0xymoronic asked: I gather you're an English major? Context clues suggest you are.
No, I am not, if you can believe it. Guess if I’m a man or a woman!
Girls and College - Girl News
I don’t even have a sense of how to position college in the Girl Experience because a) I literally don’t remember it—not a single class, what I did, what I looked like, or what I learned—even though I have an honors degree in politics. (Quite aside from the really intense full-time graduate work I did in getting way fucking high, that is weird, right?) And b) college is very much like ‘family’ in that the meaningful corollaries of experience between girls that we can talk about here, while we chew gum and daisy-chain the wrappers, is just too bound up in so many other traditions, experiences, and standards that there’s less of a wayin to the whole, common thing of ‘THIS IS COLLEGE.’ We don’t even call it ‘college’ in Canada, even though it’s just as letterman jackets and sweatpantsy here, we call it ‘university,’ just like Daddy does. This necessitates a different Girl News approach than, say, blowjobs, because no matter your personal context, where you come from, whatever, a blowjob will always be a blowjob (unless, like, Norwegians do them really weird? WHOAH, DO YOU?), like, we all use our thumb-pads to deal with jizz spill-off. And c) because college no longer seems like a singular, mandated, teensploitation-ready experience of familiar tropes for whoever is in, like, the top three-quarters of the socioeconomic spectrum or got good grades in high school or gives even a tiny baby shit about doing what you’re supposed to do or has parents that make you go. Now college, like fucking everything, is less of an assumed rite of passage and more of an economic transaction colored by Sex Terror and debt and date rape (OK that’s pretty 90s, when we thought ‘college’ meant ‘date rape’ and ‘date rape’ didn’t mean ‘everywhere all the time’). Do you know what I mean? Not to dive into the nostalgics this early, but when I was little college meant something mythic and Skull and Bonesy and forever, where I’d wear certain things (brown Prada boots; navy blue tights; tweed skirts, button-downs; reasonable ponytails) and come out so much smarter, and now that I’m a degenerate grownie college seems, like, just an enormous Visa bill you accrued when you were drunk. Is it still even fun? Email me.
DRUGS
Let’s start here since I do have some kind of memory of tripping balls in downtown Toronto in the winter without a coat on, which would be consistent with the facts of my college experience, and hallucinating that the thin red strings in weed were floating out of the baggie and onto my eyeballs, criss-crossing their broad white plains in the mirror like lonely backroads. And what I do remember, synesthetically, about college, is being very wet and cold and dirty most of the time, which is why I will go for a brisk walk when someone so much as rolls a joint, because my sense memory starts to transmute into just being fucking freezing and uncomfortable and getting terrible grades and knowing so many things that I couldn’t bring myself to say because what if I didn’t know them in the right waaaaay? This is very frownyface.
ROOMMATES
I am just totally opposed to the idea of college roommates because surely having a stranger sleeping across a room from you when you are at what has to be the most vulnerable time in your whole life will undermine your personality forever because you can’t fucking even masturbate??? Y’alls should totally contact Human Rights Watch about this.
POWER
Power structures are wildly different in a college setting than in high school in that the most important girl is a little hedgehog from some shit town where she was Max Fisher But Worse. Ugh, and she’s always real smug and doesn’t know that she’s not cool, or that her coolness taps out at the top of the nerd pyramid? BUT DOESN’T CARE? Anyway the point is that professors are still not allowed to fuck you, but are a little bit more allowed than in high school, but you will be commensurately that much less interested. Wait, is sex in college boring?
Ongoing Series: Majors that Suck
Law/Pre-Law/Legal Studies
If you ask someone what their major is, and they respond with one of the above, immediately drop your beer on the floor and grind your foot into the broken glass because THAT is way more fucking fun than listening to these insufferable cumshits blahblahblah about whatever “ambitions” they fucking have.
Most of these undergrads are just doing this because their Stepford mom wants something to brag about in the annual Christmas letter, but some of them actually think that an undergrad in Law will somehow prepare them for the LSAT, when really, just casually fucking a philosophy major a couple times a week is WAY better prep.
