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.
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1 comment:
Your blog is extremely accurate. You didn't mention laundry day though in the part about laundry. Geez, that is the main reason college kids like us use the smell test in the first place. We absolutely hate doing laundry.
Poor Lewis, I know that silently-sitting feeling. Most kids who come from small schools feel the same way when they are placed in such a different and bigger population. I know that I felt and still continue to feel that same way at college.
Masterly done blog, my friend, and it was fun being enrolled in your College 101 class, and it even holds true in the upper reaches of New York State.
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