By living with your classmates 24/7, college affords you an insight you didn't have in high school. For example, you might think some girl who criticizes another's clothes mercilessly is just mean or cruel. She's surely that, but if you see that same girl wearing a ratty bathrobe every day for an entire semester without washing it, while spending whole days in bed and subsisting on Diet Coke and candy bars, you realize something else: She's a loony. I can actually think of two girls from the floor of my dorm alone who fit that description. (Amazingly, I only hooked up with one of them!)

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In my defense, she was really hot. For legal reasons, here's a picture of someone who is not her.

College was the first time I realized that people were walking around with scars I knew nothing about. Injuries and illnesses that shaped everything they did. They weren't making objective decisions of right and wrong as they went through their day. They were acting reflexively to prior pains and current neuroses. Learning that, it got a lot harder to simply call someone a childish jerk who needed to grow up. (Don't worry, I persevered and found a way, ultimately creating a mean-spirited Web series and a caustic Internet column, but you get my point.)

They totally worked at the college level.

To be clear, I'm not talking about hard workers who arguably are the most entitled to their success. I'm talking about crafty little weasels. They end up doing even better than the hard workers, because college is not some test whereby qualified academics recognize true quality the way a psychic reads an aura. It's a machine, like government bureaucracy or your future job. The only thing most people care about is getting it done. You can be that sniveling little busybody whose greatest talent is just getting the 411 on exams, and that, alone, can propel you to greatness. Or take a privileged little student whose only talent in college was instantly memorizing all the names of his fraternity brothers. Do you know where a skill like that will get you?

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He does.

College is no different from the high school that precedes it or the real life that follows: If you want to find the special people, you need to look for them. As an aside, I have to note that, ultimately, the Internet did a better job of fulfilling the promise of college by giving easy access and a worldwide pool for similarly interested people. And much like college, you can do a lot of it without leaving bed.

And there is no shortage of examples. For one, I wish it were only one or two girls at school who had stories about getting date raped, but it seemed like it was at least 25 percent of all women I knew. And in almost none of those cases was there a criminal investigation. That's a lot of rapists walking around in the world, remembering that time they crawled inside that nearly comatose girl with a fond smile.

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Yeah, sorry, I checked, but there are no jokes about date rape.

Or then there was a group of students who took over the administration building during my time at school. Amen! Civil disobedience! It's admirable having convictions so strong that you're willing to break laws and get arrested to bring attention to your struggle. Except these particular students agreed to leave the building they occupied only on the condition that their criminal trespass would not go on their records. And you thought only kids today could stage a crappy protest!

Oh, and then there was the student newspaper that, in a fundamentally flawed misunderstanding of the First Amendment, printed a full-page advertisement by a neo-Nazi claiming that the Holocaust had never happened. Oh, they also ran a teaser on the front page pointing to an editorial about why as journalists they had to run it. This was the same newspaper that wouldn't run an ad in the personals if they thought it would be offensive to one person. Can you believe a bunch of Ivy League journalism majors thought that there was somehow a constitutional right in this country to have a newspaper print any ad you wanted to run? They seriously claimed that. That would be like me insisting that the Constitution forced Cracked to run an ad where I explain in detail how Seanbaby is an impotent meth head. (Just kidding, Sean. I'd never pay for an ad.)

Of course, there is no such constitutional right. And of course, the president of the university wrote a letter in response to the outrage, saying ... he understood the constitutional concerns that prompted the paper's actions. Proof that you can be a genius at a venerable institution and still have no idea what you're talking about.

So college was a good way to prepare for life. It showed me that having expectations is the first step in being disappointed. There are no magical places filled with envisioned friends you've created with your mind. There are only people. And some of them will behave as badly as anything you've seen or will see. They might suffer the consequences of their failings and transgressions, or they might not, because those in power are just as flawed.

That was a lot for me to accept at 18. It's a lot for me to accept now. But it's good to know, and there is a bright spot when it comes to people: There are an awful lot of them. Good, bad, sane, crazy, boring, bland, exciting, sophisticated, dull and brilliant. The older you get, the more control you have over which ones fill your life. And the older you get, the less you keep looking for some concept of authority to set things right. You either become that sniveling kid who thinks he's smart because he's figured he can game the system without consequence, or you do things for you in your way, knowing that it might be the only reward.

Speaking of college, the new HBN is about college! And boobs! Yep, watch the new episode of HATE BY NUMBERS. Also follow Gladstone on Twitter and stay up-to-date on the latest regarding Notes from the Internet Apocalypse. And then there's his website and Tumblr, too.

For more from Gladstone, check out 5 Things I Learned by Quitting the Internet and The 5 Most Overused Jokes On the Internet.