Now and then student government attracts my attention, usually by mishandling an election.

Yet this year I was lucky enough to interview all of the candidates for student government president and vice president. They all had very nice platforms, with varying degrees of plausibility, but none of it seemed very applicable to me, which got me to thinking about the things student government at all levels (hall, class and student body) could do for me.

For starters, forget the campus shuttle. I'd rather have library minions.

The library could employ a whole squad full of people whose job is to go find my books. I could head over to the library, look up a bunch of books on Aleph and then, while I hang out and chat on the second floor, my minion would run up and down the library looking for the books, sparing me the frustration of discovering they are not there. For that matter, now that you can use Aleph on the web, the library minions could bring me my books in my room, thus sparing me from ever having to leave my couch.

There was a lot of talk this year about reviving the tradition that undergrads can't use the front steps of the Dome. Well, that's all very well and good, but I'd rather revive the tradition of a campus-wide snowball fight. Student Senate is very good at talking, but couldn't they turn those voices to better use than arguing about commas and semicolons? They could set up some kind of phone tree to call every student senator on campus, then the senators could run up and down the halls of the dorms, pounding on doors and shouting, "Snowball fight!" to get people out on the quad. I get a kick out of throwing things at people.

As for the Class of 2000, forget the statue. (Or have we forgotten that? There's a notable lack of fliers touting it this year.) I would much rather have those Notre Dame medals that everyone from the Class of 2001 on down got at Freshman O. There are two months until graduation, but that's plenty of time for the Class of 2000 class council to locate for me and everyone else in the Class of 2000 a Notre Dame medal and give it to us for graduation.

Another recurring problem on campus that I feel student government coul address is the flashers around the lakes. Just this weekend, my next-door neighbor was flashed while jogging around the lakes. Now, in Illinois they train swans to scare away Canadian geese, so couldn't student government form a task force to train swans to scare away naked men and the people who like to have sex on the hill in front of Moreau? (And believe me, the seminarians can see you. If you must have outdoor sex, can you not choose a place better than right in front of the seminary? Doesn't that creep you out?) If the swans prove untrainable, couldn't some of our mutant squirrels be trained for the same purpose?

These are just some of the many things that student government could be doing to work for me. I expect to see at least two of these items on agendas in the next week.

Of course, student government could always ignore my excellent and well-researched suggestions and spend the remainder of this year passing irate resolutions about humor columnists.

• A Few Suggestions