In the best-case scenario: You’ll have next year all locked up, inane coursework will be a thing of the distant past, you’ll be burning your last few classes on endeavors that intrigue you while also separating your resume from the herd, and you’ll be underloading your classes so as to divide your time between the projects that interest you and the parties that interest you. The only problem, really, is that you’ll feel a little bored, a little trapped, and ready to move on and to move up.
In the worst-case scenario: Your realization that you possess not even a notion of what you will be doing in the future will trouble you nearly as much as your realization that you possess not even a notion of what you want to be doing in the future. To make matters considerably more depressing, you won’t have time to work out the all-important answers to these all-important questions because you’ll be tying up the mind-numbing requirements that you neglected to handle as a drug-addled teenager (lab science, anyone?), and you won’t have anyone willing to do your thinking for you––yes, you’ll have already psyched yourself out of intellectual independence––because you neglected to network, and haven’t gotten any semblance of meaningful work experience on your resume. Not only that, but you’ll be overloading courses to prevent the embarrassment and added cost of having to stay on for another semester, so you won’t even have time to get out and enjoy the glory days of your drinking associates, the established of whom are out partying like rock stars; partying more like brokers-in-training, actually, which they just officially became. They’ll be obtusely rubbing their will-be salaries in your face, which you’ll have grounds to be pissed off about, but they’ll also be obtusely giving you shit every night for not getting out, which you won’t have grounds to be pissed off about, since that’s exactly what you did to them when they were staying in, getting shit done, and setting themselves up for life. You won’t be able to truly enjoy your last few months in fantasyland because you couldn’t or wouldn’t get it together when the slate was clean, the pressure cooker was on “MIN” and there wasn’t yet a need to play catch-up. And when you do finally get out, the experience will be soured, because you’ll be as bitter as the pussy you’ll feel like too much of a deadbeat to even hit on. You’ll flock around all the other half-assed ass-holes and drink yourselves stupider than you normally are, and then you’ll start running your mouth, boring innocent bystanders with would haves, could haves, and should haves. Then you’ll give unfounded, amusingly atrocious advice to your younger drinking associates, each of whom will feign interest, exit stage right at the first opportunity, and lace into you behind your back. You won’t realize that, but you will realize that the opportunity of college was utterly wasted on you, and that you’ve only begun to reap the shitstorm, as you have yet to be shoved off the high-dive of college into the icy waters of the real world that you’ve neglected to prepare yourself to tread, and that you can’t help but assume are going to end up treading you…
Uplifting, no? Enough of a deterrent to keep you from pissing all over your golden ticket?
written by Cole on October 24th, 2008 under The Senioritis Patient
Even if you’re enjoying the luxuries of job security and a resultantly irrelevant GPA, you still won’t be spared from the disconcerting disbelief that you’ll be somewhere completely new doing something completely new in a mere matter of months. You may have noticed that this has caused nostalgia to slip into your tone while milling shit over with your friends, your drinking associates, and even your bang buddy. Like all exciting things, your impending transition can also become extremely stressful. (It’s a quantum-goddamn-leap compared to your high school-to-college transition.) Do what you can to avoid letting this get to you.
My first piece of advice on the salvaging sanity front: by getting decent sleep and a modest amount of exercise, you’ll be as intrinsically optimistic and relaxed as the circumstances could possibly allow. (Oh yeah. Sex works, too.) This mood boom occurs because you’ll be letting off endorphins, the biological equivalent of imbibing morphine––and as anyone who’s ever survived a bayonet stabbing can attest, morphine is some of that good shit.
My second piece of advice is going to sound hokey, especially coming from me, a wannabe philosopher king who’s allocated years of his youth to something as philosophical and majestic as A Frat Boy’s Guide to the 4.0: How to Strap on a Pair of Gender-Ambiguous Balls & Make College Work for You. But I don’t care. It’s good advice, anyway:
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written by Cole on October 23rd, 2008 under The Senioritis Patient
One of the more disturbing things to dawn on you in the coming months: once you graduate, your house will no longer be your house. It will be Mommy and/or Daddy’s house––and you’ll be squatting. This transition can be an exciting state of affairs (“Bachelor pad! Whoo!”), but not if you don’t have the means to create one.
This will require a healthy diet of networking, which should spawn from the contacts you’ve acquired during your internships. Hopefully you won’t be getting started; hopefully you’ll be finished. If you’ve found yourself behind the curve, I have one word for you: Nepotism.
