-I’m a senior now.  Fuck me.  Well, it’s been a while, but Ruminations is back for one last year.  It was a crazy summer, living in New York City, working hard, and of course, getting really fucked up.  As always, some funny shit happened…

-My friend left his cell phone in a bar.  When he realized the next morning that he didn’t have his phone, he called it and the guy who jacked it actually picked up.  So my friend offers the guy fifty bucks to get his phone back and instead of calling the cops or going with a bunch of dudes to beat the guy up, he goes with his girlfriend, meets the guy on a shady street corner, and pays him fifty bucks to get his own phone back.  The guy has already made over a hundred calls.  My friend almost deserves it.

-Since I was living in the city instead of at home, I of course changed the address of my magazine subscriptions.  So I’m getting Sports Illustrated, no problem.  Then one week, the magazines just stop coming.  A few weeks later, I get a little postcard in my mailbox from SI saying that I have an invalid address and they can no longer send me issues.  Well how the fuck did you mail me this postcard then?

-Why does the TV show 20/20 control my life?  As far as my mom is concerned, whatever Barbara Walters says, goes.  First they had a show about binge drinking which resulted in a two-hour discussion with my mom about my drinking habits (“Mom, don’t worry, I just nurse one beer all night.”)  Then there was that show that says that cell phones cause cancer.  So what do I get in the mail from my mom?  One of those fucking earpieces for my phone.  I swear the sales of earpieces must have skyrocketed after that 20/20 episode.  So now everyone is walking around with them and it looks like they’re talking to themselves.

-So it’s been over three years of college and I still can’t remember anyone’s name.  Cell phones present an additional problem though because when I get a girl’s number in a bar, I put it in my phone.  When I get to the part where you input the name, I just put in “X” and hope she doesn’t notice.

-At the end of last semester, I visited my boy Brian at Cornell for Slope Day.  Slope Day is a tradition in which everyone at Cornell emerges from the library for one day, sits on a big-ass hill, and gets ridiculously hammered.  What I thought was funny was that there were all these like emergency alcohol response teams on the slope, not necessarily controlling the drinking, but rather waiting until people got too wasted and then swooping in with fluids and shit.  I think the direct result of this was everyone getting even more wasted because you felt so safe.  One particularly drunken kid who had passed out was driven away in one of those little golf cart things like an injured football player being taken off the field.  He gave the crowd a thumbs up as he was taken away and we gave him a standing ovation.

-It’s funny what college kids will do to get out of exams, changes grades, get into classes, etc.  Such as in Ruminations #8 when I talked about how my friend made up that he had swollen testicles as the reason why he never came to class.  I’ve noticed that right around final exams time, a lot of people get very religious.  Like my very un-religious friend who didn’t want to take an early evening final on a Friday and told the professor that he couldn’t take the exam because he had to observe the Holy Sabbath.  What a bullshit artist.  I have to admit though, last year I changed my major for a week just so I could get into a class.  Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

-I don’t fucking get why people who have the wrong number continually leave messages on my answering machine.  The message clearly states, “Hey, this is Karo, I’m not here right now…”  Yet every week I get at least one message like, “Hi, this message is for Leroy, your car is ready to be picked up…”  What the fuck?

-This guy in my fraternity is going to be fencing in the Olympics in Sydney.  He could win a gold medal.  Talk about motivation.  All I want to do is win my frat’s beer pong championship.

-You know what a great moment in college life is?  Those two seconds.  The two seconds when you first wake up at 3pm after a hard night of partying.  Because in those first two seconds you haven’t yet remembered that last night you threw up on your floor, punched a cop, and hooked up with an ugly chick.  Savor those two seconds as best you can.

-Quote of the Month.  A lot of my friends are now looking at graduate schools and taking entrance exams and shit (damn I’m old!).  Some are more excited than others.  When my friend, Jason R. from Penn, got a package in the mail, he was psyched because he thought it was a new Dreamcast game.  When he saw that it was his tremendous LSAT study guide instead, he commented, “I’d rather this was a mail bomb.”

-I think my favorite tradition at Penn is Hey Day.  Hey Day occurs on the last day of classes and is when the juniors symbolically become seniors.  Basically the entire junior class, wearing bright red shirts, Styrofoam hats, and armed with wooden canes, gets up at 9am, drinks heavily, and marches around campus beating each other with the canes and breaking shit.  At the end of the day, the juniors are declared seniors.  Sounds strange, but what I can remember of it was my favorite day in all of college.  My friend got cut with a cane so I took him to the hospital.  The doctor said that it was the 12th cane-related injury so far that day.  At that moment I was so proud to be senior.

-Now that most of my friends are moving out of dorms and into fraternity houses and apartments, I’ve noticed an evolution in the way they set up their rooms.  Freshman year, all you wanted to do is figure out how to fit that fucking mini-fridge into your tiny room.  Now, you have to maximize the amount of seating while leaving enough elbow room for everyone sitting to chug a beer at once and calculate the amount of steps it takes to get a girl from your door to your bed.

-I turned 21 this summer.  About damn time.  I love when people say that drinking is no longer fun after you turn 21.  Are you kidding me?  The shit is twice as fun now that I don’t have to worry about being negged by some bouncer on a power trip.  Not being able to get into a bar when all your friends can get in is like when you were five and not tall enough to go on the cool rides at the amusement park.  The only thing that’s annoying is that this year I must have been to a hundred 21st birthday parties.  I feel like its that year when we were younger and had to go to a Bar Mitzvah or a Sweet Sixteen every weekend, and half the time you didn’t even like the person.

-It sucks when you try to argue a grade that you received in the spring semester when you come back to school after the summer.  You walk into the professor’s office, he doesn’t even remember who you are, you have no idea why you deserve more points because the class was so long ago, and you end up having to make up some excuse about swollen testicles.

-I think that every college campus has “that bar.”  You know, that bar that everyone goes to all the time yet everyone complains it sucks and asks why everyone keeps going there?  I think we should all stop complaining about “that bar.”  Embrace it for what it is and accept that you will always go there anyway.  And admit it, sometimes it’s even fun.

-I think it’s a little fucked up that some professors teach their classes with textbooks that they have written themselves.  I wonder even more when the professor teaches the textbook out of order.  How can you disagree with the order of the book?  You fucking wrote it!

-Trimesters are fucked up.  I think it’s funny when kids who go to schools that use a trimester system try to say it’s not that bad.  Yeah, right.  At the end of the summer they’re home alone for a whole month while everyone is back partying at school.  And by the time the last trimester is over, everyone else has already been enjoying summer for a month.  Plus you have a midterm or a final about every other week.  Stop denying it, that shit sucks.

-As I start my senior year, I can’t help but laugh at the freshmen – how they travel in herds and drink until they land in the hospital.  But the other day, as I was going to a party with about seven or eight friends, most of who consistently drink until unconsciousness, I thought, shit, not much has changed!  Fuck me.

HOME