5

People Are Less Good/Bad and More Sane/Insane

I used to think the world was divided into good and bad people. Things were black and white. As I got older, I acquired a deeper appreciation for shades of gray, but that's not the point of this entry. College taught me that before I could judge good and evil, there was a more basic inquiry that needed to be addressed: Is this person batshit insane?

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!)

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

4

Weasels Succeed

There's always that guy in high school who is just smarter than everyone else. He doesn't need the teacher. You put exams in front of him and they'll come back with 100s every time. And then there's that other kid who sits in the front row and raises his hand a lot. He constantly asks, "Will this be on the test?" and then he gets a copy of an old exam from his brother's best friend's sister to prep. That kid gets 100s all the time, too. I didn't mind getting inferior grades to the smart guy, but the other kid always pissed me off. I was pretty sure his grab-ass, bullshit games wouldn't work at the college level.

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?

Getty
He does.

3

Everyone's Still a Cultural Philistine

One of my biggest expectations for college was meeting people who shared my passions for comedy and films and music. I mean, college radio was where the cool stuff got played, right? Student filmmakers and college cinemas flourished on every campus. I thought that once people hit college, they magically became more sophisticated.

Well, there was a college radio station and student cinema aficionados at my school. There were freaks and artists, but here's the thing I didn't realize: The people who see the demanding movies and want to talk about them, the people who search for obscure music and study the nuance of the classics, will always be in the minority. They're the freaker artistic fringe. College, like most of society, is filled with bland people whose favorite author is John Grisham, favorite movie is Forrest Gump and favorite band is the Spin Doctors. (That's the '90s version of being obvious and boring. Today it would be, oh, I don't know, Stephenie Meyer, Love Actually, and Coldplay.)

I went to college at the height of grunge, but the best way to get an audience (and women) was to play really bad, extended jam hippie funk or join (God save us all) an a cappella group. Yes, just like Andy Bernard on The Office. I can't tell you how absolutely spot-on that character is. My campus was flooded with guys just like that. But no one except me and my freaker friends called them tools. And we did. Over and over. And it was fun. But most people didn't, because most people were just like them, minus the ability to sing three-part harmony to Billy Joel songs while smiling.

Getty
In hell, these guys perform all your favorite songs.

2

Girls Are Just as Stupid as Boys

I'm not sure why, but I think I grew up putting women on a pedestal. Maybe it's because I was close with my mother or because society tells you that girls mature faster than boys. On TV, I saw an awful lot of jerk guys being mean to sensitive girls. Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie was one of the few mean girls I knew.

Today, you might enjoy her performance as King Joffrey on Game of Thrones.

1

Not All Actions Have Consequences

College was the first place I ever saw people getting away with stuff. Important stuff. In high school, the kids who stole an exam usually got caught. When the principal's car was vandalized, someone ended up suspended. And even when people did get away with being jerks, somewhere in the back of my naive little mind was the notion that the universe would not abide such behavior from an adult. But college showed me that not all actions have consequences.

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.

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