The laundry/rap issue

In college, I find myself listening to a disturbing amount of rap music. I don’t know why. I don’t even like rap music. But my iTunes tells me that I’ve listened to the song “Hip Hop is Dead” by Nas (a popular rapper who doesn’t actually think that Hip Hop is dead) a disturbing 24 times, which is impressive, given my other most-listened-to songs are “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, and “My Mood Swings” by Elvis Costello. So as you can see, I don’t really have very rappy tastes. So what gives?

Laundry. Every Wednesday, I wash my clothes. I don’t enjoy it, but I pretty much have to or else I’d have to go naked. While college is, I’ll admit, a pretty liberal place, I don’t think that the general population of the University of North Carolina would think that it was particularly groovy if I walked around in, um, nothing. I mean, it’s okay when it’s Woodstock, and heck, Bonnaroo got so hot that people had to walk around naked, but people won’t accept public nudity if the naked guy in question just doesn’t want to do his laundry. Sorry to put that picture in your heads, folks.

But I digress. Whenever I do laundry, it seriously takes, like, a week. I can grow a beard in a shorter span of time than it takes for my laundry to get done, and that’s saying a lot, for someone who just emerging from puberty. I mean, even Russell Kooistra could grow a beard in the time it takes to do my laundry.

And doing laundry isn’t fun. Allow me to illustrate: if you were to personify fun, you would probably get David Lee Roth. And if David Lee Roth is fun, then doing laundry is John Kerry. Even walking into the laundry room is a hostile experience. The first time I went in there, I toted my bag of clothes, only to find that all of the washing machines were in use. I probably could have figured that out by just looking at the faces of the people in the room. I didn’t see one friendly face in the crowd. It seemed like everybody’s face had a look that said, “What in the world are you doing here? Why are you so presumptuous as to assume that you could do your laundry in the laundry room? Get out before we call the cops!”

So while I wait for my laundry to get done, I listen to the song “Hip Hop is Dead” by Nas on repeat. When I run, I listen to “Hip Hop is Dead.” I’m even listening to the thing right now. There are two songs whose words I know by heart, and this is one of them.

But why do I listen to rap music when I do my laundry? I don’t know. I guess I enjoy the juxtaposition of the inexplicable pull that rap offers — of stylized violence, misogyny, and money — against, well, putting your dirty clothes in a washer and waiting.

If Hip Hop is dead, then its ghost is haunting me.

College 101, lessons learned

So. I no longer live in Polk County. I live in a twelve feet by fifteen feet by ten feet cube called my dorm room. Only half of it is mine; the other half is my roommate’s. As I type this, my roommate is sleeping in his bed at 11:22 in the morning, because after you enter college, you never sleep when it’s dark out. Right now, I’m running on four (maybe) hours of sleep, so please excuse me if this seems rambly-tambly, to borrow a phrase from Creedence. Anyways, the first three or so weeks of college have been — not to exaggerate in the least — all-encompassingly transcendent. I’ve learned so many life lessons here in my first three weeks, I’ve almost forgotten that I already know everything because I’m 18. So I’ve decided that today I want to share with you some of the wisdom that I’ve picked up from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Tangent: it should be noted that this is a list of everything I’ve learned in college, so if it ain’t on the list, I either already knew it or never learned it.)

Lesson 1: Living with a roommate is like having a brother that you can’t resolve differences with by punching in the face, or else it’s assault. I haven’t actually learned this first-hand, because I get along with my roommate. But I’ve met plenty of people who loathe their roommate with an all-consuming passion in their soul that borders upon bloodlust. So I guess a mini-lesson here would be: Choose your roommate wisely.

Lesson 2: Not everyone in college is drunk all the time, it’s harder to be let in to a frat party than you think, and once you’ve gotten into them, they will remind you of a middle-school dance, only with drunk people. During college, I have not technically gone to a party at a fraternity yet. In fact, I’ve only been to one party here at all, and there were only about thirty people there, which is a very small number where college parties are concerned. But the reason that I have not been to a frat party is not because I haven’t tried. It’s just that my room/suitemates (whom I hang out with almost exclusively) are all, obviously, males, and in order to get into a frat party, you kind of need to be either (a) female, (b) a pack of females, or (c) in a group where the number of females vastly outnumbers the number of males, or (d) in the fraternity. Now, the obvious response to my rant about not getting into frat parties would be, “Well Drew, if you’re so interested in getting into frat parties, why don’t you just join a fraternity?”

The answer to this question is, of course, “Shut up.”

Lesson 3: Once you enter college, laundry drops way down on your list of priorities. Here’s a quick quiz for the laundry-conscious college student to give him/herself every morning:

Q: Does it smell?

A: Eh, kind of. Wear it anyways!

Lesson 4: Everyone here is smarter than you. Not sure about that? Well just ask someone if they think that they’re smarter than you. Their answer is always “yes.” UNC students as a whole thrive on the notion that they’re the smartest person in the room, even when they’re sitting in a 500-person lecture hall listening to the man who wrote the book on his subject.
Lesson 5: Dave Matthews is the second coming of Beethoven. For those of you who don’t know, Dave Matthews is the most boring musician alive, but I believe that every college student (except myself and maybe seven other people) thinks that he rules face. They don’t call him “Dave Matthews.” Just Dave. Like he’s their buddy. It’s sickening. Note: this is especially true for members of Greek organizations, whose frontal lobes are specifically designed to trigger high-fives all around when one of Dave’s songs comes on.

Lesson 6: Cafeteria food is horrible, but it beats starving. One of my friends claims that she got food poisoning from the cafeteria that my friends and I frequent, so I’m patiently waiting for that plate of bad chicken.

Lesson 7: College makes poor people out of everyone. College forces you to make very dumb monetary decisions, such as, “If I don’t eat today, I can afford to buy that poster of Dave Matthews!” But hey. It’s college, which means we all make those dumb decisions as a collective, and when dumb decisions become collective, that makes them “trends.” So let’s all skip a few meals and buy tickets to that sweet Dave concert coming up in a few weeks!

In the meantime, I’ll be napping.

Oh and PS…. Mom and Dad, I’m almost out of money. Please send more.