-Ah, New York City nightlife.  The clubs, the bars, the lounges, the beautiful women, the puddles of vomit.  What’s not to love?  Being in your early twenties, single, and living in Manhattan is a unique experience.  There are millions of interesting people in the city.  Unfortunately, most of them are waiting on line for the club you want to get in to.  Nevertheless, every night out brings a new adventure, along with a killer hangover, an empty back account and, of course, nipple stickers…

-I’m convinced that the only thing I spend my money on is alcohol.  I get my credit card bill back and it breaks down all my charges by category.  I usually only have one category listed: “Food & Drink.”  The thing reads like a Zagat guide to New York bars.

-The worst part about the bar is putting down a tab.  Tabs kill me.  Because once I put that credit card down, all of a sudden I become, “The most generous man who has ever lived!”  “You guys want a drink?  On my tab.  You guys?  Shots?  On my tab.  Ladies? Just put that on my tab, it’s under Karo.  You?  Tab.  You?  Tab.  Tab!  Tab!  Tab!  Barkeep, bring me a round of your finest spirits, on my tab!”  Then at the end of the night I get the bill and I’m like, “OK, who had a Miller Lite? You owe me three bucks. Seriously, pay up.”

-Ever notice that you’re all polite when you bump into someone in a bar?  “Oh, sorry dude.”  But if you turn around and realize it’s your buddy you bumped into, you’re like, “Oh it’s you, now I wish I wasn’t so polite.”

-After giving birth, some women develop emotional problems.  This is called “post-partum depression.”  I think I suffer from what I call “post-party depression.”  After a long night of boozing, the next day my hormones are so out of whack I sometimes get depressed.  One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the couch watching Forrest Gump and I swear I almost broke down in tears.  I think I need help.

-How come when you hear the Nelly song “Hot in Here” on the radio you’re like “Oh man, I’m so sick of this song,” but when it comes on in the bar you go wild?

-How come the nicer the bar, the shittier you can dress?  I went to this sports bar down the block and they made me take my hat off.  Another night I went to this posh club and there were dudes in visors and wife-beaters.  Did I miss something?

-Ever try to go somewhere “different”?  You know, you try to go to a bar you haven’t been to before and one that won’t be filled with your friends so you can meet new people.  But what do you do when you get there?  You strain your neck looking around the bar for someone you know.

-I hate dudes wearing suits in bars.  Listen buddy, it’s a hundred degrees in here and no one is impressed that you’re a fucking banker.

-Kids who just graduated from college are now making the same transition to the real world that I made a year ago.  I’ll just go ahead and tell you all what to expect.  Toward the end of college, you got bored with doing the same old thing with the same old people every night.  You were excited to graduate and move on to new things in the city.  Strangely, though, you decided to live with someone who you lived with in college.  For the next three to six months, you will go to the same five bars every night where every single person there went to college with you.  The guys will evolve from going out wearing jeans and a t-shirt to wearing jeans and an untucked, long-sleeve, button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up slightly.  The girls who used to wear black pants every night now wear, well, black pants every night.  And after a few bouts of post-party depression you’ll realize, shit, not much has changed!

-Several of my friends have serious girlfriends.  I am single.  I think my friends that have girlfriends have forgotten what it is like to be single.  Their whole incentive system is off.  We’ll be at a bar and they’ll want to stay and I’ll want to leave.  They’ll be like, “Yeah, this is a great bar, I got my girl and I’ve got my buddies, what more can you ask for?”  I’ll be like, “Dude, I’m glad you’re having such a great time but your girlfriend is the only chick in here and I’m trying to get laid.  See ya.”

-Last week I was at a bar talking to a girl.  I made a joke and she laughed really hard.  I thought to myself, “Good work Karo, nice joke.”  Then the chick said, “Oh, I laugh at everything.”  That’s great, way to shatter me.

-You gotta love the pre-emptive cheek kiss.  You know, like at the end of the night at the bar or at the end of a date at the girl’s door?  She wants to make clear she has no intentions of hooking up so she squeaks “Good night!” and jams her cheek in your face so you have no chance whatsoever of making lip contact.  It’s a move guys have yet to come up with a defense for.

-A few of the places I have been to lately have TVs all over the bar.  By midnight, there’s not really any sports on anymore so all they show is ESPN’s SportsCenter.  This just doesn’t work for me.  I can’t concentrate on talking to girls when there are baseball highlights on, it’s just not fair.  You see all the dudes standing next to each other completely mesmerized by Plays of the Week.  The chicks don’t even need to use the pre-emptive kiss because we’re not paying attention anyway!

-I love how guys will lie to chicks about what their plans are for the night.  I’ll be sitting around with my buddies and we’ll know exactly what bars we are going to hit up, who we are going to meet up with, and when we are going to go out.  And then a girl calls and my friend is like, “Um, I’m not really sure what I’m up to tonight, can I give you a call at like 2am?”

-I was at this bar the other night and there was a company there promoting their new product: nipple stickers for chicks.  I’m not kidding.  Apparently there are enough chicks out there who want to wear see-through shirts without bras that someone came up with the idea of putting stickers on their nipples so they don’t show.  I quickly found the creator of the product.  I took her aside and told her she was the greatest inventor since Einstein and professed my love.  What did I get in return?  Nothing but cheek.

-Forgive me for venting here for a second.  I fucking hate smokers.  I hate smokers even more because they all whine about is how a pack of cigarettes costs eight bucks in New York now.  Listen, no one wants to hear you bitch.  I’m tired of smokers making lame-ass excuses of why they don’t quit.  “Oh, I’m just a social smoker.”  “Dude, I had such a stressful day, I need a cigarette.”  “I only smoke when I’m drunk.”  Hey, I only throw up on myself when I’m drunk, but you don’t see me getting any Camel bucks for that do you?  How dumb are you?  You are fucking addicted!  My clothes stink, my eyes sting, and the streets are dirty because of you.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

-What is with the wearing of the belt not in the loops?  Who the hell is coming up with this shit?  I feel bad for chicks sometimes.  They have to hobble around in high heels, belt all dangling off, stickers on their nipples, it’s like a fucking circus out there.

-I have to be honest, with all the distractions at bars these days – SportsCenter on TV, chicks with see-through shirts –  I find it very difficult to pay attention to any conversation I’m having.  The worst is when I’m talking to a girl and I realize that I’m actually interested in her, but that I didn’t listen when she told me her name or occupation.  So I have to try to play Twenty Questions.  I’m like, “So how do you spell your name again?”  She’s like “Um… L-I-S-A.”  Shit.

-Similarly, I hate when I run into someone that I know I know, but I don’t know how I know them.  Because at this stage in my life they could be from high school, college, work, someone I see at the gym, my roommate’s friend, etc.  Eventually you have to ask the question, “So where do I know you from again?”  And the answer is always something embarrassing like “Karo, we dated for six months.”

-Next week I am leaving New York for an epic vacation to Rio de Janeiro and Miami.  Somehow I think the nightlife in those two locales will be slightly different than it is here.  I’ve heard that money will take me a long way in Rio but won’t get me anywhere in Miami.  All I know is, I really hope they don’t have SportsCenter in Brazil!

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-Isn’t it awkward when you’re taking a picture with a bunch of friends and someone who you don’t want in the picture steps in?  You’re like, “Yeah, um, sure, hop in.  Just move all the way over to the end.  Like, all the way.”

-You know when you are standing with a bunch of people and someone’s cell phone rings?  I hate the guy who pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and checks it even though it clearly isn’t his phone ringing.  What are you showing off that you have a phone or something?

-There just needs to be a better way.  Whenever I pick up a magazine, I am immediately besieged by those little subscription cards that fall out everywhere.  And you always try to stick them in the back of the magazine thinking you’ll never get that far but when you do they start falling out in clumps and next thing you know they’re all over the floor and you think to yourself, hmm, maybe I should just subscribe…

-What is going on with the new female pop singers?  It can’t be a coincidence that they are all so hot.  The record companies must just find chicks with a pretty face and a decent voice and then lock them in a room and force them to do 10,000 crunches a day.  I’m watching MTV and it’s like an “Abs of Titanium” video.

-I really wish radio stations would stop telling me how “commercial-free” they are.  “Commercial-free!  Commercial-free!  Next up, an hour of commercial-free requests!”  Man, it’s more like “music-free.”

-Do you get nervous when you go to buy something at a store and they actually watch you sign the receipt to see if it matches the signature on your credit card?  I’m always like, “Oh shit, I forgot exactly how I loop my ‘K,’ I hope she doesn’t notice!”

-Do you have shirts that wrinkle instantaneously upon putting them on?  I get the shirt back from the dry cleaners, take it out of the plastic, put it on, sit down, get up, and it already has to be ironed again.

-You know when you’re walking with a friend and your friend bumps into someone in the street that he knows and starts to have a conversation with them but doesn’t introduce you?  You have to do that little “awkward hover” where you stand one foot behind and to the right of your friend.  And you feel like an idiot so you take your cell phone out of your pocket to check it even though it clearly didn’t ring.

-Ever notice that some people just have a perpetual pile of stuff in the back seat of their car?  It’s always clothes they don’t wear, books they don’t read, food they’ve already eaten.  But it never goes anywhere, it just shifts positions.  And the response is always the same: “Oh just throw that stuff on the floor.”

