The Sentinel

Issue date: 5/4/09 Section: Commentary

It's 4:00 AM on Easter Sunday and I'm writing my last column for this newspaper as an undergraduate. Pretty crazy. It took me awhile to decide whether to employ my usual anti-intellectual tone and brush off this event like no big deal or to speak from the heart and risk sounding like a sap. But, allow me to start off with a bit of the former and use it as segue into the latter.

The fact is it would be a huge waste of time to spend my last article extolling the long-term value of late night 'shrooming at Mirror Lake or the virtues of getting obscenely drunk and running naked down Indianola. I have done both and can say from experience that they have their place: freshman year (maybe sophomore year if you're in the Humanities). The larger point I'm trying make, is that at the end of your four years (or five, or six...) you should have no regrets. That's a lie: everyone has regrets. But, hopefully, your regret-to-satisfaction ratio is weighted heavily in favor of satisfaction.

How exactly do you get to that point? Liking what you are doing goes a long way. If you're in it for the money, you might get a killer job and an orange/blonde girlfriend with fake tits in the short term. But, in twenty years you will wake up in suburbia with a job you hate, kids that hate you, and probably a hefty divorce settlement. You've got to have something more.

It's not like there are unwritten rules of adulthood that say you have to work a job you despise and that bores you to death. The vast majority of Americans do because they've been told since time began that happiness is measured by the amount of shit you end up accumulating throughout your lifetime. However, the real success stories that I've encountered have had the balls (insert comparable female equivalent here) to follow their dreams, whatever they may be.

As cliché as that sounds, you have to realize that life is a gigantic cliché. The stars actually do come out at night. When your significant other looks at you in that special way all thought will vacate your brain and all you will be able to say is how you could lay in their arms forever. You will get drunk at the bar and watch unattractive people somehow become sexy. Roses are, in fact, red.

What isn't cliché, however, is all the weird shit that happens in between those Hallmark moments. Crazy Mexican roofers will steal your van at 3 AM, which you will a few days later with the spare tire missing but roofing supplies still in the back. You will become the official ambassador of American culture to your new foreign roommate, and you will find yourself innocently invited over to a friend's house and only to be thrown into the midst of a strange religious service.

With all these bizarre happenings going on around you, the only thing you really have control over is how you react to it all. These reactions usually occur along a spectrum with "total dick" on one end and "acid casualty" on the other. We both know people at either end of this spectrum, and thankfully most of us desire to emulate neither Glenn Beck nor Wavy Gravy. If you are thinking of looking up that last (admittedly obscure) reference on Wikipedia, let me save you a trip and just boil everything down: just don't waste your time here.

If you're asking yourself "Am I making the most of my college years?" you probably aren't. But the good news about that is that most normal people ask that question at some point. So basically what you have left is a bunch of 18 to 21 year-olds who have no fucking clue what they're doing and largely making up the rules for their lives as they go along. Actually, when you think about that, it's kind of inspiring.

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