with most bouts of writer’s block, it was only getting worse.

So when the opportunity to go to Raging Waters came up on Sunday, I pounced.

Unfortunately, the slides, and even the lazy river, weren’t enough to take my mind off the problems I was having with the column. Fortunately, the slides and the lazy river completely resolved them.

Sitting by the wave pool, taking in the scene, I saw something. I saw it around me, I saw it in everything. I saw my friends and me in a different context, and that context exposed just how insulated we college students are at UC Davis.

First off, we’re fit. Some of us more than others, but 70 percent of college students are neither overweight nor obese. We care about what we eat (we did take NUT 10, after all), we exercise (the ARC is only closed for five hours a day) and just 9 percent of UC Davis students smoke. But 21 percent of Americans smoke, and they’re the fattest people in the world; 67 percent of Americans over 20 years of age are overweight and 34 percent are obese. Worse, the overweight and obesity rates among children have tripled since 1980.

We don’t disrespect our bodies like America.

Second, we’re not stupid. Assuming we graduate, we’ll be among the minority of Americans, 28 percent, with a bachelor’s degree. And while 85 percent of Americans have a high school diploma (or GED “equivalent“), the current drop out rate is 30 percent, and has been increasing steadily since the late 1960s if you include (unlike the government) 16- to 24-year-olds who are in prison and exclude (unlike the government) people with a GED.

We don’t think like America.

Third, we’re immersed in a completely different racial demographic. UC Davis’s breakdown is 42 percent Asian, 36 percent White, 12 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Black with a 56/44 female to male split. The rest of the country is just 4 percent Asian, 66 percent White, 15 percent Hispanic and 13 percent Black with a 51/49 male to female split.

We don’t look like America.

Fourth, we speak more languages. Sixty-four percent of the students in the UC system are from homes where English is the only language, 21 percent from a home where both English and another language were spoken and 15 percent never heard English when they walked through the door. The other language is usually Asiatic. America though is quite different; 82 percent speak only English in the home, while 10 percent speak both English and another language, usually Spanish.

We don’t talk like America.

Fifth, just 26 percent of college students have divorced parents, whereas nationally 43 percent of all first marriages end within 15 years. Furthermore, those parents make an average of 60 percent more per year than the national median. In 2005, that meant the average household with a kid in college pulled in $74,000; $27,700 more than the median $46,300.

We don’t come from America.

Sixth through ninth: We wear casual clothes and shirts with witty sayings like “Camping – It’s In Tents“; we use words like “awareness” and “masquerade“; and we walk with our bodies pointing forward. The rest of Americans wear shirts that say “NO FEAR,“ watch sports like NASCAR and either walk with their pants around their quads or waddle like ducks.

We don’t act like America.

But we’re in America, right?

I’m not so sure. What I saw at Raging Waters was an entirely different country.

Before his winky got him in trouble, John Edwards said there were two Americas; but I see three. There’s the America of the very select few who went to Ivy League schools and snorted the right people’s coke; they run this bitch and you will never be one.

Then there’s the America in the middle of the economic hourglass, doing everything it can to avoid slipping to the bottom; going to college, working hard, putting their savings into a home and 401K (at the advice of the previous America). They were generally surviving up to now, but that hourglass is getting awfully lopsided.

And then there’s the America I saw this weekend.

Raging Waters exposed me to something very ugly about America, and it took me back to why I started writing in the first place.

I was trying to show you a way from crazy. For all my rancorous diatribes and stick-it-to-the-man fury, I was doing it because what I see out there falls terribly short of where we could be, and I want so badly for us to get there. It was to give those who might be in a position to do something other ways of doing it; to voice alternative points of view; to get Americans to mobilize for something, to agitate for something, to be something.

I see so much that could be better about us, see so many ways we could drop the charade and stop pretending to be anything other than what we are: human. To stop trying to be gods or machines and just be human fucking beings.

To stop hawking heart attacks on a stick and cancer in a tube. To stop pushing the fear of inadequacy on our children through media. To stop getting caught up in material trivialities. To stop cutting throats like we cut budgets and taxes while wondering where the old America went.

I wrote because I wanted us to instead center on our families, our children, our health and education. To start giving people the tools to do those things, and to start pulling the hourglass a bit more in their favor; single payer health insurance, guaranteed housing, a food allowance, a living wage, six months paid maternity leave. Any one of those would do, all of those would do better.