And even if you do end up with a 1937483758 score on the LSAT and get into Harvard Law or whatever, you really want to BE A FUCKING ATTORNEY? You know these people work 4000 hours a week (plus pro bono!) while their significant others get assfucked by Filipino pool boys and their kids grow up to be the worst fucking dogshit excuse for humans? GAH! What is wrong with you? Oh, you think bringing justice to the world is your fucking calling? Excuse me while I go find some more glass, this time to scrape out my eyes because they are getting sore from ROLLING SO HARD.
Don’t get the cheesecake
I know it’s really fucking hard not to, little undergrad, when your pupils are bigger than your stomach at that glorious little 24 hour diner that seems to glow like the Annunciation of the Virgin, but don’t do it. After you’ve devoured five orders of poutine and pancakes and zucchini sticks and you’re clawing the greasy papers for remnants of cheese and gravy, you will think you want to eat more, but getting the cheesecake will only make it fucking impossible to throw up later (cheesecake coats your disgusting, disease-laden throat) or you will be even more constipated tomorrow (too much diary/heroin).
Vodka Tap Water
This will become your new favourite drink, especially after you blew that tuition check Mommy sent you at the casino during frosh week and all of your savings from that shitty job pulling weeds and killing baby racoons at the City of Buttfuck dry up into $30 to last you the next 5 semesters.
In first semester of first year, you will be classy and use an empty beer bottle that you found under your dorm room bed (remember to wash out those cigarette butts) to mix, but REAL undergrads just fucking skip the glass part. Just pour some of that rubbing alcohol/nail polish remover liquid straight from the plastic bottle into your mouth, then turn on the tap, slurp and swallow (no dishes!). And don’t worry if you’ve done 5 of these and the ‘shrooms you took 20 minutes ago are making your tummy hurt, because the sink is right there!
ADDITIONAL GUIDANCE: When you have exactly $24.25 in your pocket and you’re at the liquor store, fucking skip on the beer/wine/whatever, and ALWAYS go for the two-six of vodka, because basic fucking arithmetic is higher % = + fun for - $. Now count out those pennies with pride and stop being a fucking pussy already!
Visit your friends
The reoccurring role of “visiting friend” is one of the best fucking decisions a wee undergrad such as yourself can assume. There are NO RULES for the “visiting friend”. None. You’ll get introduced to your friend’s friends, then drink 30 of their beers and swallow whatever pills you find on the floor (or at least the ones that don’t stick to the carpet), fall off their balcony (bushes will break your fall, the undergrad gods are looking out for you), smash a couple windows, wake up next to their girlfriend and peace the fuck out, with no consequences whatsoever (except for bruises and that vaginal discharge taste in your mouth that you can’t brush out for the bus ride home).
Ongoing Series: Majors that Suck
Engineering
I have dyscalculia, which is a made up learning disability for kids who go into Arts, but these fucks are the worst. Mostly arrogant pricks who have loud conversations about (imaginary) vaginas they (didn’t) stick their (limp) dicks into and have the most abhorrent frosh week orientation, thank god half of these losers drop out by second year. By fourth year, there are so few left they just blend into the regular imbeciles in undergrad, so don’t fret, little first year, it gets better.
Don’t Be Obnoxious on the Bus (or Why Bus Drivers should make a $1000/hour for driving the route that goes to a university)
Undergrad bros/ditzos exhibit the most infuriatingly appalling behavior on public transit, probably due to being worthless fartsacks with their parents’ credit cards. It’s really fucking fabulous that you were homeschooled/raised in a moldy, dank cave covered in your own urine and missed that whole acclimatizing to being around other human beings thing (I can find no other explanation?), but can you just ride a fucking bike*/walk/give roadhead if you insist on proclaiming how many cuntbitches you banged/fought with at some god-awful fratbash while you talk over two seats of people who are just trying to get the fuck home before they rip their veins out with their teeth? And who the FUCK is having sex with these misogynistic, insipid, infected pustules of dicks? Is it you, girls-with-daddy-issues? STOP DOING THAT!
You could herd a motherfucking cow with Asperger’s onto the bus and it would be like “maybe I should stop eating my own afterbirth, shut the fuck up and listen to my Ipod until my stop”. How are you not picking up on the overwhelmingly simple social codes here?
*Please fucking forget the helmet, nobody wants any chance you’ll survive if some suburban mom in her spawntank runs a red while looking for that Mariah Carey cd to sing along to on the commute