-Walking into a crowded elevator when you are in the middle of a conversation is always interesting.  You try to continue your conversation and talk a little softer but you know everyone in the elevator is still listening to what you are saying.  So then you start to talk in “elevator code” and swap all proper nouns for pronouns.  You whisper, “So then I said to her, I can’t believe you went there with him and did that without telling them.”  And everyone else in the elevator is thinking, are they talking about grocery shopping or sex?

-I am very confused about the price of underwear.  Do you realize that a pair of brand-name underwear is like nine bucks?  I don’t get it.  How do people wear Polo underwear every day?  Either they do laundry every three days or they’ve spent several hundred dollars on underwear.  Either one is pretty weird in my book.

-I feel like the “push” and “pull” signs on doors are the most ignored instructions in the world.  How many times have you almost gone face first into a door because you pushed when you should have pulled?

-I saw a beautiful New York City moment the other day.  There was a truck that was blocking the street while it was being unloaded and a whole line of cars that couldn’t get by.  First, one car honked, followed by a second, and then a third.  Soon, the whole block was filled with the cacophonous sounds of angry cab drivers.  Finally, the truck driver walked out into the middle of the street to see what all the commotion was about.  Upon seeing the rage filling the street, he did the only thing he could: he calmly lifted his hand and proceeded to give everyone the finger.  I love New York!

-How come every time I walk down the street and get hit with water dripping from an air conditioner does it still confuse the shit out of me?

-I am running out of things to say to the doormen in my apartment when I come and go every day.  “How are you?”  “Take it easy.”  “Catch you later.”  The other day I actually said, “How’s it hanging?”  What the fuck is that?

-I recently went to my cousin’s one-year birthday party.  With all the babies and grandparents there it was a very weird crowd.  Most of the guests were either younger than two or older than eighty-two.  There were strollers and walkers everywhere.  And everyone wore diapers.

-I find it very strange that my grandma doesn’t know when her real birthday is.  I think she lost her birth certificate like fifty years ago and never bothered to get a new one.  She says that it was some time after the Civil War and before the Great Depression, but after that her memory gets a little hazy.

-Ever meet someone new, become friends with them, and then find out later that everyone else hates them?  All of a sudden you’re like, “Yeah, now that I think of it, he is kind of annoying…”

-I feel bad for Boston Red Sox fans.  I really do.  Because, in their heart of hearts, they actually believe they have a shot at beating the Yankees this year.  They’re like innocent little children who haven’t realized that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.  You don’t want to tell them the truth because they seem so happy in their little dream world.  Dream on Boston, dream on!

-I don’t understand people who have to hold their nose manually when they jump in the pool.  This isn’t rocket science people, we’re just holding our breath here.

-And, finally, I think that the people who build malls are very smart.  First, they build very big stores, like Macy’s, that you have to walk through to get to the rest of the mall.  I’m told these are called “anchor stores.”  No one is actually shopping in the anchor stores.  All the people there are just wandering around looking for the mall entrance.  But the anchor stores are like casinos.  There are no windows, no clocks, no signs.  I’m stumbling about in the lingerie section, the perfume lady sprays me with something, I’m disoriented, and next I know I stumble out of Macy’s with twenty pairs of expensive underwear.  Fuck me!

HOME

-I am very, very hungry right now.  I like to eat, I mean, I like to eat a lot.  But I can’t cook.  Don’t know how to cook, don’t want to learn to cook, don’t like cooking.  When I moved to New York City I never thought I would be faced with this dilemma.  What can I say?  Cooking is just not my cup of tea.  Come to think of it, I don’t even know how to make a cup of tea…

-For whatever reason, my apartment has a very nice kitchen.  My roommate and I have two George Foreman grills (one with built-in bun warmer), a stove, a mini propane grill, a toaster, and a microwave.  I don’t think I have used any of them even once.  Seriously.

-I even have one of those Sub-Z fridges like in Meet the Parents, you know the one with the hidden doors?  The refrigerator in guys’ apartments is always a funny thing.  We have no solids, only condiments and drinks.  And they’re not even good condiments and drinks.  It’s like a jar of relish, a packet of soy sauce, a bottle of flat Diet Coke and a six-pack of cheap beer.  Damn I’m hungry…

-By this point you have realized that I eat out.  A lot.  I have major problems with the eating establishments in this city.  Here are some of them…

-I don’t know about you, but when I got out to eat, I go to get fed.  Just serve me the food ready to eat!  I don’t want buffets or smorgasbords, forget variety and selection, and I certainly don’t want to make-my-own or build-my-own anything!  I just want to fucking eat!  If I order fajitas, don’t serve me chicken on one plate, guacamole and sour cream in another dish, and lettuce and onions in another.  Wrap that mother fucker up for me – you’re the chef, why the hell would you think I can do it better than you?

-Same deal with when you get served a salad where all the cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, etc. are grouped separately in the bowl.  I thought I ordered a salad, not some weird vegetable Seder plate.  Mix that shit up!

-There’s this restaurant in the city where you have two-sided coasters at your place setting.  One side is green and the other side is red.  If you leave your coaster on green, the waiters keep coming over to you with more meat, and they don’t stop until you turn it red.  What the fuck is going on here?  Are we eating food or drag racing?  My God, if I wanted to deal with all that red light-green light stress I would have just gone out and got stuck in traffic.

-How about these take-out places where they charge you by weighing your food?  I don’t like to have my food weighed.  I feel like a fucking zoo animal except I get Baked Lays on the side.

-When you order a sandwich at the deli or whatever, do you like to see them actually make the sandwich in front of you?  I don’t.  Then you see just how little skill and effort went into your sandwich and, for me, that just ruins the whole experience.  I want to go home and open that wax paper and at least pretend my hoagie was made with a little bit of love and tenderness.

-When I order a Coke at a restaurant and the waiter asks me if Pepsi is OK, I just want to punch him in the neck.  Of course it’s OK!  (Anyone out there reading this who just thought to themselves, “But I like Coke and I don’t like Pepsi” please don’t email me about this – I hate people like you more than the stupid waiter.)

-One of my number one pet peeves: waiters who make you feel bad about ordering tap water.  Here’s a typical conversation.  Waiter: “Would you care for an overpriced bottle of sparkling water?”  Me: “Uh… no thanks, regular water is fine.”  Waiter: “Oh, so just plain tap water?  From the sink in the bathroom in the back?  Of course sir, right away sir, I’ll be back in a moment with two dirty glasses.”

-What about when you’re at some fancy shmancy restaurant and you try to pronounce the dish properly when you order but the waiter totally calls you out on it by loudly pronouncing it correctly when he unnecessarily repeats the order back to you?

-As regular readers of my column know, there is a tradition in the Karo family that when you graduate college and get your first real job and your first real paycheck, you have to take the entire family out to a really nice dinner.  My dad has been holding the dinner over my head since I was like eight years old.  Last summer, I finally got to take the family out.  Of course, since I was picking up the tab, my dad ordered like lobster-encrusted filet mignon or something ridiculous like that.  You should have seen my dad’s face when I signed the bill.  Actually, you probably could.  He had the waiter take a picture.

-Another thing I hate: garbage cans with a swinging lid at fast food restaurants.  Am I the only the one who has a problem with this?  Basically, you have two options.  You can either attempt to push the lid in using your tray while at the same time making sure your Dr. Pepper and half-eaten burger don’t spill all over the place, or you can actually touch that swinging lid of filth to keep it open while you drop your garbage in.  Either way you’re fucked in my book.

-How about this:  you go to a restaurant with one of your friends.  It just so happens that your friend speaks another language, and so does your waiter.  And when they discover this, they spend the rest of the meal speaking in that language so you can’t understand what the hell they’re saying, but they’re giggling so much you think they must be making fun of you for drinking tap water.

-When you are at a restaurant and someone asks the waiter, “So, are the clams any good?” don’t you just want, for one time in your life, the waiter to say, “Ma’am, I have to be honest, the clams here suck.”  I think that would make me really happy.

-You know what freaks me out about restaurant bathrooms?  The “Employees Must Wash Hands” sign.  To me, this implies that the restaurant employees need to be reminded to wash their hands before returning to work.  I can just imagine the conversation between chefs in the bathroom:  “Hey Jack, did you know you had to wash your hands after taking a shit?”  “Really?”  “Yeah, it says so right here on this sign.”

-The U.S. Open golf tournament was played at the Bethpage Black course this year, which is just a few minutes from my house in Long Island.  It was definitely an awesome experience.  I spent the whole day watching golf in the sun while kicking back beers and munching on jalapeno poppers.  The next I think I set a world record for poisoning.  I managed to get sun, food, and alcohol poisoning all at once.  But I’d do it all over again.

-The other day I made a Saturday appointment for my regular check-up at the doctor.  The receptionist said that I could not eat before I came in because it might affect my blood tests.  She kept insisting that since I had to fast beforehand, I had to have a really early appointment, like 9am, otherwise I would get too hungry.  I’m like, listen lady, make my appointment at two in the afternoon, I sleep until 1:30 anyway!

-Why doe everyone working at Taco Bell wear braces?

-Why are all the workers at the “authentic” Tex-Mex place down the block from me Asian?

-Why are all delivery men only four feet tall?  And why do they insist on riding their bicycles kamikaze-style down the wrong side of the street?

-I have a coupon for Domino’s pizza.  On the bottom, it says “Drivers carry less than $20.”  Right above that it says, “Special: Two Large Pizzas and 2-Liter Soda, $21.99.”  So what happens when I give the guy $21.99, he can’t accept it?

-Why do people chew cinnamon breath mints?  They don’t freshen your breath, they just make it smell like cinnamon.  And that’s weird.