Consider why we even run this rat race; we do it because we want to be happy. And we believe, rightly, that in order to be happy we need some base level of income. But that base of income is merely a means to an end; the purchase of a base level of comfort in the form of clothing, food, shelter and health. When any of those four is threatened, people’s lives become incredibly stressful because they are then struggling to literally survive.

So struggle they do; over 12 percent of homes (let alone rentals) are in default or foreclosure; over 10 percent of Americans are not “food secure“; 56 percent say college is unaffordable while college tuition is increasing three times as fast as the median family income; over 45 percent of Americans are uninsured, underinsured, have trouble paying for needed medical expenses or simply don’t seek care due to costs; over 40 percent have medical debt.

But no one cares.

We are so wealthy, even now, that to forego these sorts of social supports and thus force our fellow countrymen to scrounge for scraps at the edges of society is appalling. It’s a tragic, even shameful testament to just how far we’ve wandered from decency and respect as a community of human beings.

We could be so much more than this.

K.C. CODY thanks you all for your time and attention, and invites you to check out his blog at contentiousobjector.blogspot.com. Any remaining hate mail or stalker scribbles can be sent to kccody@ucdavis.edu.

Readers – as this is the last column the hard-working and parsimonious gang at The Aggie will let me publish this year, let me say its been one king-hell of a ride writing for you. My coverage of the obscure and important, I hope, has helped you to see more elephants in the room than a schizophrenic pachyderm.

Much more importantly, I intended my writing to arouse a sense of inquisitiveness that leads to an act called ‘independent thought.‘ I want you to blast through the filters of mainstream media and blaze your own intellectual trail.

Truth still lives in our world, and you can have it for the price of asking. That price is going up, so I say steal it.

But I’m not the scrapbooking type, so I’ll wipe my single nostalgic tear and get right into it.

I’m going to bombard you with information. Some of it I believe to be true, other parts I consider and rebuke and others yet make me laugh.

Until we meet again, I’d like you to sort these quips into those three categories.

Not for me, for you.

Figure out where you stand on each one, and think until you’re sure.

Self-motivated learning is the best way to chart the ever-night sky of human existence.

My work may not point you toward a lode-star, but I hope it can find you a constellation or two. Start now. Look up.

Once again, I am intentionally pushing buttons and testing limits, as is my constitutional right. If we don’t use our legal protections, how do we know they’re there?

Let’s begin.

Since the California Supreme Court has decided that human rights are up for a vote by upholding civil rights limitation Prop 8 by 6 to 1, it can’t be long now till the Ballot Box Wars break out. Mad with power, judicially-encouraged Protestants and Catholics will flood biblically on voting day, becoming the Crusaders of the Polling Places – now able to bash any less numerous group into the status of second-class citizens. Ethnic and religious groups of all kinds will be caught in a war of lost freedoms. Californians will be forced to decide with which gang they stand to fight for their freedom of speech, their voting rights, their rights to legal representation, their rights to own businesses and their rights to promise their kids a stable and prosperous future.

Cities will be riot-scorched wastelands of boarded windows and barred doors. The Capitol building will be sandbagged and patrolled by National Guardsmen. For some strange reason, Blackwater mercenaries and FEMA agents will begin to appear. Progress will be trashed to a halt.

Or, we could take Prop 8 to the Federal Supreme Court and get the whole marriage mess straightened out before anything happens.

Truth is, the word ‘marriage‘ is a glitch of American legal history. Church and state crossed over for a second and wound up getting their bags mixed up. The state has the authority to create legal unions between people. And that’s all. It’s up to individuals to determine their own spirituality and decide what rituals they want when they unite with their soul mate. In every case, legally united people will share the same rights and liberties and spiritually joined people can have their peace. ‘Marriage‘ shouldn’t appear in legal code anywhere. Just a mix up we can fix. Click.

Monogamy is outdated anyways.

Barack Obama is a test tube baby. He was engineered in 1980 in a secret genetics facility on a forbidden Hawaiian island.

We don’t know anything true about Sept. 11.

Republican pundits are a mass of inarticulate bloodsucking ticks riding in the ears of the gullible and skewing their view of reality.

Al Qaeda doesn’t exist.

Jack Ruby killed John F. Kennedy. He and Lee Harvey Oswald lived within a block of one another and both had plane tickets to Mexico for the next day. After the plan went a little awry, Ruby plugged the hole (Oswald) and covered the Illuminati’s tracks. JFK aspired for world peace and sought to dismantle the Federal Reserve. Bang, bang, bang went the guns in Masonic Square.

