CHAPTER ONE: INTRO TO COLLEGE LIFE

College is the institution where people who have been telling their parents to treat them like adults for the past four years realize that it's more fun to act like a kid.  It's a place where an eighteen-year-old has their best opportunity in their life to score with their next-door neighbor.  College is not just an institution for higher learning that your parents tried to convince you it was while you were in High School, instead it's a sociologist's wet dream where people from ever nook and cranny around the globe converse on one place.  It's the real "Real World".

Picking the right university is the first major decision you will be forced to make in your quest for knowledge.  There are many reasons to pick one university over another.  There’s location, size of the college, cost, availability of classes, variety of majors, but the most original determining factor I’ve heard was from my friend in high school who chose his educational homestead solely on their showing in Playboy’s Women of the PAC-10 issue.  Most have a much more rigid screening process. 

I lived in a co-ed dorm on a co-ed floor, which in guy terms means you gonna get some every night, but in real terms it means there are lots of girls on your floor who want nothing to do with any of the guys on the floor.  Sure they like you, but it's the proximity issue, you're too close to have a relationship but you're the ideal distance for a friendship.

My co-ed floor had what we called community bathrooms, which means that there are two bathrooms for 34 residences, which are located at the ends of the hallway.  These community bathrooms have a wide range of cleanliness, for example the honors dorm’s cleaning schedule seemed to be a lot more frequent than the cleaning schedule of the other dorms.  The interesting thing about this is that the honors students seem to have much tighter asses than any of the other students so you wouldn't think it would have had to be cleaned as often.

In a fairly devious plan by the administration the University strategically places the Honor’s dorms as far away from the “general admission” dorms as possible in fear that our rowdy underachiever ways will in someway dissuade or corrupt the crème de la crème of the University.  The Achilles heel to this design is that good college girls find the slimy underachiever asshole men the most attractive – and then complain about how all guys are slimy underachiever assholes.

I remember that the only thing that I feared more than the community bathrooms was my roommate.  What was my roommate going to be like? Would I be able to live with someone who's the complete opposite from me?  These were some of the thoughts going through my head.   You can imagine my sigh of relief when I found out my roommate was an ecstasy addict who's a compulsive masturbator and truly believes that Vodka is the Russian word for water.  This guy would arise with a pitched tent in the middle of the night and with his eyes closed he would slowly meander his way to our two foot tall fridge where he would keep his water bottle of absolute, take a chug and then return to his slumber all the while mumbling God know what under his grotesque breath.  This wasn’t the strangest action I witnessed from him.  On a regular basis he would have full conversations with the D.J. on the local hip-hop radio station.  Sounds normal enough, but the most bizarre portion of this relationship was that he wouldn’t use the phone to talk to her, instead he assumed that our radio worked much like an intercom and he would speak directly into the speaker.  Granted he would normally begin his one-way conversations after a few bottles of his Smirnoff water break.  Surprisingly he didn't last long as my roommate after being written up for noise by our R.A.

An R.A. is a Resident Assistant; their job is to act as a parental authority figure for the floor.  Most RA’s are just upperclassmen who were unable to make friends with anyone for their first two or three years of college so they decided to take their frustration out on the incoming freshman.  If you ask them, they'll always say it's because of the free room and board but that's a lie.  They do it because they hate you.  They relish in their God complex and wield their pseudo-power unmercifully.  In some rare cases the R.A. is more laid back than the hall mates but this was not the case on my floor.  Our R.A.'s name was Becky; she was a cross between Nurse Ratchet of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Cruella DeVil of 101 Dalmatians.  She took pride in her job, too much pride, which is why I spent the majority of my time at my girlfriend’s place.

My first college girlfriend was in a sorority.  Before I came to college, I had no idea what a real sorority was other than what I have seen on Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House.  You can imagine how disillusioned and jaded my perception of more than 40, 18-21 year old women living in the same house could be on a freshman.  Images of panty raids and dozens of naked women frolicking around the sorority house filled my ever imaginative mind, but when I entered this ‘Castle Anthrax’ my eyes told a different story.  There were no naked girls running in circles, no group showers and I didn’t see one topless massage.  Instead there were study groups and conversations about politics.  Sororities were less like the erotic orgies I’ve read about in my fathers hidden Playboys and instead resemble passages from The Babysitter’s Club.

Once I came to terms with this really bad episode of a show off the Disney Channel, I reassessed the situation.  Even in this horrible After School Special Sorority, there was the fact that there were a lot of women in one house, which means a lot of opportunity to score, that is, if things didn’t work out with…. what’s her name.

I found out the truth soon enough.  Because I was involved with one of the girls in the sorority, that made me off limits to the other 39.  Sure they still talked to me, but it was a different sort of talking, the type of talking you only see on TV shows like The Gilmore Girls and Dawson’s Creek.  You know, friend-speak.  Not aware of the term?  Friend-speak is a terminology where a female feels comfortable enough with a male that she is able to talk about very personal thoughts and feelings with the male without fear of the male making a move on her.  Let me warn you now that this is a worst-case scenario!  If you find yourself in a friend-speak situation you have two options.  You can either be buddies with this girl for the rest of your life, or if you are at all the slight bit interested in getting in her pants leave the situation immediately!  Get up and walk out or you will never be viewed in the same regard again.