-How come after I cut a bagel in half I can never get the two halves to line up perfectly again when I try to make a sandwich?

-In Ruminations #25, I talked about the “mystery beep,” that strange beeping coming from somewhere in your apartment that you have to track for weeks.  Well now I have the mystery smell.  Something smells, but I don’t know what it is or where it’s coming from.  One thing is for certain though, it’s not coming from the Sub-Z – I’ve never had any food in there!

-Here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-I’ve started to notice a disturbing fashion trend – guys wearing polo shirts with the collar turned up.  Dude, we’re not on your yacht, and this isn’t 1985.

-Does anyone look good with a mustache?

-Isn’t it awkward when you run into a really good friend that you haven’t seen in like two years but you can’t run up and hug them because they are either on their cell phone or talking to someone else so you kind of just have to stand there patiently and wait until it’s convenient to get excited?

-I love when people act like they have inside terrorist information:  “Are you sure you want to go to Boston this weekend?”  “Oh yeah, it’ll be fine, I heard they’re attacking Las Vegas instead.”

-Why do I always prick myself trying to open a “safety” pin?

-A very awkward situation occurs often in New York City when you are walking down a relatively empty sidewalk and there happens to be a person walking right next to you in the same direction as you at the exact same pace as you.  I never know whether to pass or draft.  It becomes sort of a strange competition.

-When you realize that a shirt has to go to the dry cleaners anyway, don’t you smush it up into a little ball in your closet so it gets as wrinkled as possible?  Ever go into the dry cleaners and they tell you that your stuff will be ready in a week, but when you ask if they can have it ready by tomorrow, they can?

-Have you ever been in someone else’s apartment, picked up the TV remote control instead of the cable remote control, and tried to change the channel, thereby fucking up the entire system so that you can’t even figure out how to get it back to channel three?

-So, I took the leap.  I made my stand-up comedy debut on July 10th.  Although I was nervous as hell, I am happy to report that it was a rousing success.  To me, comedy is like sex.  Beforehand, you’re a little nervous.  During, it’s the best feeling in the world.  And immediately afterward you never want to do it again and all you want is a hoagie.  I’ll make sure, though, to let you guys know the next time I perform.  Stand-up, that is.

-Ever notice that Foot Locker and Athlete’s Foot barely even sell sneakers anymore?  It’s like one row of Nikes and 900 shelves of jerseys, socks, and wristbands.

-I went to DC for July 4th weekend with a bunch of my frat buddies.  Their thought process is hilarious.  The girl we were visiting suggested we go to the White House.  All of us at once were like, “Oh, is that a bar?”

-It bothers me that only Oscar winners and championship athletes say, “If you follow your dreams, and don’t give up, you will succeed.”  Of course you’re saying that, you just won the fucking Stanley Cup!  You never see any homeless people say not to give up.

-And, finally, ever notice that whenever you write an awesome, long, detailed email to a friend, you always accidentally delete it before sending it and then instead of retyping it you write something like, “I just wrote you the longest email, but then I deleted it, fuck me!” and just send that instead?  By the way, after I wrote this issue out the first time, I deleted it by accident.  Fuck me!

HOME

-When I went to London on a family vacation over five years ago, I was amazed at how technologically advanced the British were.  Everyone was walking around with cell phones and almost no one I knew back in the States had one.  I scoffed at the extravagance.  I thought to myself, why would I ever need a cell phone?  Now, I don’t even go to the bathroom without taking my cell (more on that later).  The only thing is, I think that having a cell phone has slowly become more trouble than it’s worth…

-Let’s face it, a cell phone’s primary function is as a phone book.  I have everyone’s number in there.  Of course, I dial by choosing a name out of my phone’s address book and when the phone rings, a name pops up, not a number.  As a result, I have no fucking clue what anyone’s number is.  So when I don’t have my phone on me, I can’t call my roommate or even my sister.

-And now that I have literally hundreds of numbers in my phone, I don’t even pick it up anymore when someone calls and their name doesn’t pop up.  I think, “Oh my God, who is this?  They’ve never called before.  This can’t be good.”

-A lot of laws are being passed around the country prohibiting driving while talking on your cell phone.  And I think that’s good start, but we really need to extend the ban elsewhere.  For instance, the other day I saw a woman in a motorized wheelchair crash into a bus stop because she was talking on her phone.  And how about those fucking people you see in the street who clearly can’t talk on their cell phone and walk at the same time?  They walk really slow, then speed up, then slow again, they’re swerving and shit, they walk across red lights.  They are physically unable to walk and talk.

-1-800 Collect commercials have been all over the place lately.  I have a question for you – have you ever called collect in your entire life?  I think I did maybe once when I was ten years old and stuck at the mall.  What about pay phones?  When was the last time you used one of those?  Do you ever find yourself walking past someone using a pay phone and thinking, hmm, I wonder what happened to her cell phone?

-The most notorious cell phone talkers I have ever seen are New York City cab drivers.  These guys are on their cell phones literally all day.  They’ll be chatting away your entire ride.  What could they possibly be talking about?  They’re definitely not discussing the fastest and cheapest way to get to your destination, I can tell you that much.

-Has this ever happened to you?  You’re on the phone and a bunch of people are around.  You are talking to someone and start to get off the phone but then realize you had to ask one more question, but by the time you finish your question the other person has already hung up.  Do you ever act like the person is still on the other line (“Oh….um…OK, no problem, bye.”) so that you don’t look like an idiot in front of your friends?

-Ever call one of your friends at work and on his answering machine message your friend is talking in such a low voice you can barely hear him?  What are you afraid to set up your voicemail at work?  Speak up!

-One of my buddies who I went to college with at Penn now goes to Penn Law School.  His new phone number is one number off from the hoagie place that we always used to call for delivery at school.  I cannot physically call my friend now.  My fingers are ingrained with the hoagie number.  I think we’ll just have to set up some system where they can transfer me over.

-I’m that guy who has that phone that calls people by mistake when it’s sitting in my pocket.  Poor Amy and Zach.  As the first and last names in my phone book, about once a month they get a phone call from my pocket that’s about twenty minutes of nothing.  Of course, since my first name is Aaron, I’m almost always the first name in my friends’ phone books.  I get accidental calls about twice a week.  Thankfully my phone usually just picks up when in it’s my pocket anyway.

-Something must be done about cell phone plans.  Could anything be more complicated?  Seriously, you need an advanced degree to figure one of these fuckers out.  I love the offers they make on TV – “Now available, 3,000 weekend minutes!”  3,000 minutes?  You know how many minutes that is?  Who the fuck can use that many minutes on the weekend?  You’d have to be a cab driver or something.  How about this – on my plan right now, I have “anytime” minutes… that I can only use during the week.  What??

-I think cell phone customer service is literally run by the Devil.  Could there be any more helpless, rude, annoying, or stupid people in the world?  When my last cell phone company offered a new plan that was better and cheaper than the one I had at the time, I actually refused to call up to get the better deal just because it would mean talking to one of these jerks.

-I hate trying to manage my cell phone use so I don’t go over my plan.  You’re talking, you’re talking, and then when it gets to 0:59, you’re like, “OK gotta go bye” and you hang up on your mom so you don’t waste that extra minute.  There’s nothing worse than a 1:01 call.  Then you always have idiots like my one friend, Chi, who on the first day of the month passed out with his cell phone on for like twelve hours and used up all his minutes in one night.

-The problem with having your cell with you at all times is that you end up making calls for no reason.  You’re like, well, I have three minutes to kill, might as well get on the horn!  Then you get your ridiculous cell phone bill and you’re like, who the hell are all these people and why did I call them?

-I use my cell phone so much that I don’t even have a regular phone in my apartment.  So I have a cell phone and web-based email that I can check from anywhere – I’m completely virtual.  Only thing is, when I come home after a long day, I have no emails or messages waiting for me.  It’s kind of anti-climactic.

-The fact that I only have a cell phone gets me in all sorts of mishaps.  Last week I left my cell phone in my cousin’s car in Long Island.  I didn’t realize it until I had gotten back to my apartment in the city.  But my roommate wasn’t home so I had literally no phone to call anyone with.  I was taken back to the olden days when there were no phones, because I had no way of communicating with anyone.  I tried to make some smoke signals or something from my window but that wasn’t going to work.  Finally I realized that I have instant messenger on my computer.  There was only one person on my buddy list online at the time, my friend in San Francisco.  So IM’d him to call my parents who then emailed me to tell me that my friend was going to pick up my phone from my cousin and drive it into the city the next day where I could get it.  Pretty convenient, huh?

-When I finally got my phone back I took it into the bathroom with me to catch up on all the calls I missed while I took care of business.  When I went to leave the bathroom, I dropped my phone in the toilet and fried it.  Now I’m waiting for the company to send me my eighth replacement phone (no joke) in as many months.  So if you need to call me in the next week, just send a smoke signal instead.

-Do you have friends that don’t check their voicemail?  This completely baffles me.  I call my friend and leave an urgent message on her cell.  She never calls me back.  I see her a week later and ask her what happened.  She says, “Oh, I never check my voicemail.”  Are you fucking kidding me?

-In this era of cell phones, isn’t using regular phones just weird?  I always try to hit “Send.”  What about leaving messages on a regular answering machine and not digital voicemail?  It’s like a black hole.  Don’t you just get that feeling like they’re not going to get your message for like two weeks?

