Things I Wish People Had Told Me About College

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The freshman fifteen doesn’t exist. The freshman thirty, however, does. I blame it all on the food they serve in the dining hall. Since you can’t afford to eat elsewhere, you’re forced to consume Depression Taco Tuesdays and I Hate Myself Western Wednesdays. All of this terrible food you’re putting in your body will only fast track the sadness you’re already feeling as a result of moving away from home. It’s like when that guy ate McDonald’s for thirty days and wanted to kill myself afterward. He couldn’t even get a boner! While freshmen boys typically have little problems with maintaining erections, eating crappy food and gaining weight does kill your life boner.

Speaking of boners, you see your roommate have sex. I mean, I didn’t SEE mine do it but I heard him. Our dorm room was the size of a closet but that didn’t deter him from getting laid. The girls always sounded drunk and moaned a lot in that fake porn star kind of way. They expressed initial discomfort with having sex while two feet away from my sleeping body but he convinced them to do it. I heard that “smack, smack, smack!” sound of his dick going into their Georgia O’Keeffe and was totally revolted by the act of sex. If you aren’t the one who’s having it, sex usually sounds like a sloppy affair best reserved for National Geographic.

A lot of your friends suck. In my first two years of college, I spent most of my time with people I hated. They were total filler friends—people I only hung out with until my real tribe showed up. It’s funny because you hang out with people who don’t matter to you because you’re lonely, only to figure out that the whole thing just makes you feel even more alienated. Who’s surprised? Not me. Lauren, Trenton, Samantha, George, David, Heather: I saw many of you vomit in trashcans, talk about your relationship problems, and smoke SO MUCH POT. All the while, I nodded my head and smiled, playing the part. Now my acting days are over. See you on Facebook!

Three things you need to know in order to pass college: Gender is a social construct, Foucault is a God, and the lesbian who sits across from you in your child development class hates your guts. That will be $60,000 now please.

If you’re a girl or a gay, you will have a crush on every Bukowski-reading douche you come in to contact with. They’ll be super sexy—too sexy for a 20-year-old—and chain smoke cigarettes and act all Jordan Catalano-esque hanging out in some corner by themselves . You’ll want to smack them and then screw them. But beware of these college boy heartbreakers. They will crush your soul with their affected aloofness and insensitivity. Having a medium-grade orgasm on his twin bed in a railroad style apartment is not worth all the tears you’ll eventually shed over them.

You’ll read that one book that changes your life and about a thousand other ones authored by some revered chauvinist. You’ll NEVER do your reading but you’ll make sure to piggyback off of someone’s observations in class so it seems like you did. Everyone walks away from college with a degree in BSing. If you didn’t, you did something wrong.

College isn’t necessarily the best years of your life (god help us all if that turns out to be true ) but they do have a dreamworld-like quality to them. You’re protected from the outside world and you live in a bubble. The only things that matter are the the things that occur within your social groups and classes. You have no real awareness of how life works beyond your campus. And you know what? You don’t care. You have the rest of your days to worry about it. For now you’re just focusing on having lots of feelings, getting drunk at house parties, and getting someone to sleep with you. Enjoy having those types of non-problems because believe me, it does NOT last.

One last thing, popularity doesn’t exist. If you think you’re popular in college, it’s only because you’re crazy.

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image – Paul Stainthorp