(“Must I repeat myself, Fatha? Please pass the salt, and then the employment as well!”)
As for your GPA, that’s completely set in stone, as it was at least a semester ago. But if you’re insecure about it and find it likely that it’ll hurt your chances of getting where you want to go, then bust your ass during your last semester with the aim of landing a GPA that’s high by anyone’s standards. This way, instead of leaving your GPA off of your resume entirely (standard fare if it’s under a 3.0), which would give your would-be employers convenient cause to conclude that you’re a sub-par scholar beyond repair, you can salvage your scenario by recording your one semester of success––and, since it was your last semester, will be able to preach maturity and whatnot during your interviews.
written by Cole on October 22nd, 2008 under The Senioritis Patient
Your could-be employers will become essential to your sense of wellbeing. You will become a speck on their radar. Just another email. Do what you can to have some accomplishments under your belt when the time comes––to give them a reason to pursue you, and not the other way around. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself an insecure wreck incapable of truly enjoying yourself. It’s not easy to celebrate when you’re worried about your future, and damn near impossible when all there is to toast to are your friends’ accomplishments.
written by Cole on October 20th, 2008 under The Senioritis Patient
“Now your time at college is at an end. Now you are leaving here. And this leads me to a question that just isn’t asked enough at commencements: why are you leaving here?”
––Stephen Colbert
You become a Senioritis Patient when you walk onto campus for your last semester. Outside of finishing up your classes and hustling for a job, there’s not much left in your power during this phase. The opportunity to use your college’s resources to figure out what you want to do and to establish yourself as a candidate of caliber in that field has come and gone––you’ve made your bed and are praying, perhaps for the first time, that you don’t get fucked in it.
No matter how they act and no matter where they stand, every Senioritis Patient is scared shitless in their own way. Scrambling to make up for lost time, the unprepared majority will suffer from senioritis maximus (genuine terror at the thought of losing college and allowance) while the precocious few will be inflicted with senioritis minimus (marginal boredom amidst the juvenile insanity, and mild angst to move the hell on).
The quality of your final semester will be an uncanny reflection of whether or not you handled the tasks that mattered during the previous seven. I’ll give myself the liberty of beating the dozens of people who will be relentlessly hounding you with stressful questions to the punch: this reflection will apply professionally (“Where are you working next year? You do have a job locked up, don’t you? No? Well… You’re still young… Any leads, then?”), and it will apply academically (“Are you graduating on time, at least? Thank heavens! Will you be graduating Phi Beta Kappa? No? Cum Laude? No? Did you write a thesis? No? Did you earn any honors at all? No?”), and it will even apply socially: If you’ve planned ahead and set yourself up with a job and an easy last semester, you’ll have plenty of time to drown your senioritis, chemically or otherwise––and for the first time in college, you won’t really have anything to worry about. If, on the other hand, you’re clueless about what you’ll be doing and are forced to overload on classes just to graduate on time, you may not have time to get out at all––and for the first time in college, you’ll really have everything to worry about.
written by Cole on October 19th, 2008 under The Senioritis Patient
If you end up finding yourself hooked or near-hooked to something you’ve abused around the frat house, it would be profoundly pitiful of you to scapegoat the drug(s). It was you who failed to become adult enough to control your own impulses, and people like you don’t just fall prey to narcotics. You fall prey to just about anything.
The most telling example of unhinged, substance-free escapism is video games, where college-aged kids and even middle-aged adults forego their stressful lives to spend the majority of their waking hours as heroic alter egos in an electronic universe. (“How dare you, Fatha? I am not a video game addict! I am a Level 70 Reality Evader!”) These escape junkies end up working obscene hours to earn fictitious money when they themselves are broke, and getting hitched in virtual relationships when they themselves are alone––or, even more disturbingly, abandoning real life loved ones over in-game e-Lust. Avoid this.
What follows (verbatim) is Testimonial #19,658 from WoWdetox.com, an online support group for World of Warcraft addicts––if you’re half the bastard I am then this will probably be funny to you, but I can promise it’s not a joke:
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written by Cole on October 18th, 2008 under The Functional Shitshow
“Rehab? The first time is a gift; the second time is a bitch.”
––Carrie Fisher
If you find that your relationship with a given drug is of the volatile, love/hate variety, handle it like you should’ve handled your Prom Queen relationship: break things off, stop spending money on it, be jealous when you see other people doing it, accept the pain and grow from it with the aim of not being quite as stupid when you encounter the next lust of your life.