-The worst is when you are about to leave a message but then realize that you didn’t hear the beep.  You always have to start the message like, “Um, I don’t know if you are going to get this but…”

-What about the obligatory cell phone number exchange?  You meet someone you haven’t seen for a while in the street and they ask you for your cell phone number.  So of course you have to ask them for their cell phone number even though you have no intention of calling.  Sometimes I’m just playing Snake on my phone when I’m pretending to enter in their number.

-Something weird keeps happening to me.  I’ll get a phone call and the person calling will ask for Bob or something.  So I’ll be like, “Sorry, you have the wrong number, what number were you trying to reach?”  And they’ll tell me my phone number!  I never know what to do so I’m like, “Um…can I take a message?”

-What about when you’re with a bunch of your friends and someone calls you and when you tell them where you are, they tell you to “say what’s up” to everyone.  You have to be all awkward like, “Hey guys, Dave says what’s up,” but no one ever gives a shit.

-Here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-When you’re waiting for a cab for what seems like forever and every one that goes by is taken, don’t you start looking at the cabs like limos?  A cab goes by with someone in the back and you’re like, “Wow, how did he swing that?  He must be somebody!”

-I am completely cut off right now from my parents, they don’t give me a cent.  It’s funny though, because now that I’m on my own, and it’s my own money, I spend a lot more freely than I did when it was my parent’s money.  I guess before I felt kind of bad if I dropped a hundred bucks of my mom’s money at the bar.  Now I’m like, fuck it, I earned it!  Of course, I’m broke now.

-Why are magazines pages numbered so poorly?  First, I can never find the table of contents because it’s buried after fifteen pages of ads.  Then, the magazine only has like four page numbers: 23, 68, 89, 101, and then the back cover.  How the fuck am I supposed to find anything?

-I know this is completely random but this is what us Wharton grads think about.  I think that Brita should make bottled water.  If you think about it, Brita really isn’t selling water filters and taps, its selling peace of mind that you are drinking pure, clean water.  Bottled water gives you that same peace of mind.  And since other bottled water companies, like Evian and Perrier, are already cutting into Brita’s filter business, it would make sense for Brita to do it as well, even though technically it would be cannibalistic.  So that’s why I think Brita should make bottled water.  Thank you.

-Ever go to try something on in a store but the clothes have these huge anti-theft tags on the inside?  You have look in the mirror like, well, if there wasn’t this two-inch bulge on the side, I guess this would fit!

-Ever notice that every radio station goes to commercial at the same time?

-Ever listen to the radio and you hear this great new song and it’s two minutes before you realize it’s a Sprite commercial?

-I hate it when my friends make me wait for them so that we can leave together.  Then we walk down a flight of stairs together and then go in opposite directions.  What the hell was the point of that?

-My name is Aaron Karo, but most people just call me Karo.  Sometimes people get confused and think that Karo is my first name.  They’ll ask, “So… “Karo,” what kind of name is that?”  And I’ll be like, “Last.”

-When you’re walking down the street and see someone up ahead giving out flyers, you think how annoying those people are.  Like I need another flyer for a barber or strip club.  But when you walk past the person and they don’t try to give you a flyer, don’t you get kind of insulted?  What, I’m not good enough for your strip club?

-Is it immature of me that I still snicker at people named Dick?

-Ever notice that any party that you get an Evite for sucks?  And what do you do when you get it?  You go right to the section where it tells you who said “No.”

-And, finally, here is a true tale of “cellular woe.”  I met this chick, let’s call her Lisa.  I wanted to take Lisa out on a date one night so I gave her a call during the day.  She was down and we made plans to go out that night and I was supposed to call her at 8pm.  8 o’clock rolls around and I give Lisa a call.  Her voicemail picks up right away.  I tell her to give me a call back.  She doesn’t.  8:15 rolls around, I give her a call, there’s no answer, so I hang up.  8:45 comes and I’m fuming, thinking I’ve been stood up.  I give her another call, again the voicemail picks up, and I leave a somewhat pissed off message.  I never fucking hear from the girl.  She stood me up.  She never calls.  Not the next day or the day after that.  About a week later I get a call from a friend of mine who lives in California.  I’m chatting with her and then she says, “Oh yeah, last week you left these two strange messages on my phone about getting together, what the heck were you talking about?”  Then I realize it.  Her name is Lisa, too.  I have two Lisa’s in my cell phone.  When I left those messages that night, I didn’t realize I was leaving them for the wrong Lisa.  I never actually called the girl I wanted to take out.  She thinks I stood her up!  Fuck me.

HOME

-When my very first girlfriend broke up with me, I was quite upset.  I told my dad I just didn’t understand women.  I’ll never forget my dad’s advice.  He said, “You don’t understand women?  I don’t understand women.  Women don’t even understand women!  Just give up.”  Many years later, as I trek nightly to clubs with monosyllabic names and try to meet “the One” in the alcohol-induced frenzy that is the New York City dating scene, I’ve realized that, for once, maybe my dad was right.

-The first challenge in meeting a girl is, of course, finding a girl that is actually single.  Does everyone have boyfriends in this city?  Sometimes I feel like there was this giant game of musical chairs and everyone sat down except for me.  Anyway, us guys need some sort of sign to see if a girl is taken or not.  To be honest, there’s not enough time on a Saturday night to sort through everyone.  If I’m talking to you, I’m not interesting in making a new friend, I’ve got enough of those.  So if you’re taken, just let me know and I’ll walk away and we can both get on with our lives.

-However, a lot of my friends say they like a “challenge.”  You know these guys.  They’re like, “I don’t care if she’s engaged, it’s more fun that way.  I like the challenge.”  Me, I don’t want to be challenged.  I don’t have the energy for that.  I’m looking for a single girl.  I don’t want challenges, obstacles, or hurdles, thank you very much.

-So my friend was dating this girl for a while.  He was pretty into her, but then she left him for another guy.  Eventually, the girl ended up marrying this new guy.  My friend was pretty bummed.  I think the fact that she ended up marrying this guy should have cheered him up.  It’s kind of like if the Knicks lose in the playoffs, but the team that beat them ends up going on to win the championship.  At least you lost to the best, you know?

-For guys, whenever something new happens in their lives, they want to know immediately if hot chicks are going to be involved.  You get to college: “How are the chicks, any hot chicks around?”  You move into a new apartment: “Dude, did you see any chicks, are there any hot chicks on our floor?”  You start a new job: “How are the chicks at this place?  Did you see that chick in the elevator?  She was hot!”  What can I say, we are very simple creatures.

-The worst part of a relationship is, of course, the end of one.  My buddy had such a falling out with his ex-girlfriend that they sent me as a neutral party to exchange belongings.  He gave me all the clothes she had left at his place all nicely folded up.  I met the ex-girlfriend at a neutral location where she gave me all his stuff wrinkled up in a garbage bag.  We then signed the obligatory treaty that, as the guy’s friend, I would never be able to hook up with her as long as I lived.  It was all very official.

-A while ago I went to this bar but was quickly barred from entry by the bouncer who kindly told me that there was too much “sausage” inside.  As I stood helplessly on the line, I happened to see an ex-girlfriend of mine walking by.  I convinced her to get on line with me and pretend she was still my girlfriend so I could get in.  Then we started fighting on the line.  I said she was too clingy, she said I don’t listen to her (at least that’s what I think she said).  By the time we got inside the bar, we had broken up all over again.  The important thing, though, is that I got in.

-In New York, a bar is unfortunately still one of the best places to meet someone.  Let me break down some of the different types of bars.  First, you have the bar that you think you’ve never been to before, but then you walk in and you’re like, “Oh, this place?  I’ve been here ten times!”  Then there are the bars that make you wait on line outside forever, then you get in and the place is empty.  You also have the bars where you’re like, “Wait, there’s a downstairs?  There’s a whole other part of this place?  Damn, I never knew that!”  Lately, I’ve been noticing bars that, once you are already inside, they make you wait on line and pay a cover again, just to get to the downstairs part.  I always think, man, I liked it much better when I didn’t know there was a downstairs in the first place!

-I love those nights when you get all your friends to motivate to go to one bar and you’re all psyched (“Yeah, this place is gonna be awesome, it’s so much fun, we’ll all have a great time!”) and then you get there and there is a huge line and they’re not letting anyone in.  All of a sudden you’re like, “This place sucks, who do they think they are?  There’s no way I am waiting in line for this shit hole!”

-I am the last male Karo in my family.  Therefore, it is up to me to carry on the Karo name.  My grandma has been holding this over my head forever.  She tells me that I absolutely must have four boys to carry on the Karo name.  “Four boys!  You gotta give me four boys!” is all she ever says.  No pressure or anything, Grandma.  She started making me promise her four boys when I was like six years old.  I didn’t even like girls yet.

-It’s always an awkward situation when you start dating someone just before Valentine’s Day or their birthday.  Because you never know if you need to buy a present or what you should you buy.  And what do you write on the card if you don’t even love them?  “Happy Valentine’s Day, your friend, Aaron.”  That’s a little weird.  I think we need to establish a no-gift buffer zone.  If you start a relationship within one month of a major holiday, no gifts are allowed.  That would just make life a lot easier.

-Quote of the Month.  I was in the drugstore with my buddy, who was buying condoms.  The cashier said, “Oh, these are actually on sale, they’re half-price.”  My friend said, “Half-price condoms?  That sounds kind of shady.  Can you just charge me full-price?  Thanks.”

