Have you noticed the number of studies, polls and surveys constantly being done on people of various ages for various reasons?

Why? I mean, outside of being points of interest to talk about over the dinner table after the macaroni and cheese has crystallized on your plate, do these polls and surveys actually do anybody any good?

I guess what I’m asking is, do we ever really learn anything from our own history, or do we just keep chronicling all these things so we can say stupid things like, “Yep, history repeats itself, all right”?

No one really cares. Sure it’s interesting, but who cares? Take, for example, the magazine U., which came out last week. The front page is mostly taken up by two stories: “40 percent of students polled admit cheating,” and “Two million of us are ‘ticking time bombs'”(referring to AIDS).

How many people saw that article on cheating and said to themselves: “I’m aghast! 40 percent! God help us—I’ll never cheat again!!!”? Or read about AIDS (for the five billionth time) and said, “Holy flaccidity, no more cheap sex for me!!!”

That’s what I thought. More than likely, most people just thought, “Oh wow, I’m not alone.” If you’re perceptive, you might have deduced that people who can cheat can probably lie pretty well too. So if 40 percent were honest and admitted it, how many lied—and what’s the real percentage? And how many of them had AIDS? Enquiring minds wanna know.

Put that on your list of things to ponder. Which brings me at last to a big topic of recent surveys: Values of today’s college students (and the lack thereof).

MONEY. (Oh, come on, you know this! It’s universal.) Everybody sing: “MONEY makes the world go around, the world go around, the world …”

Why do you think we’re all here? To get an education? Oh, surely you jest. No! We’re here to get that little piece of paper with calligraphy on it, known as a diploma, which in translation amounts to: “Give the person holding this a job and lots of MONEY.” Of course it doesn’t work that way, but that’s what we believe, isn’t it?

When we get lots of MONEY, we can buy lots of things: Gucci bags, LV accessories, BMWs, Jaguars, Porsches, CDs, VCRs, swimming pools, jaccuzis, lawyers, psychiatrists and plastic surgeons.

Why? So we can be appealing. Why? To attract a mate. Why? So we can have a partner in life with whom to share all our things; to reproduce with so we can have children who’ll drive us crazy and spend at least three to five years of their lives hating us and then spend our MONEY getting their degrees so we have nothing left to buy more things with.

Then they’ll move away, make their own MONEY and buy their own things and find mates who, like ours, will become such a part of them that they will have absolutely nothing to talk about over dinner—but can communicate by pure osmosis, eliminating the need for emotion.

Phew! Okay, okay, I’m exaggerating. I’m sure somewhere, someone has a distant set of cousins who are very happily married, have common interests in “starving artist” exhibits, hockey, ballet and bad horror movies—and who really couldn’t care less about MONEY. Introduce me, will you?

And I’m sure there’s at least one person out there thinking: “All I want is to have fun, as long as I can get by.” “Getting by” is not fun, you moron, how naive can you be? You want fun? Refer back to sex and MONEY.

Actually, some people are really into learning. I’m not sure if I fit into that category, but I wouldn’t mind postponing the “real world” as long as possible. Maybe I’ll just get a Ph.D. in everything and die with the largest GSL debt known to man.

Anyway, I guess somehow I’m hoping that more comes out of social surveys and polls than idle dinner conversation, but I’m not so sure. We’ve known at least since “Mone Mone” hit the charts the first time that our values are rapidly disintegrating. And still, nothing has changed.