Orientation week is one sweet deal. So far you've gotten everything placed right in your hands, hands which perhaps still carry the smell of hayfields back home. There's been the free meal, the Orientation Sample Pack of Adderall, the cattle-call to freshman night on 113th, and the discounts on returning service at St. Luke's.

By now you've gotten a whole lot of hook-ups, and its our intention that they not stop there. Lit Hum is but the length of this article away. You can save yourself the chocolatey taste of Lit Hum Fear for the entire year by absorbing one simple idea:

Everything in Lit Hum can be boiled down to a tidbit about as long as a haiku, which your professor/ bitter grad student will expect you to surmise.

Don't go to Cliff Notes. Trust to the Fed: clip out the lowest common denominator, and soar, yes, soar over the midget-sized hurdle that stands between you and attendance at every one of the six daily Barnard Orientation Ice Cream Socials.

Your only task is to listen during at least ten minutes per class and find out which phrase of the mantra interests your particular preceptor the most.

Is he fascinated with pansexualism in the Odyssey? Maybe he devotes his class to a self-mutilation motif in Eumenides. When it comes to essays and finals, customize the mantra accordingly and then expound. Do not stop until you have filled two small blue books.

And the key to remembering all mantras is to look for places where it works itself into the many-threaded motif of Columbian life. Judging by the number of Columbians reliving each classic down to the moistest core of each one's mantra, it looks like Lit Hum contains works appreciated beyond their times after all.

Hymn to Demeter
Mantra: Demeter attempts to make a new generation of gods by herself so she can scare Zeus off his duff. The last things Zeus wants are demigods designed for one purpose: consuming mead.
CCC: Columbia institutes a new generation of sexual misconduct policy to scare the predators even worse than actual real true criminal charges. The last things New York wants are guys in perpetual need of 24 more credits to get a B.A.

The Odyssey
Mantra: After nearly twenty years absence, Odysseus proves that home is a place where they will always love you and take you back.
CCC: After nine hours away from the northwest side of Broadway, a Barnardite proves that home is a place where they will always love you and take you back and hold a bitch session to make you feel better.

Agamemnon
Mantra: Agamemnon proves that home is a place where they might not love you and take you back when you're gone for nigh on ten years. Everything changes.
CCC: A Columbia junior proves that home is a place where they might not love you and take you back when you're gone for nigh on ten months during study abroad. The Core must be fulfilled.

Bacchae
Mantra: Don't tie up Dionysus if he'll destroy everything you hold dear. Find a happy medium.
CCC: Don't let him loose either, or talk it out with the cute guys with CAVA uniforms. Find a happy medium.