-So I was on a date a couple of months ago.  Candlelight dinner, a little wine, the whole nine yards.  I started to think how complicated life has become since graduating.  Remember in college how you could pick up a chick between points of beer pong by offering her a Natty Light?  Those were good times.  As I started to daydream, the candle on the dinner table at the restaurant brushed against the napkin in the breadbasket and the whole breadbasket burst into flames!  I’m not making this up.  The waiter ran over, grabbed it, ran outside, and threw it in a puddle in the street.  Needless to say, there were a lot of sparks flying on that date!  (I just couldn’t resist.)

-I think maybe I’m starting to figure women out though.  One thing I have noticed is that girls are always cold and they’re always complaining that they’re feet hurt (who the hell told you to wear seven-inch heals anyway?).  So, I think what I’m gonna do is carry around a pair of sneakers and a sweater.  That’ll really make me a hit with the ladies!  Man, the things we do for love.

-Here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-I visited the University of Arizona a couple of weeks ago.  They actually have this program called “Finish in Four” that encourages kids to graduate in four years since everyone there fucks around for like seven years.  I’ve got an idea.  How about taking away the chicks in bikinis and endless alcohol and getting these kids to do a little work?  Then they might actually want to leave!

-Ever notice that the drink does not increase in proportion to the rest of the value meal when you super-size?  You get a little bit bigger sandwich, a couple of extra fries, and like a twenty-gallon drum of Diet Coke.  Who can drink that much?

-Why do people in the locker room of my gym, when they get out of the shower, do that little barefoot walk on the sides of their feet?  Is that supposed to prevent athlete’s foot or something?  Like the germs are going, “Oh wait, this guy is only walking on the sides of his feet.  We can’t touch that, let’s hold out for some heel.”

-My friend went to the airport and felt the full force of airport security.  They searched all his stuff, made him take off his shoes, and even confiscated his toenail clipper.  The whole thing took like half an hour.  Then he got on the plane and what did they have in the first-class bathroom?  Razor blades.

-Aren’t magazine covers with scantily clad women on them getting a little ridiculous these days?  I walk past the newsstand and I can’t tell what’s Penthouse and what’s Maxim.

-Ever notice that you can only be a porn “star”?  There are no porn extras or porn supporting actors.  You’re either a porn star or you’re not in porn at all.  Sounds like a great industry to me!

-The eternal question: what towel do you use to dry your hands when using someone else’s bathroom?

-And finally, did you guys read about that twenty-year-old-chick that won $50 million in the lottery?  $50 million!  That’s a whole lot of money.  Last week I got really excited because I scratched off a lotto ticket and won – another ticket.  Then I scratched that one off and lost.  Fuck me.

HOME

-Well, let’s pick up where Ruminations on College Life leaves off. I’ve graduated college, the summer is over, and I pick up and move to my new home – an apartment in the Gramercy Park section of New York City. Of course it took my roommate Brian and me about two weeks to put together all of the shit we got from IKEA. What’s with IKEA instructions? They’re like hieroglyphics, all pictures and no words. Worse yet, they combine like 19 steps into one. Step 7 is insert screw B into notch F, attach knob G to panel 14, flip over, and repeat 8 times. I’m like, that’s twenty steps! And of course, when it was all done, none of our furniture had drawers. Because everyone knows the drawers are the hardest part to install and they leave them for last so no one has the patience to put them on because they’re so frustrated with the instructions. I’ve got a whole closet full of uninstalled drawers in my apartment right now.

-One question has plagued me since the first time I ever moved anywhere. How the hell does everything get so tangled? I put like a pair of headphones and my cell phone earpiece in the same box and they ended up in a knot so big it would make a Boy Scout proud.

-To me, the hardest part about moving to a new place is figuring out how to work the shower. No one else seems to have a problem with this, but for me, a new shower is a complete mystery. Which knob is hot? Which knob is cold? Should I turn them a lot? A little? Simultaneously? Separately? I’m still experimenting but I think my roommate is starting to wonder why I spend so much time in the bathroom…

-Speaking of showers, I’m just not having a lot of luck in the shower lately. My friend bought me a shower radio. I was psyched. I put it in the shower, it got wet, rusted, and broke. Then I bought a fogless mirror so that I could shave in the shower. First of all, seeing yourself in the mirror while showering is a very unnatural. You’re making all kinds weird hairdos with the shampoo, it’s just strange. Then, one day, out of the blue, the mirror just stopped working. I have never seen a surface fog as fast as this mirror does now. It’s the least fogless mirror ever. I also used to have this little digital watch that I put in the shower because I was trying to cut down on my 25-minute shower times. Trust me, you don’t want a watch in the shower. You start timing different body part wash times and shit. You’re like, “Four minutes for elbows, a new record!” One day I just got too competitive and finally tossed the watch out of the shower. I’ve now decided to stop bringing accessories into the shower with me.

-I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here about shaving. I hate shaving. It is one of my least favorite things to do. I also hate it when women complain about having to shave their legs. Are you kidding me? I have to shave my FACE! I literally drag a razor-sharp blade across my jugular! I could die every morning trying to shave. Maybe my problem is that I use two razors to shave. Yup, Sensor Excel for my sideburns and a Mach 3 for the rest of my face. I’m not kidding, I need some kind of naked tool belt that I can wear in the shower to hold all my razors.

-Of course, New York City apartments are pretty tight. In my bathroom, I have to keep all my toiletries on a shelf above the toilet. This gets interesting. About once a week I have to go diving across the room to swat away my floss as its about to fall off the shelf and into the toilet. One time, my electric tooth brush fell off the shelf and my hands were full so I flung my foot out, nipped the brush with my toe, it hit the side of the bowl, and landed safely on the floor. It was one of the greatest bathroom moments of my life.

-Getting back to moving for a moment. You know when you’re moving and you’re in the middle of unpacking and your stuff is scattered everywhere and you just stop for a moment, and it gets really quiet? And then you hear it. BEEP. You don’t pay much attention at first and then… BEEP. Where is it coming from? BEEP, another minute… BEEP. It’s the mystery beep. You know don’t what it is, you don’t know where it is, but it’s somewhere in the mess and it’s driving you crazy – only it’s not frequent enough or loud enough to track. So you start timing the amount of time between beeps. Like that’s gonna help. “Well, it’s 46 seconds between beeps. It must be coming from… the kitchen!” I was plagued by the mystery beep for about a week. And then I found it. The digital watch that I threw out of the shower. Where was it? Buried underneath some uninstalled draws from IKEA. Damn those drawers!

-I had a single all four years of college, so I’ve never really lived with a roommate until now. I noticed that the roommate relationship is very different if the roommates are guys than if they’re girls. If my roommate doesn’t come home one night I think, “Alright, he must be getting some ass!” But if a girl’s roommate doesn’t come home in time for Sex and the City, she calls the police. If you’re a guy and your roommate doesn’t come home for two days, instead of being more worried, you’re more excited like, “Damn, he must be getting some serious ass!”

-My apartment has a doorman. Surprisingly, this does not give me the sense of security I thought it would. This is because my doorman lets people upstairs and then calls me when they are already coming up in the elevator. This doesn’t seem very secure to me. What happens when a burglar comes? The doorman will probably buzz me and say, “Hey Karo, just wanted to let you know you’re about to be robbed. Yeah, he’s in the elevator.”

-Here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-I hate having to make an appointment when you don’t really need one. You call the doctor and spend twenty minutes trying to figure out a convenient time for an appointment, and then you get there and they take you in the order that you arrived and you end sitting in the waiting room for an hour reading six-month-old Field & Stream magazines. That pisses me off.

-I find using the ATM to be an amusing experience. You kind of want to shield your pin code from other people but you don’t want to look all paranoid so you do that subtle little elbow move to try to block people from looking. Sometimes, I’ll even pretend like I am going to press the number five but then at the very last second, I’ll actually press four. That really seems to throw people off.

-I find the after-hours ATM centers to be quite awkward. These are the places that you can swipe your card at any time and go into a little building where you can use the ATM. When you’re in there, someone always comes to the door and stands there because their card isn’t swiping right and they can’t get in. So you have to decide in like five seconds whether this person is actually an upstanding citizen whose card isn’t working right or a vicious killer who is going to rob then murder you. Of course, no one wants to be rude, so I end pretty much letting everyone in. But I definitely make sure to do my elbow move so the murderer won’t get my pin # before he kills me!

-I had my appendix taken out the night before New Year’s Eve. You don’t have to tell me how much it sucked. In the past year and a half I’ve had all my wisdom teeth and my appendix removed. All I’ve got left is my tonsils and I think they’re looking to get out too.

-The hospital is a very funny place. You’re sharing a room with a complete stranger and you’ve got on this horrible robe with no back. Everyone is desperately trying to keep these robes shut while they hobble about. You can always tell the patients who have been in the hospital the longest because they don’t care anymore. Ass hanging out, they’re not even trying to keep the robe closed. They’re like, “I’m sick and I’m old and I don’t have a belt. Deal with it.”

-Quote of the Month. Just before my surgery, I asked the nurse if she always works the graveyard shift. Her response: “Son, this is a hospital, we don’t call it the graveyard shift.” Yeah, I guess I never thought of it that way before.

-Have you ever been reading a recipe and the directions are written something like this: “Add three (3) cups of sugar…” Are there people out there that don’t know what the word “three” means?

-Do you think that writing “photos – do not bend” on an envelope really works? You think the postal workers are like, “Hey Jim, did you see this envelope? It says it’s got photos inside. Make sure you don’t bend it, that could be pictures of somebody’s family!”

