Just a few days ago, I think, I was sitting at my desk on my newly-purchased seat cushion, a wonderful product designed with my sensitive areas in mind, and I began to wonder about my butt.

Nothing too anatomical, mind you, just wondering…

Well, more specifically, about the chair upon which my butt, and subsequently the remainder of my mass, rested. I began to wonder if I was actually sitting on a chair in my room, if there really was a chair in my room, if there really was a chair…

Let me give a little background history to those frosh who haven’t had the pleasure of the spewings of Rene Descartes in Cultures, Ideas and Values yet.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there once was a little boy (by the relative and contemporary definition of “boy”) who was named Rene Descartes (purely a societal tag to facilitate interpersonal interaction; it implies nothing of the “true nature” of the “boy”). “Rene” “was” (assumes the passage of time; left in for simplicity) “sitting” (implies physical incarnation of “Rene,” whom we have not shown to exist) on a “chair”…

Anyway, Rene Descartes denied everything except the unbelievably famous “I think, therefore I am.”

So I was sitting on my butt, feeling much like Descartes, denying everything, left and right, mowing down objects at will, feeling the true force of my all-consuming power.

“Hey, Course Reader, eat this!”

“University bill, take a hike.”

“What stop sign, Officer?”

Oh, and you have never, never in your wildest dreams, really ticked off your roommate until you’ve denied his existence.

So instead of falling to the ground do to the sudden disappearance of a certain piece of furniture, I started to think more abstractly about existence instead of trying to obliterate the universe. In the old days of messed-up scientific theories, people naively believed that objects actually existede in the real world, and when we saw or felt them, we were interacting with the object. But in the spirit of science and the advance of human knowledge, that theory has been replaced.

Now here’s the leading theory: nothing really exists out there; those things are just perceptions that we have of nothingness