LSD: You too will become a user. You can't avoid it. It's everywhere. No, I'm not talking about drugs. LSD stands for Little Stupid Desk. ...Those flip-out things that seem so neat when you're on a grade school field trip, but you now realize are far too small to serve any purpose but prevent people from walking past that seat to get to an empty seat in the middle of the row.
Pizza, pizza, everywhere, but not a slice to eat. Every pizza place within a ten-mile radius will give you a million coupons for pizza, secure in their knowledge that even at their kindly reduced price you still can't afford it. The dining halls often offer pizza as well, secure in their knowledge that only the most desperate of students will eat it.
College is a place to form new friendships. Caffeine is a friend to all. Students have found that in the proper (translation: high) doses, caffeine and sugar can produce a definite--and completely legal--high.
Financial habits are developed. It's been said that college students will eat anything that's free. In truth, they'll eat anything that didn't come from a dining hall, it just helps if it's free. They'll also wear anything cheap, especially "free" T-shirts, even if they have to sign up for a credit card to get them.
Popularity is now based on different characteristics. The snotty people with the best clothes are no longer necessarily the ones everyone wants to be around. Here, the people who you want to hang out with are the ones with the most comfortable furniture and the best stereo or entertainment center in their room.
The diversity is striking. Just walking down to the bathroom, you may hear room after room blasting music, but no two rooms the same. A sample selection: Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me," Neil Diamond's "Cracklin' Rosie," Garth Brooks's "Rodeo," something by Bach, "House of the Rising Sun," the new single from Hootie and the Blowfish, and the music from the movie Titanic.
Less emphasis is placed on personal appearance. When you can't even step outside your room on your way to the bathroom in the morning in your pajamas to brush your teeth without finding yourself surrounded by people--usually even in mixed company--you realize that if everyone's already seen you like that, only a minimal effort is needed to make you look comparatively radiant.
Growth is evident in those leaving the nest. For many, this is the first time they haven't had a mother coming in on a regular basis to nag them into cleaning their room. This is particularly evident on the men's floors of the residence halls. You can tell the boys who can't run a washing machine by the growth of various biological entities on the clothes they've kept wadded up on the floor and worn too many times.
When you live in close quarters, you share everything. Roommates and neighbors share everything from cookies Mom sent to homework tips to personal details (sometimes unintentionally) to favorite videos, and that's not all. When one person gets sick, the whole neighborhood (floor) gets sick too.
There is safety in numbers. That clingy guy you made the mistake of meeting in the computer lab one afternoon is a lot less likely to follow you around if you're with six other people. Also, one person not using the crosswalk is a lot more likely to be run over than a group. They're more visible and have more insurance.
You learn which of your acquired skills are truly useful. Years of hard work in math classes all through high school? Worthless. They don't do things the same way here. Years of playing Frogger on the Atari or Apple IIC? Priceless. Now you can judge when to cross the street.
A good dictionary will come in handy. It would be advisable to look up at least a few of those words in your reading assignment that you've never seen before, but even more importantly, you'll want to look up some of those everyday words for which you've forgotten the meanings. Here are a few examples: Sleep. Silence. Solitude.
Erin Paseka, September 1998
Warning: include(/VirtualHosts/www.plghetto.org/unl/2000plg/bottom.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/local/apache2/virtualhosts/www.plghetto.org/unl/arch/inevit.php on line 33
Warning: include(): Failed opening '/VirtualHosts/www.plghetto.org/unl/2000plg/bottom.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /usr/local/apache2/virtualhosts/www.plghetto.org/unl/arch/inevit.php on line 33