-What is with all these “intros” and “skits” that are on albums these days? Who are we fooling here? I don’t want to hear that crap. Why does the CD case say you have sixteen songs when there’s only six (6) that have music?

-My cousin just had a baby a few months ago. Objectively speaking, Daniel is the cutest baby of all time. The thing is, though, when your cousin has a baby, you don’t become anything cool like an uncle or something. In fact, now I’m a second cousin. It’s like I got demoted.

-I hate it when people try to be nice and they hold the door open for you when you’re still like fifty feet away and you have to do that little racewalk in order to get to the door faster and you just wish they wouldn’t try to be so nice.

-Why do people answer questions so strangely? I asked this dude that I met where he worked and he was like, “Oh, 30th and Park.” I’m like, I don’t give a shit where your office is located, what company do you work for? Likewise, I asked my friend how long he and his girlfriend had been dating and he was like, “Oh, about twenty months.” What is it a fucking newborn? (No offense to my second cousin of course).

-Why is it that whatever someone else is reading on the subway is always so interesting?

-And, finally, ever since September 11th, New York Firefighters have been recognized for their ridiculous display of courage. But you know why I really admire firefighters? They handle traffic really well. I’ve seen a fire truck with its sirens blaring and its lights flashing like crazy trying to fight its way through Times Square rush hour traffic. But if you look at the firemen in the truck, they’re always so calm and collected, even though they are battling some of the worst drivers in the world just to get to a burning building and risk their lives. Now that’s impressive. I get stuck going below 50 MPH on the Long Island Expressway and I’m banging my head on the steering wheel. Fuck me.

HOME

-I graduate college in about a month.  That is some seriously fucked up shit.  Although I’m pretty psyched for life after college, the past four years have been wild to say the least.  I can’t believe this is the last issue of Ruminations on College Life.  Well, let’s make it a good one…

-I don’t know why it never struck me before, but isn’t it strange how your room at home is frozen in time?  Walking into my old bedroom is like walking into 1996.  There are posters of Kathy Ireland and Patrick Ewing lining the walls, there’s a little tiny bed in the corner, and a phone with a bunch of people I never talk to anymore programmed in the memory.  Here’s a tip for pre-froshes out there: when your parents threaten to change your room into a study after you leave for college, take them up on the offer!

-My friend had an interesting experience with a professor last month.  He went to office hours to argue for more points on a paper he had just gotten back.  The professor skimmed the paper, mulled it over for a minute, and then said, “You know what?  This paper is actually worse than I first thought.  I’m going to lower your grade.”  And then he sent my friend on his way.  What a sucker.

-Another one of my friends was a little more creative.  He had an assignment to write a paper about pretty much anything.  One night he went out, got drunk, then came home and wrote a paper about getting drunk and writing a paper.  I think he got a D.

-You know, sometimes life works in mysterious ways.  One day, back in high school, I was playing basketball with some of my friends.  I accidentally smacked into one of my buddies and fucked his shoulder up pretty badly.  He never got it checked out and it would flare up every now and then.  The years passed and my friend ended up joining the Israeli Army.  After a couple of years in the army, my friend was ready to come home but still had mandatory service left.  Last week, he re-aggravated his shoulder and subsequent tests revealed that the original injury had caused permanent (though not debilitating) damage.  As a result, now he gets to leave the army and come home free and clear.  How great is that?  I should seriously injure my friends more often!

-After you give your email address to tons of people, it’s a huge pain in the ass to change it later.  This is especially a problem for people who have graduated college and are somewhat responsible adults but still use the same email address they created in like ninth grade.  It’s pretty hard to take someone seriously when they’re twenty-three and their email address is still pornstar69@hotmail.com.

-My dad can’t wait for me to graduate and start working.  You see, there’s a tradition in the Karo family that when you get your first real job and get your first paycheck, you have to take the whole family out to a really nice dinner.  My dad has been holding this dinner over my head since I was about eight years old.  I’d be going to Little League practice or something and my dad would be like, “Oh, one day you’re gonna buy me some steak dinner, son, I can’t wait!”  No pressure or anything dad!  But don’t worry, you’ll get that steak soon enough…

-While groping for some Tylenol in a hungover state the other morning, I had this thought: why would anyone not buy extra-strength medicine?  You roll into the drugstore and they have regular Tylenol and extra-strength Tylenol.  Obviously you buy the extra-strength.  I mean, can you ever have too much strength?

-The saving of empty beer and liquor bottles is a strange college phenomenon.  I bet most of you reading this right now have some empties on a shelf in your room.  Everyone knows how much us college kids drink, but do we really have to display it?  It’s a good thing this trend stops after college.  Wouldn’t it be weird if your parents had empty bottles of wine up on their bedroom wall?

-Oh, I almost forgot: Spring Break.  I was a little nostalgic before my trip to Acapulco this year.  After all, this would be my third and final Spring Break in the consequence-free environment we call Mexico.  Nonetheless, I soon forgot all my worries as I set off for paradise with a six-pack of Red Bull hidden in my carry-on, next to a big bottle of Tylenol for hangovers – extra-strength of course.

-If you were going to define the term “scene,” you could just show a picture of the pool at the Hyatt in Acapulco.  It’s pretty scary when you combine kids from Penn, Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, and Syracuse all in one place.  I felt like I was back home in Long Island, except everyone was eating nachos and guacamole instead of bagels.  The best was watching the chicks catfight over the chairs at the pool.  I guess they couldn’t see that there were 250 other chairs since they were all wearing those stupid purple-tinted sunglasses all the time.

-Acapulco is just plain madness.  Rum is about as cheap as purified water.  Plus, in the hotel there was a bottle opener on the wall of each bathroom.  I guess that’s so you could have a beer while you were shitting your brains out from all the guacamole.  And can you believe I got thrown out of Senor Frog’s?  Do you know how rowdy you have to get to get thrown out of Senor Frog’s?  I don’t either, because I don’t remember a thing.

-In Acapulco, my buddy was absolutely bombed when he met this girl in a club and somehow managed to convince her to go home with him.  During the night, she kept asking him if he was really drunk, but he denied it.  After they hooked up, my friend said to the girl, “Come on, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”  To which the girl replied, “Asshole, we’re in my room.”

-I just found out that the sororities here at Penn sometimes have mixers with Penn Law School.  How hilarious is that!  I can just imagine a bunch of dirty old third-year law students hitting on eighteen-year-old wasted sorority chicks.  It’s ironic because you’d think the law students would realize what they’re doing is barely legal!

-This past weekend was Spring Fling at Penn.  Spring Fling is three-day sloshfest featuring heavy drinking, bands, funnel cake, and more heavy drinking.  The craziest part was when Tiffany made a special appearance and sung “I Think We’re Alone Now.”  It was wild.  Now, I have never given myself Quote of the Month before, but fuck it, this is the last issue anyway.  Sophomore year I was so fucked up at Spring Fling that I couldn’t even walk and was falling everywhere.  At one point, while lying on my back, unable to get up, I was quoted as saying, “I’ve seen more ceilings than floors today.”

-Next week I’m going to Slope Day at Cornell.  Slope Day is essentially Spring Fling all jammed into one afternoon, but with no funnel cake.  I was there last year and at one point I encountered a severely wasted British dude wandering around in a bathrobe.  I asked him if he was OK and he responded, “If you can stop the world from spinning, I’ll pay you.”  Oh, I’m gonna miss college!

-As a business major, it really boggles my mind when companies do dumbass shit.  Take my phone company.  I go to school in Philadelphia and thus have a Philly phone number, but, as a poor college student, I have my phone bill sent home to my parents in New York.  So what do I see when I walk into my bedroom at home in New York a couple of weeks ago (beside the Kathy Ireland poster)?  The fucking Philadelphia phonebook.  The phone company sent the new Yellow Pages and White Pages to my billing address.  It’s not going to do me much good in New York now is it you assholes!

-Does anyone watch the extras on DVDs?  I was reading a DVD box the other day and it said that it had an interview with the director, behind the scenes footage, and scenes that were cut out from the movie.  I mean, who needs that shit?  Scenes that were cut out of the movie?  Wow, they must be awesome!

-You know who I hate?  Whoever is at the door when you’ve been waiting for Domino’s for an hour and a half and the doorbell rings and you get all excited and run all the way downstairs and open the door only to see some other asshole at the door and not the Domino’s guy.

-Ever notice that 50% of all water fountains don’t work?

-So I’m gonna be making a speech at graduation.  I’ll be doing Ruminations live for the first time!  I’ll probably have to cut out all the cursing, but it will be fun nonetheless.  Speaking of graduation, does everyone really throw their caps up in the air?  If so, how do you get it back?  I think they charge you if you don’t return it and I just spent all my money on DVDs…

-How nice is campus when it’s sunny out?  People are throwing Frisbees and walking dogs and laying out on the green and shit.  I love when tours of prospective students come around and they’re all like, “Wow, is it always like this?”  I just wanna be like, yeah, except from October to March when it’s cold and miserable and no one leaves the house.

-In Ruminations #20, I talked about “that bar,” you know, that bar on campus that everyone goes to all the time, yet everyone complains it sucks but keeps going back anyway?  Well, “that bar” at my school is called Smokey Joe’s.  Smokes has been around forever and, yes, we go there all the time.  A couple of weeks ago, I was there and noticed that there was a digital countdown clock on the wall.  At first I just thought it was counting down to the next St. Patrick’s Day or some shit and didn’t pay much attention.  Then a bunch of us realized it was counting down to graduation—our graduation.  This was unacceptable of course and my friend ended the travesty by smashing the clock with a beer bottle.  In fact, every time I’m in Smokes I make it a point to stop the clock.  Being in “that bar” every night is bad enough without being reminded of how little time we have left!

