Home, Sweet Home

At last, I have arrived. I have been caught in a sort of limbo since last May; no longer a high school student, not yet at college, not really a productive member of either the professional or the social world of adulthood, I have been the ultimate child bachelor. My needs have been provided for by my parents, I have worked to keep myself busy, and for the most part I've spent my time vacillating between being lonely and being really happy to be left alone. And now I'm finally here. I've broken out of the bizarre sort of Purgatory that came of my forced leave of absence from the academic world, and I've finally made it to college.

I did my best to come into college without preconceived notions or prejudices, but I couldn't help but pick up a few. Just kidding. I had, from listening to and visiting my friends already at college (and a few people at Middlebury in particular), developed a pretty clear picture of college as a sort of intellectual Utopia. I believed quite firmly that colleges were populated exclusively by groovy and intelligent people who love nothing more than a good meaty conversation about politics or history or the subtle nuances of language. I knew that there would be alcohol, drugs and sex being enjoyed in extreme quantities all around me, but I was assured that there would be plenty of social opportunity for a straight-laced boy like me. Oh, how I wish the first sentence of this paragraph were true.

Let me give you a quick run-down of what I learned about my new home during orientation:

I can get free condoms from my RA, CRA, JCRA, MOAB and SUV, or from my dean, or from the health center. Any one of these places can offer me a wide selection of colors, sizes, styles and even flavors. That's right, my college will give me free flavored condoms. And, on the off chance that somebody is overcome by the desire to "make the pointy meet the mushy" and can't stand to find a free condom before they jump one another's bones, the female can just go to the health center afterwards and get a free morning-after pill.

The new Atwater Dining Hall on campus boasts the largest window in the state of Vermont. Don't even pretend that you're not jealous.

The college buys alcohol for the students. The college buys booze for the host of the party, you tell the host of the party that you are underage, and the host puts a black "X" ON your hand and a cup of beer IN your hand.

The only way an underage drinker can get in trouble for, well, being an underage drinker, is if Public Safety catches him or her with an open container in his or her hand. That means that I, as a hypothetical (and, I assure you, ONLY hypothetical) underage drinker, could be caught sitting in front of a table strewn with empty and half-empty alcohol containers with my name written on them, obviously inebriated and drenched in beer, with a sealed bottle of Hennessy in one hand and a sealed bottle of Absinthe in the other?.and I would get off Scot-free. I could fill every remaining space in my room, with full, sealed bottles of grain alcohol?.and the school wouldn't be able to do a darn thing to me. They wouldn't even be able to make me get rid of the stuff.

What happens if I manage to get caught by public safety in the act of pounding a bottle of Jagermeister? Well, I would get a citation and have a meeting with my dean, at which nothing at all would happen. It would take THREE citations before my parents even found out about my boozification, and a whopping five before any sort of disciplinary action more serious than a meeting was taken.

I have no objection to such freedoms. People should live as they want to live, as long as it doesn't infringe upon my basic human rights to be able to pretend that everybody around me is sober and virginal and to have friends that do something other than drink, smoke or screw. Sadly, however, such individuals don't seem to exist. Or rather, the people that share my interests are all either drinkers or smokers-just about everybody on campus is a fornicator, but such misbehavior is usually easier to ignore than habitual self-medication.

I am now going to give up on this submission, for it is not funny and too long already. I shall put up more funny?..sometime.

Required Reading (because I know you missed it)
Scary-Go-Round Oh webcomics, what would I do without ye?

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