I was born without the college gene.
Sometimes, when others realize this, they mistakenly think that I’m impartial to or uninterested in learning. This isn’t the case. I will be the first to admit that I attempted to sit front and center in every one of my classes, especially the ones relating to my major, but would feel so much stress and disdain for then having to go back to my room and spend eight hours writing a paper on a short story we’d been picking apart for the past two weeks.
I was all, c’mon, man. Wasn’t my eagerness enough? What did I say that made you think I wasn’t paying attention to those metaphorical trees? What conclusion should I have reached that I didn’t already enthusiastically throw up my hand to defend forty-seven times?
But even more so, it was the social aspect, something with which I could never fully become comfortable, and Lord knows I tried. I wore glittery tops to several events held in the basements of deteriorating houses. I raised plastic red cups to 23-year-old shirtless men who were turned upside down and sprayed with keg taps. I mastered the throwing technique of a ping pong ball. And the whole time I wished I was sleeping.
I even joined a sorority my sophomore year, figuring that if I was stuck in that town, I might as well do something to distract myself from the fact that there was no escaping the campus. Some of those girls were so effortlessly graceful and beautiful that it made my hair ache, so much so that when I pledged and was introduced to the term mandatory mixer, I didn’t run for the very nearby hills.
But those few girls I became close with were the exception to my bitter awfulness, and when I saw another woman wasted to the point of announcing how those pictures of her up on the bar, practically procreating with a similarly intoxicated human being, would be perfect for her special Facebook profile, I couldn’t help but think the most hateful, malicious things about this person I did not know. My hate would be so strong that it would ruin my evening and send me to bed feeling gross. Thoughts including, but not limited to, her utter drunkenness (I would have more self-control after chugging a 12-pack — does she realize how massively flabby her upper arms are? — she has no business wearing a tank top or continuing to not be hit by a school van) were running through my mind so ceaselessly that I was sure I was very visibly snarling.
Here were these girls, girls who were attending my college, my higher institution of furthering education, acting like Lindsay Lohan pre-lesbian. It took a lot for me to not rip off their 4-inch heels and remind them that they were dancing atop a dirty counter in a town named Slippery Rock LOCATED IN THE PENNSYLVANIA STICKS.
(I eventually threw in the Natty Light-stained towel and transferred to a private school in the city.)
And I know what you’re thinking. So, it’s A-OK for the men to drink and act like idiots? And my only explanation for this is that it’s one of those things I, for some reason, can relate to the general screwiness of the gender, like when the dog drinks from the toilet and even though you know it’s pretty gross and unnecessary because the water dish is sitting right there, you kind of just roll your eyes, say “ew,” laugh for a few seconds, and close the lid.
Either that, or sometime during my relatively traditional upbringing it was instilled in my 5-year-old self that it’s all right if the man has a few too many glasses of red wine, as long as the woman has a buttery batch of pirogies ready before he starts drooling on the couch.