-I’m in an interesting situation because the memory on my cell phone is full.  Every time I want to put a new number in, I have to delete one that’s already in there.  So when I meet someone new, basically I have to scroll through all the people I know, pick the one I like the least, and delete them.  Its kind of like cell phone Survivor.

-I think you can pretty much classify graduating seniors into three categories.  First, those going off to slave away at full-time jobs (also known as trying to get as rich as possible as fast as possible).  Second, those who are “taking a year off to figure out what I want to do with my life” (also known as let’s see how long I can mooch off my parents before they realize I just sit on the couch all day).  And third, those doing a little bit of both (also known as going to grad school).  By the way, if you don’t know which of these categories you fit into, you’re probably in the second one.

-So this it.  College is almost over.  I’m not sad, though.  I’ll be living in Manhattan, working long hours, not partying that much, waking up early every day… wait a minute, that sucks!  Whatever, real life had to happen eventually, right?  At least I learned a lot of valuable things that will help me in the future, like how to cure a hangover, how to tap a keg, the rules of beer pong… wait a minute, none of those things are really useful outside of college!  Shit.  Oh well.  Anyway, a lot of people have asked me if I am scared about graduating and my answer is no.  I’ve experienced everything that I could these past four years.  I’ve had the time of my life and made great friends.  Right now I’m just enjoying my last few weeks and trying not to look ahead.  Wait, I just heard they fixed the countdown clock again.  Well, looks like I’m off to hit that bar, one last time.  Fuck me!

HOME

-Remember the second half of your senior year in high school?  You didn’t do much work, you probably cut a bunch of classes, you may have even gotten fucked up in the middle of the day.  You had “senioritis.”  Wow, the college version of senioritis is so much crazier (or should I say, lazier).  My friends don’t do shit.  Some aren’t even enrolled in any classes.  I once went a whole week without leaving my house.  Being at college with nothing to do is truly the life.  I dedicate this issue to college seniors everywhere – the laziest creatures on earth!

-So I’m pretty much addicted to Red Bull and vodka.  I was never much of a fan of vodka.  But then along comes Red Bull, this magical drink that covers the taste completely and is available for free at my school (see the previous issue of Ruminations).  I am also obsessed with the TV show Temptation Island.  So I guess this is what my senior year has been reduced to: downing vodka-caffeine drink cocktails while watching reality television on FOX.  Man, that’s almost embarrassing.

-I love “male tension” at parties.  Guys don’t like to meet other guys.  Guys think they have enough guy friends that they’ll ever need and everyone else is automatically an asshole.  You’ll see a guy whisper to a girl at a party, “Hey, who’s that dude in the corner?”  “Oh, you don’t know Matt?  He’s great.”  And the guy is always like, “I fucking hate that kid,” without ever meeting him!

-If you have to take a shit during class, is it OK to take the book you are reading in class to the bathroom?  The other day I walked out of poly sci with our big-ass textbook under my arm.  When I came back like ten minutes later, everyone was giving me looks.  I mean, if you have to read something while on the can, it might as well be relevant to the class you’re missing, right?

-How come moms never know their own cell phone number?

-Why doesn’t that mark you get on your hand when you walk in the bar ever come off?  Is it a special pen or something?  You have to shower like six times otherwise everyone knows where you were on Saturday night.

-This is not necessarily about college, but how can rappers talk about how rich they are on their first album?  I don’t get it.  How can you be so rich?  This is your FIRST album, no one had even heard of you when you were recording it!

-I’m twenty-one but I feel old.  You know why I feel old?  Because all my fucking friends are on Propecia.  What the fuck is going on here?  When did everyone’s hair start falling out?  I walk into a party and it feels like the fucking Hair Club for Men.

-I’m taking this course now where the professor smokes a pipe during class.  No big deal, right?  But listen to this – he even lets kids smoke cigarettes during class!  I am not kidding.  How ridiculous is that?  The only good thing is that with all the smoke in the room, no one even notices when I leave to take a shit carrying the textbook!

-My friend’s boy from high school was a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.  So we all gathered around the TV to see if maybe he could take home some cash.  The kid set the all-time show record and Pat Sajak looked like he shit himself.  It was awesome.  And since my friend has TiVO (the second greatest invention behind the George Foreman grill), we watched it over and over again.  If it wasn’t for Temptation Island, that might have been greatest moment of television I’d seen all year!

-I went to see an XFL game at Giants Stadium a couple of weeks ago.  Although the game was pretty cool, it’s nothing like you see on TV.  On TV, the people in the stands are two-fisting beers like they’re giving them out for free.  In reality, I almost got tossed in the first quarter for smuggling a case of Natty Light into the stadium.  On TV, the cheerleaders are half-naked and practically groping the fans.  In reality, the cheerleaders were about half a mile away and wrapped in long trench coats since it was about ten degrees outside.  On TV, the teams fucking suck and the action is just about at a middle school level.  In reality, well, actually, that part is pretty much true.

-This kid in one of my classes was telling me that last year he had a pretty steady girlfriend.  One day, this guy is just fucking around on the Internet and searches for his girlfriend’s name.  Turns out she has a personal homepage.  What’s on it?  Pictures of her other boyfriend from home!  Oops…

-Why do girls who deactivate from their sorority act like they were never in a sorority to begin with?  I’ll be like, “Oh, I just saw some of your pledges.”  And the girl will say, “I’m not in a sorority.”  Damn it, you know what the fuck I’m talking about!  Just remember girls, once a sorority chick, always a sorority chick.  There’s no going back!

-And, finally, I recently saw the Michael Jordan IMAX movie.  What a bunch of garbage.  It’s got this whole dramatic narration where Laurence Fishburne is like, “Michael Jordan was not afraid to win.”  I don’t get it.  Who the fuck is afraid to win?  Have you ever been afraid to win?  Because I certainly haven’t.  The only thing I’m afraid of is that I just wasted ten bucks!  Fuck me.

HOME

-Well, this is it, my last semester of college.  Where did the time go?  It seems like only yesterday I was a lowly freshman trying to figure out how to do my laundry, getting lost on campus, and drinking way too much.  Now, well, at least I figured out how to do my laundry!

-So I noticed they started selling the energy drink Red Bull at the commissary at school.  Here at Penn, when you buy stuff at the commissary, you put it on your school ID card and the bill goes right to your parents.  Considering I’ve never seen anyone drink a Red Bull without at least three shots of vodka in it, this is just another example of the university supporting students’ drinking habits.

-Last semester there was a black tie, open bar event at school.  Everyone was getting wasted.  One of my friends had a little too much and decided he needed to take a break, so he sat down in a bathroom stall.  He then proceeded to pass out completely.  At 4am, when everyone was long gone, the janitor found him, in his tuxedo, still passed out on the toilet.  He had to wake him up, carry him outside, and throw him in a cab.  The moral of this story is, if you’re gonna get really fucked up and pass out somewhere, at least do it while dressed well.

-How the fuck are you supposed to register for classes when the course catalogue uses such crazy abbreviations?  The classes are listed as like “Anc. Dem. Hist. Iden. Sem.”  What the fuck is that?

-So there was all this controversy about the presidential election and the so-called butterfly ballot where a bunch of people messed up and voted for the wrong guy.  Everyone was upset about how such a ballot could have been used.  Has anyone used an ATM lately?  The fucking arrows on the screen never point directly to any of the buttons – it’s confusing as hell!  Fuck choosing the president, I want to know if I’m taking out 10 bucks or 10,000 bucks!

-For the most part, winter break was its usual bore.  Shoveling snow was my most exciting activity.  I was thinking, remember in high school when you always complained that there was nothing to do in your town?  You didn’t have a car, you weren’t 21, you had a curfew, it fucking sucked.  So now I have a car, I am 21, I have no curfew and, guess what, there’s still nothing to fucking do.

-As I sat on my ass all break I made a few observations.  How come when you’re splitting the check at dinner there’s always someone who only has twenties?  Why do some people insist on taking the elevator only one floor?  Why does it take bands so long to set up?  Why don’t car stereos have a record button?  I could make the craziest mix tapes if I had that shit!  Does MTV play music videos anymore or just Real World reruns?  And finally, why the fuck does the guy at the counter never cut my sandwich all the way in half?  He always leaves that little piece attached so that you have to pull it apart and ruin the sandwich.  All I’m asking for is a clean cut here.

-Over break, I had a dentist appointment.  I fucking hate going to the dentist with a passion.  He’s always like, “You have some inflammation of your gum line, it looks a little irritated.”  Well it wouldn’t be like that if you didn’t keep fucking poking me with that metal hook!

-Pass/fail is really a fucked up system.  I took this class last semester pass/fail and I couldn’t do poorly no matter how much I tried.  I put as little effort as possible into the assignments, but I kept getting good grades.  I was like, fuck, why didn’t I just take this for a grade?  But it was too late to change it.  So I ended up spending all this time trying to do poorly, just so I wouldn’t feel bad about taking it pass/fail.  What kind of messed up shit is that?

