Pearls of wisdom cast freely before ye swine

Greetings from St. George, or as I call it, the Palm Springs of Utah. 

It’s 4 AM in the desert and I’m busy not sleeping because I thought it would be a really good idea after being completely sedentary for five days to drink lots of Dr. Pepper right before bedtime.

Anyway, I hope everyone has had a blissful holiday season surrounded by family and old friends. Myself, I made some new friends this winter break, all of whom are contractors and/or construction workers invading and destroying my house like metastatic cancer.

There’s Chatty Cathy, a nice man who drives a Lexus and ropes you into painfully long conversations like a boa constrictor strangling its helpless prey. 

And there’s Vernon Dursley, whose face is roughly the color of an eggplant. So now I kind of have a visual basis of what J.K. Rowling was describing.

Then there’s Silent Killer, who doesn’t say much, but his eyes say “I have body parts in an ice box in my garage.”

And of course, there’s the legions of strange foreign men who listen to really bad Latin pop and set up their scaffolds RIGHT outside my bathroom window. We’re all such good amigos that they want to make sure I don’t fall in the shower. 

Fortunately in two weeks I depart for a semester abroad in ISTANBUL and I couldn’t be more anxious and excited and scared. I’ve had a lot of time over the break to wring my hands in apprehension and reflect on my past two and a half years in college. I’ve assessed the most important lessons that I’ve learned in college so far, none of which pertain to that science-for-non-scientists baloney (bologna?) I’ve been busting my ass over.  I think I have a pretty solid compilation so far.

Valuable lessons I learned in college that don't have much to do with academia

LESSON ONE: PARTIES ARE NOT FUN

The first fatal flaw of most parties is that the word “party” implies that there is something to celebrate, and there is rarely anything legitimate to celebrate besides having bullshat our way through another week of classes. Then there’s the fact that campus safety doesn’t allow any party to survive past midnight, so you spend more time GOING to the party than actually BEING at the party. Towards the end of the semester I purposely dress down for parties because I don’t ACTUALLY plan on ever getting there.

 I go to fewer and fewer parties each semester, I think because it is gradually dawning on me that there is actually nothing to do at parties. You can get absurdly drunk and then doing nothing is really fun, but if you don’t drink, doing nothing is pretty much as fun as it sounds.  The real Friday night fun happens in my room, where between a paper about metabotropic receptors and the next episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I like to yell out my window at the drunken frosh stumbling by dressed to the nines stuff like:

“WHEREVER YOU’RE GOING, IT’S NOT GOING TO BE FUN!”

“YOUR FATHER ISN’T PAYING FIFTY GRAND A SEMESTER SO YOU CAN LEARN HOW TO SUCK MORE AT BEER PONG!”

And

“YOU’RE FOOLING NOBODY! THAT IS NOT VITAMIN WATER!”

…

So basically I’m just a dick.

LESSON TWO: WOMEN ARE PASSIVE LEARNERS

Cue feminist uproar.

The statistics speak for themselves. Seven out of ten times, the loudmouth dummy making poorly-thought out comments and shouting out poorly-thought out questions is male. Two out of ten times, the class gets tense and quiet and watches some poor girl timidly ask a simple question with judgy-face expressions that say something like “Dumbitch doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” The remaining ten percent of the time, there is a girl with some balls. This in no context should be a good thing, but is somehow refreshingly awesome. 

I’m sure there are a zillion ways to explain this phenomenon, but I’ll just wait for a man to do it and in the meantime sit here and look pretty and submissively accept the way things are. 

And while I'm at it, I may as well make you a sandwich, wrap my feet, and make out with another girl while you and your friends watch

LESSON THREE: ONCE AN EAST COAST PREP SCHOOL DOUCHEBAG, ALWAYS AN EAST COAST PREP SCHOOL DOUCHEBAG

The ECPSDB can usually be seen:

• Smoking a cigarette
• Wearing suede footwear
• Reading the business section of the New York Times
• Casually hanging out and shooting the breeze with an esteemed professor, administrator, or other authority figure
• Trying to dictatorially head too many student organizations at once
• Playing lacrosse

And I’m pretty sure the only way to get a Mass-hole or upstate New York hipster to express human emotion is to insult his hometown.Then they just can't be tamed.

Like Miley Cyrus in her creepy XXX music video "Can't Be Tamed"

LESSON FOUR:  PEOPLE DON’T DRINK COFFEE BECAUSE IT TASTES GOOD

It’s expensive and makes your breath smell like shit. But I think I get it now.

LESSON FIVE: COLLEGE BOYS CANNOT DRESS THEMSELVES

Basketball shorts are for basketball.

Running shoes are for running.

Football jerseys are for football.

Baseball caps are for baseball.

The fact that the sports industry is male-dominated does not (should not) give college boys a four-year pass to avoid civilian clothing. 

And o ye gods, please send a plague that will destroy all men’s plaid shorts, as well as plaid quilts and Scottish kilts for good measure. 

Because better safe than WHAT THE !*#@ IS THAT

LESSON SIX: DON’T TELL PEOPLE YOU HAVE A CAR, BECAUSE YOU WILL BECOME THE SUBSTITUTE FOR AN ADEQUATE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM 

This one was kind of intuitive for me, so I avoided telling anyone but my close friends that I had a car for the better part of a year. But people started figuring it out. It might have been that my car is stupidly red in a sea of silver Priuses (Prii?) so it was bound to get noticed, or the fact that it is the only car at Oxy with Utah license plates and I am the only kid at Oxy from Utah. Or word of mouth. Or seeing me drive it. Or whatever. At any rate, I’ve been able to avoid people deliberately getting plastered to make me DD by default (the whole vow of sobriety thing) by simply not ever going out (see lesson one). So now all I use my car for are trips to CVS and Trader Joe's for conditioner and Puffins. Someone else who is not so willing to sacrifice their social life might to well by just not mentioning the car.

LESSON SEVEN: DORM BATHROOM ETIQUETTE

Thou shalt not leave wads of thy hair in the shower.

Thou shalt not occupy the stall directly next to another occupied stall.

Thou shalt not take up multiple sink areas with all of thine crap.

Thou shalt flush.

Thou shalt not enter the bathroom and stomp all over it with thine soiled boots whilst the cleaning women are cleaning.

Thou shalt make deliberate attempts to speak to thine hallmates in the bathroom, lest the electricity should go out and one of thy hallmates be required to hold her iPhone light over thy sink while thou finishest brushing thine teeth, and thou shalt feel like an asshole for not knowing her name.

Thou shalt not steal toiletries from the cubbies of thine hallmates, and if thou must borrow, thou shalt leave a note explaining the borrowment in humble and ironic tone that shall not be understood nor appreciated, and thou shalt offer to pay back the borrowment in full with friendship or fiber tabs. 

LESSON EIGHT: YOUR REAL FRIENDS ARE THE ONES WHO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE WITHOUT ASKING, STOP WHAT THEY ARE DOING TO COME SIT WITH YOU WHILE YOU EAT EVEN THOUGH THEY JUST ATE, AND INSTEAD OF ASKING “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TONIGHT?” ASK “WHAT ARE WE DOING TONIGHT, SLUTFACE?”