You will be that friend who will be called in the middle of the night after Johnny, her 3rd boyfriend in two months cheats on her with her roommate Kelly, who is a ruthless bitch that doesn't clean up her dirty dishes and was probably planning on stealing her boyfriend for weeks.  There will be crying, she will need a hug, you will give it, and she will tell you that she'll never trust another guy again, you excluded of course.  As a guy, we're thinking, this is it!  She's in distress; I'll be her Prince Charming.  Nope! She'll think about all the ways she can get back her cheating boyfriend and all the while learn how to cope with his cheating ways convincing herself that she was the real reason that he strayed.  If she only slept with him sooner, bought him more stuff, or let him go out with his friends that night this would never have happened.  She is wrong.  You will be out of luck and after a few empty promises they will be back together by the end of the week.

I, unfortunately became friends with her entire sorority, forty girls.  Forty girls I am now friends with, friends forever.  That shouldn't matter to me because I'm involved in a very healthy relationship with…what’s her name.  After a few more weeks I realized that we weren't exactly cut out for each other and we parted our separate ways.

Now what?

Now is when college begins…

As a freshman your first experience at getting around campus is Orientation.  At my Orientation I came to the realization that I'm going to fail out of school if my lectures are even one tenth as boring as the Dean's ‘Welcome to the University’ speech.  Lots of thoughts passed through my head as various administrators and alumni gabbed on about their first year of college.  I realized that I would never see any of these people again unless I do something amazing or amazingly stupid that forces me to meet with them and chances are it would be the later.

I don't know what they're thinking.  Why would I care if John Mitchell key-holder of the Key Club, founder of "Corn Dogs for me" and assistant secretary to the replacement dean has to say about college?  Is this stranger's life going to inspire me?  If anything it should have told me to get up and race my ass out of this money sucking educational quicksand because there's a chance that I could eventually be that guy, on that stage, lying to kids by telling them I love the way my life turned out.

Once we were sufficiently orientated with the campus, it was time to meet with our advisor.  Your advisor is someone who acts like he wants to help you and guide you through this maze called college but ultimately wants to go home and try to forget that he is going to be in college for the rest of his life.  We chit chatted for a few minutes before he broke into the interrogation.  He asked me what I’m interested in.

Interests?!?

What are the interests of 18-year-old college students? Unless there's a major for sex and sleeping I don't think my interests are relevant in our conversation.  Then he asked me questions I had no answer for, like, "What do you want to do with your life?" "How do you think your major will help you achieve your goals?” and “What are your long-term plans?”

I didn't have any long-term plans, for that matter my short-term plans consisted of going to lunch in the student union and figuring out a good spot to place my posters when I get back to the dorm.  My advisor persisted in his questioning so I only had one answer for him.

“If I did know what I was going major in before applying, there'd be no way in hell I'd apply to an oversized general education liberal arts state university for my next four years.”

He looked a tad taken by my remark but from the glimmer in his beady little eyes I could sense that he was going to make it his goal to find me direction in my life.  He was relentless.  He told me that I was in luck because my new university happens to have a great-undeclared major program.

"A great-undeclared major program."

What kind of mom and pop, makeshift university am I attending that has a great undeclared major program?  A great one?  What's a bad undeclared major program?

After a few minutes of class picking I was the University of Arizona's newest undeclared major.

One thing that everyone must understand when picking your classes is that your GPA is directly correlated with the time your class meets.  For example, coming from high school where I was accustom to 6am classes every day five days a week, I signed up for my Spanish class at 9am which meets only four days a week.  My earliest class was three hours later my normal time and it only met four days a week.  This will be cake.

It's not cake. It's nothing that resembles cake.  A 9am class is sheer torture and anyone who says otherwise should be shot on sight.  The reason your GPA is related to the class time is because of the fact that you will not go. It comes down to when you look at the two blinking dots on you alarm clock after you've snoozed for the sixth time and instead of getting up you're laying in bed guessing what song will be on the radio the next time the alarm goes off.  Only after you neighbor has had enough with listening to the start and stop of music from their adjacent room is when you actually contemplate getting up for the day.  Let it be known that a 9am class in college is the equivalence of arriving at a normal 9-5 job at 4 in the morning; it's simply unheard of.

Even if you manage to adequately attend you earliest class, sometimes there are other distractions and obstacles, which pose a problem for your later classes.  A group of girls who lived two floors below me actually banded together and scheduled their entire course load around the programming schedule of Days of Our Lives and General Hospital.  A guy who lives down the hall from me scheduled his classes around the class schedule of his girlfriend (who happened to live on my hall as well), so they can spend all their free time seeing one and another.  Two weeks later they broke up because she was cheating on him, and so he spent all of his free time seeing her and her new boyfriend.

College is an exam; there are tests all the time, and most importantly, the majority of test you take in college are not taken in the classroom.

Your class should be the second place where you spend most of you time right behind your dorm, but we all know it falls somewhere between the time it takes to order a Big Mac from McDonalds and sitting through a discussion of politics with Jessica Simpson.  Class is an important part of college life; it's the true bona fide college part.  At very least it's the part that those two people about a generation older than you only care about and if you want to continue to stay on your paid for vacation called an education you'll learn how to fit in into you busy schedule of Tequila and watching the sunrise.

Sometimes there are obstacles in your way to class, for example finding the class is a popular obstacle.  I believe this is the university's first means of weeding out freshmen.  Oh, not familiar with the weeding out process?  If you attend an oversized state university the admissions is notorious for booking more freshmen than they can hold for the four years.  My guess is that the airlines and the universities are in cahoots to just screw everyone.  One theory for their over-acceptance is that freshmen bring in more revenue than any other class.  Think about it, when you a freshman you stay in the university dorms, eat at the university eateries and buy books at the university bookstore.  As we become more adapt to the city of the university we learn that we can move away from campus and even have your own bedroom for the same cost as on campus.  The campus food prices are comparable to food costs at Disney World, and you'll learn that online bookstores are the wave of the future.  In other words they have a high acceptance rate because freshmen are suckers.

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