-I need to vent a little bit here about a problem I feel is plaguing my school: the self-fulfilling prophecy of the so-called honors program.  So here’s how it works: before coming to school, a few kids get picked to be in the honors program based on their high school work.  How they do this at a school where every other kid was the valedictorian and got a 1500 on their SATs is beyond me.  Then, they require these kids to take a certain amount of “honors” classes that “regular” kids can’t take.  But, here’s the catch: the honors classes have a special curve – it’s something ridiculous like 75% As, 25% Bs, and nothing below that.  Therefore, all the honors kids have inflated GPAs because their curve is so fucking easy.  So now the school can go, hey, look at our honors kids, their GPAs are so much higher than the regular kids, you see, we knew they were special!  Bullshit!

-I was thinking about publishing a book of all my Ruminations once I graduate.  I figure if you put that shit at the checkout counter of Bed, Bath & Beyond, pre-froshes will snatch it up like hotcakes.  Of course I don’t know shit about putting together a book.  So if you know someone, or know someone who knows someone, and want to help me out, please send me an email!

-Over break I visited my sister at Dartmouth.  (Dartmouth is one of those fucked up trimester schools so they’re at school when everyone else is on break and vice versa.)  Dartmouth can be summed up very briefly.  It’s fucking beautiful, it’s fucking freezing, and there is absolutely nothing to do there except drink excessively.  This last point is demonstrated by their beer pong rules.  At normal schools, pong is typically played with two cups on either side of the table.  But at Dartmouth, they play with like twenty cups on each side, so now matter where you hit the ball, its hits a cup and you have to drink.  Needless to say, after one game I didn’t mind that it was zero degrees outside!

-So it’s time for Rush again at Penn.  Man I love Rush, its one of my favorite times of the year.  Over break, as I was sitting home watching TV because, of course, there’s nothing else to do, I was thinking that Rush is a little like one of those animal shows on the Discovery Channel.  Observe the freshman rushes.  The female species wears black pants as camouflage so as not to draw any extra attention to themselves.  But the sorority girls tag each of them with little stickers with their names on them so they can’t get away.  Whoever doesn’t show any individuality gets in.  With the male species, it’s a little different.  The frat guys observe from a distance as the freshmen are thrown into a frenzied environment of wings, beer, and strippers.  Whoever doesn’t piss anyone off gets in.  Talk about your Animal House!

-Speaking of Greek life, here’s the Quote of the Month.  Last semester, a kid in one of my classes raised his hand and asked the teacher if there were any old tests or papers from the class available to study from.  The professor replied, “Well, I don’t know, are you in fraternity?”  This was of course referencing the infamous “test banks” that many fraternities maintain, but I think I was the only one in the room who got the joke.

-I’ve noticed that my years of college have allowed me to fine-tune my vomit reflex.  Freshman year I used to take that one shot too many and just boot right on the spot.  Now I can hold it in until I can scope out a bathroom, aim strategically, and let it rip.  It’s a pretty handy skill.

-As a wise, old senior, I have some scheduling advice for those younger than me.  You know that really great class that you’ve always wanted to take but that is only offered at 9am?  Don’t take it, its not worth it, you’ll end up sleeping through every class anyway.  Similarly, are you thinking of scheduling all your classes early so that you’ll have the whole day free?  Guess how you’ll spend all that free time: napping.  Why do I have such views?  Because in college you only go to bed at 4am or when you’re wasted, whichever comes first.  I had this friend who needed to get to bed early one night because he had a test the next day, but he couldn’t fall asleep until he chugged three beers first.

-Most people at Penn go abroad first semester so by now all those kids have come home.  You can always tell which people went abroad and where they went because they feel the need to plaster their room with flags, posters, pictures, and other shit from where they went.  Yeah, that’s great buddy, but you’re back in America now and we don’t give a fuck.

-And, finally, when I was at Dartmouth, I was kind of taken aback that all there is to do there is hang out at fraternity houses and play pong.  I figured it must be pretty boring.  Then I was thinking, wait a minute, I go to school in Philadelphia, which has tons of clubs and bars and shit, and what do I do every night?  Hang out at my fraternity house and play pong.  Fuck me.

HOME

-The University of Pennsylvania is very gracious.  A few weeks ago, they gave us Friday off for Fall Break.  Friday?  What kind of bullshit is that?  What college kid has class on Friday?  Next thing you know, Spring Break will be a long weekend.

-Along the same lines, how come after all these years my mom still thinks Sunday through Thursday are school nights?  I’ll be telling my mom about a party I went to, thinking nothing of it, and she’ll be like, “But Aaron, its only Tuesday.”  She doesn’t understand that the only reason a college kid doesn’t go out on a Tuesday is because they’re too hungover from Monday night’s festivities.

-This is something I have always wondered about.  Why does Microsoft Word have all those fonts that are nothing but gibberish?  You know, you’ll be playing around with the fonts, trying to make a fancy cover page instead of actually writing your paper, and you’ll get that font that isn’t letters, just weird symbols and shit.  What the fuck is that?

-Who are those shady kids that wear backpacks to parties?

-Ever notice that the amount of reading you actually do for a class is inversely proportional to the amount that is assigned?  Think about it.  You sit down to do some reading and see only six pages or so are assigned, so you read it all.  But if you see that you have fifty pages to read, you’re like, fuck this, I’m not reading any of this shit!

-How come when you were in high school, your parents said they didn’t care what other kids did?  “But Mom, Brian’s parents let him go out on a school night!”  The response: “I don’t care what Brian does, you’re not going anywhere.”  But in college, it’s reversed.  “Yeah Mom, I’m not sure what I’m gonna do after graduation.”  The response: “Why can’t you get a good job like Brian?”

-Ever realize that you have never actually used speakerphone?  That’s because every time you try to use it, the person on the other end is like, “I can’t hear you, take me off speakerphone!”

-I have been making a lot of road trips lately.  One weekend, I went to visit my friend Seth at Brandeis University.  Brandeis is not really known as a party school.  But the weekend I went there was drunken and awesome.  I even got to see a fight where one kid hit another kid in the head with a chair!  Four days later, I flew out to the University of Michigan.  Now I know I ripped on Michigan a bit in Ruminations #6, but I take it all back.  That place is fucking ridiculous!  I had great timing, too.  Half of the students at UM are from New York and the other half are from Michigan, and I was there the day of the Michigan-Michigan State game and the Subway Series.  Needless to say, everyone was out of their minds.  Oh, and right before I left to fly home, there was a huge fight and someone got hit in the head with a chair.  Road trips, gotta love ‘em!

-Isn’t it strange how kids avoid sitting in the first few rows of a lecture hall?  It’ll be the professor, twelve empty rows, and then the entire rest of the class jammed in the back.  Kids walk in late, see there are no seats in the back, and just leave.

-Ever meet these people that talk about their cars in code?  They’ll be like, “Yeah, I drive a 525i but the other day I saw the new A4 Turbo, which looks just like the VX3 but it’s a little faster than the 750.”  I’m always like, what the fuck are you talking about?

-Why on earth do grilled cheese makers and George Foreman grills have no on/off switch?  Ever use one of these things?  You have to yank it out of the wall to turn it off.  Of all the appliances in the world, the ones most likely to be found in disgusting, beer-soaked dorm rooms and plugged into 4 interlocking surge protectors should definitely have an off switch.

-Quote of the Month.  I was in Penn Station in New York last week and was riding the escalator.  As you go up, an automated voice says, “Escalators are for passengers only.”  What the fuck else can be riding an escalator?

-This one is for all those studying abroad right now.  When traveling in a foreign country, there’s always that kid who thinks he can force others to speak English.  When I was in France my friend would go to the ticket window and be like, “Two round trip tickets, please.”  The dude would say something in French that we couldn’t understand, so my friend would scream back, “Two round trip tickets!!”  Like yelling is going to make him understand English.

-Why do college kids like to brag about how little class they go to?  A typical exchange between a group of students:  “When was the last time you went to class?”  “Oh, I haven’t gone to that shit since the midterm.”  “Oh yeah, well I skipped the midterm, I haven’t been there since the first day.”  “Dude, I’ve never been there.  If all you had to do for the final exam was pick out a picture of the professor, I’d fail!”

-How come the only alarm clock that you can work is your own?  Have you ever been woken up by a roommate’s alarm clock at six in the morning?  You stumble over to his nightstand and try to shut it off, but you try every single button and it won’t stop, so you end up having to yank it out of the wall like a George Foreman grill.

-One of the mysteries that my college is trying to solve to how to get kids to stop drinking themselves into the hospital.  A few weeks ago, I watched some medics put this wasted freshman chick into an ambulance.  As she was being taken away, I heard her cry, “I’ve never even drank before!”  There you have it.  The way to stop this problem is to teach drinking in high school, pure and simple.

-Why do answering machine messages and movie theaters give you so many damn instructions?  “I’m not here right now, please leave your name, number, time that you called, along with a brief message after the tone.”  Oh, is that what this thing is for?  I was wondering what the fuck that beep meant!  Or: “Please do not speak during the movie and deposit your trash in the garbage cans located throughout the theater.”  Thanks for the handy tips, now just start the fucking movie!

-Why do weathermen give so much extra information?  They’re always like, “There is a low pressure system moving in over the Rockies which might result in a drop in the barometer on the East Coast.”  What the fuck?  Is it gonna rain or not?

-And, finally, hey fellow seniors, do you remember when you bought your computer freshman year?  It was so powerful and fast and you could download shit off the Internet in like two seconds.  What the hell happened?  Almost three and a half years later, my fucking computer sucks.  Connecting to the Internet is like slow death and it takes forever to change the fonts in Microsoft Word when I’m trying not to write a paper.  Fuck me!

HOME

-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.

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