If, on the other hand, you simply want to ensure that your plot never thickens on the addiction front, then pick two weeks out of every six-month interval, and take a break. Some of you probably feel that this suggestion is fundamentally nonsensical (“But brah! College is excess!”), in which case you’d be forgetting that college is about gaining perspective. You’re tempted to criticize the kids who have never experienced anything more than a sugar high on the grounds of having limited perspective––as am I––but here’s the thing: those Capri Sun guzzlers are denying themselves perspective of the alternate universe formally known as intoxication; you, who are unwilling or unable to get off the ride for even short stretches, are denying yourself perspective of the universe formally known as reality.
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written by Cole on October 17th, 2008 under The Functional Shitshow
“I’ve always been the kind of person who, if there’s anything that can kill me, I want to know something about it.”
––Ray Charles
If you’re stupid enough to commit to a drug, the only thing you can be sure of is that it will commit right back. For that reason, it’s essential to know what’s on the table before it’s on the table. This will entail something resembling homework, I guess, but, as mentioned, because you’ve decided that you’re going to be ignorant enough to mess around with dangerous shit, it’s become your responsibility to approach this ignorance in an intelligent and informed way.
(Erowid.org is an unbelievable compendium of objective information on every drug imaginable. [And the only place, in all likelihood, where you could find “Principles of Responsible Cannabis Use” alongside “How to Roll a Joint” and “Eating FAQ.” {Some evidence that the information presented on this site is actually objective: there’s no section on “Principles of Responsible Cocaine Use.”}])
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written by Cole on October 16th, 2008 under The Functional Shitshow
This has got little to do with wearing condoms, and everything to do with avoiding having your face plastered across the country for something that you allegedly did.
As I would hope you know, most women are not whores. As I would also hope you know, whores are not to be trusted. College contains three types of whores: party whores, cheating whores, and lying whores. Party whores are described in conversation much like a tourist trap’s world-famous attraction is described. (“You kiddin’ me? How could you possibly have been to [insert school] and never even gone inside [insert whore]?”) Most people tend to look down on sluts––err, women––like this, but this assessment is unjust because party whores provide no harm and no foul––unless, of course, they give you the gift you can’t return for store credit.
This is much unlike the lying whore, who’s guilty of a foul but decides to harm you instead. But before we delve into that godawful breed, the cheating whore:
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written by Cole on October 15th, 2008 under The Functional Shitshow
(Perpetual Mono-like Symptoms.)
Fortunately, all that a healthy young Shitshow must do to actively avoid P.M.S. is follow the basic tenets of health, which is achieved, most basically, by doing the things that Mommy and/or Daddy nagged you about when you were twelve.
Let’s start with the most patronizing: eat your vitamins. Even in the face of a profoundly sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle, one-a-days will minimize your chances of becoming a sick, fat mess (by jacking up your immune system and metabolism, respectively)––so you can take the initial retort that probably just shot out of your mouth (“Thanks for the input, Mother!”) and wrap it around my average white love bundle.
Same goes for my follow-up:
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written by Cole on October 14th, 2008 under The Functional Shitshow
You might be a Sigma Chi senior in August, but you’ll soon be a freshman in the real world, trying to fit back in with your older superiors. One of the most important steps in defying the frat boy stereotype is conditioning yourself not to think like your average derelict, which will allow you to relate to the many matured ex-degenerates that you’ll be working with and under in the real world.
This hobby doesn’t have to be painstaking or time-consuming (reading the paper every day would be fine), it just needs to stimulate and un-shelter that coddled brain of yours to the extent that you’ll have something to bring to the table outside of your specialty (which you’ll get tired of) and your crème-de-la-riffs about the bafflingly stupid shit that you’re currently doing each night (which will only be appreciated in moderation).
As for how I’ve integrated this advice into my own affairs, I opted to become a stock market dilettante as a junior, which gave me something extra to talk and to think about outside my basic array of social and professional preoccupations. (Oh yeah, and I also tripled my savings in sixteen months [a feat that isn’t as grandiose as it might sound, considering that I threw most of it down on Nintendo six months before the Wii came out. {Sophisticated? No. But can you put a price on well-timed balls?}])
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written by Cole on October 13th, 2008 under The Functional Shitshow