The Founding Fathers required that American farmers grow hemp. As in cannabis. This is because the beautiful plant has a vast array of practical uses. American visionaries knew hemp can be woven into uniquely strong fibers for rope and clothing, and its oil could be extracted for a variety of applications. They also knew how mega-blown and trippin‘ on human equality you could get after packing some of Betsy Ross‘ home-grown buds into Benjamin Franklin’s steamroller, and that if you asked ‘TJ‘ Jefferson to see his triple-perc bong you’d better not have work the next day. The Declaration of Independence AND the Constitution were written after hot-boxing the entire Congressional hall. More than one signer had dreads.

Your dreams really exist. The subconscious is just a place where your soul can talk to you without needing to be filtered by your conscious mind. And we all have psychic immortal souls, just not like what any one religion can teach you.

Revolution is the only way this generation is gonna have its place in the world.

Love is real, and you’re getting closer to it every day.

That concludes my barrage of equally contrived and researched information. Sift it out. An answer key will not be provided.

As always, I’m pushing the limits of word-space along with everything else, so I gotta wrap for the year. Thanks so much for reading. Keep the fire of curiosity aglow. Also, check out my blog I’ll be starting within the next week. Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets, boy.

CHEYA CARY is great with goodbyes; he never says them. Wish him a happy journalism internship at cheya.cary@gmail.com.

Everyone agrees that creativity is an important quality to have in order to succeed in any profession. Not only that, creative individuals positively affect the whole world, as did Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison. There is no doubt that creativity indirectly benefits mankind, but is this intuitive notion correct? How could writing poetry or doodling cartoons assist Albert Einstein with his role in the creation of the atom bomb? Clearly, it wouldn’t help him in any significant way. There is a certain creative process that needs to be exercised in order to translate meaningless ideas into useful ones; I call this type of creativity: “constructive creativity.“

Here are 5 tips to being more creative in a meaningful way.

Make analogies and connections. You need to constantly make analogies and connections with anything that pops in your head. Doing this exercise will not only help you better understand complicated concepts, but also make you more creative! Connecting two concepts together can inspire innovative ideas. For example, letting your friends borrow money is analogous to a human ATM. Let’s take that a step further – what if it was possible to be an actual human ATM. Now imagine if they had wallets that had functions similar to that of an ATM. If someone owes you money, they could just swipe your wallet with their credit/debit card. And with just that analogy, I came up with a startup idea.

Philosophize. Philosophizing is creative thinking with a logical groundwork. Use the rigorous foundation of philosophy to ponder the mysteries in your domain of study. Many scientific theories have been inspired by philosophy. A popular scientific philosophy is String Theory. A sense of wonder wasn’t the only thing that gave rise to String Theory. The logical nature of philosophy guides the mathematicians and scientists in the right direction.

Consider the exact opposite. Being critical of everything is an excellent way to jump-start your brain. Seeing both sides of an argument gives you the motivation to think. Have you ever had someone critically scrutinize your opinion and ended up having a stronger stance than what you began with? Questioning your current beliefs will just break them down and build up new, stronger beliefs in place. Take conventional wisdom and try to argue in the complete opposite direction. This simple thought exercise will surprise you as to how much you will learn.

Say the obvious. There has been many times where a new invention or business pops up and we say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Ironically, the most obvious things are also the most looked over. When you have time to ponder, observe your surroundings and literally say the obvious. Let your inner captain obvious shine through and say whatever you observe (you might want to keep it to yourself for social reasons). This exercise won’t make you creative on its own merit; it should be used as a way to spark new ideas, you shouldn’t take a passive role.

Always ask why, and then answer it. Don’t be like the children who always ask why, because they can’t answer on their own. The trick is to let your own mind do the thinking to come at your own conclusion. This will get you accustomed to the different ways of solving problems. Keep trying to answer ‘why‘ until you come up with an answer that is hard to refute. After much practice, you will find yourself answering ‘why‘ faster and faster. Learning all sorts of different methods for solving problems will equip you with the mental algorithms for creatively solving harder problems in the future.

LIOR GOTESMAN thinks that constructive creativity is a skill that can be systematically improved. There, I just ruined your only legitimate excuse for smoking weed. Contact him at liorgott@gmail.com.