Welcome to the College Experience

"Goddamnit, Matt!" I pounded my desk for emphasis and turned to look at him. "Just...goddamnit!"

My roommate, a man of unshakeable patience considering how it is to live with me, hesitated before turning around. My temper is a flash in the pan - it flares and dies usually in under a minute over what really amounts to minutiae, the minor discomforts that everyone has to go through everyday. I could see the wheels turning in his head as he stared at his computer, a real life version of Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off at this point. If I don't turn around now, he'll just keep yelling, he won't stop until I pay attention to it, and when I do I have to sit through him yelling about something. Eventually he relented and sighed. "What is it now?"

I gestured the wildly at the screen. "This fuckin' douchebag has some damn fan club website for him! What compels a person to allow that kind of idiocy to happen? Good God." In my defense, the man on my screen was a douchebag: your standard New Jersey guido motherfucker, complete with a pound of gel to hold up his blowout haircut, overly tanned for October, throwing up faux gang signs, and making that half smirk half kissy face that every girl makes between the ages of 16 and 24 in pictures. You know the face. The lips pout outwards and are drawn to the side in a cruel mockery of a smile. The eyes roll up and eyebrows raise, attempting to give a "who cares" aura to the whole thing. The face is turned away from the camera and the contorted mouth is dead center so what should have been a profile shot becomes a Picasso rendering of the female form. That expression alone is enough to warrant hating someone - the fact that it was on a man was unforgiveable, a conscious decision to be one of the worst people in the world.

I go to a small state undergrad in New Jersey populated with all sorts of upper middle class human detriment from the suburbs surrounding Philadephia and New York that just weren't ambitious or wealthy enough to make it into Rutgers, St. Joe's, or NYU. It's a never-ending museum of annoyances, truly a display of the evils of the American Dream gone awry. Loads of people talk about the carnival of wasted potential that makes up the corporate world, or the shells of men that populate the military, but there's a ridiculous myth in the American culture that college is the best time of your life and that every minute is spent on sin and debauchery. Everyone is hot, everyone is drunk, and everyone is having a great time. A four year party for $40,000. Not only is this a lie, but it's a dangerous one, especially considering the general trend towards making college just an extension of high school. But I digress.

College is a collection of the worst kinds of people. In high school, you understood that what you were doing was just a means to an end. For most of the people there, college is the end. That acceptance letter is the culmination of their lives, their Paradise, and they want their seventy virgins lined up and waiting. For the first time these people, now dubbed adults, are out of the house and on their own, ready to abuse and waste their parents' money.

The concept of working towards something, anything, is beyond them. Freshman year is a haze of drunkenness and forgettable, easy sex. Sophomore year brings a smug sense of satisfaction - you've seen all there is, and you lord this over the incoming freshman who now look to you for guidance. To the typical 20 year old, this senseless adoration is the first time anyone has looked up to them, and college is the greatest thing in the world. In junior year, words like internship and grad school are uttered in hurried whispers, taboo, the unfunny punchlines to a cruel joke. The unfortunate recipients of such things are changed in every way. They bear the unmistakable mark of the Real World on them. Senior year is a revisit of the freshman experience as you realize the ride's over. A wake for your soul before you actually become a person.

The people that go through this, my friends and me included, are all in that mindset. It's unavoidable. Give anyone in their late-teens access to beer every night and joke classes and they'll fall into it. The problem is that many of these people are man-children - physically adults, but mentally stuck at 15. Most of them are still stuck in a high school state of mind, which is a side effect of the sheltered suburban lifestyle mixed with the absurd levels of political correctness that our country is full of. It's a frustrating world with frustrating people.

Matt appraised the picture on my monitor. He nodded and turned back to his computer. "Yeah, that guy's kind of a douchebag," he said. A moment later, "Wanna grab a beer?"