sofar-gone asked: thanks for answering my question, I really appreciate it!
What college do you go to right now?

No problem! I hope my advice helped in some small way. :)

I’m now attending [name redacted]. I just transferred here from [name redacted], which is considerably smaller and much cheaper. I was in kind of a similar situation to your’s, because I was agonizing over whether I should transfer or not, mostly due to the extra money I’d have to pay. But if you don’t take that risk, you’ll probably spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been.

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Date: April 1, 2010
File under: Q and A college

On Grad Student Housing.

In my last post, I mentioned that my college is on spring break this week, but that I’m sticking around the campus area instead of going home. Since writing about the joys of an empty library, I have experienced very little over this break, and have fallen into boredom and, ultimately, despair, as I languish around an empty college campus day after day. Today has been the first day here of weather above 50 degrees since October, so I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to venture out farther into the periphery of campus and explore areas I’ve never seen before. Of course, despite it being a beautiful 77 degrees outside, I opted to ride the campus bus. I did this because I wanted to see the fabled graduate student housing complex located at the very edge of campus, which would easily take an hour to walk to from the other side of campus.

I had heard stories of the apartments (kitchens starting on fire, etc.) from the TAs I have who live there, and for some reason the prospect of actually going there and seeing it first hand made me giddy, as though it were a magical, mythical sort-of place. The bus went past all of the obscure science buildings - Animal Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, etc. - and some administrative office buildings, to signal that we were no longer in “campus proper.” Our entire campus borders a lake, so the drive was actually quite beautiful and picturesque on this uncharacteristically nice day in March. Fifteen minutes and countless stops later, the bus was entering the housing complex. I also observed that the bus - which was empty when I got on and the start of the route - was now packed full, and I also observed that I was the only white guy on it. This was a welcomed cultural experience (that totally makes me sound like a sheltered white kid from suburbia), and I had the opportunity to practice my listening comprehension skills in the foreign language I primarily study. Often times on the campus bus I overhear xenophobic students complaining about their foreign TAs and professors. I can only imagine how livid they would be were they on the bus on this particular day.

The apartment buildings themselves were very quaint and low-key; not high-scale, but not unkempt either. They were, in a way, very unpretentious, hiding the intellect and determination contained within. I actually didn’t see many people outside, which disappointed me. I imagined groups of intellectuals grilling out and swapping hypotheses with each other. Instead, I saw a lot of children running around and playing with each other. I think it would be kind of weird to grow up as a child in this community, which was both isolated from the “outside world” (the entire complex was basically on a peninsula surrounded by the lake) and filled with adults who homogeneously shared a profession (student, teacher, or sometimes both). There was also a “community garden,” which suspiciously looked more so like a landfill than any sort of garden I’ve ever seen.

As you can tell, it’s been a slow “news week.” Hopefully when school resumes somebody will do something that pisses me off so I can vent about it here, being the passive-aggressive individual that I am.

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Date: March 31, 2010
File under: college

On The Library (During Spring Break).

This year is the first time in my college career that I am staying in my school’s city over a break, specifically Spring Break. There is no particular reason or incentive for doing this, but my dad is in Mexico on vacation at the moment and I have an apartment here, so why the hell not, right? Today I decided on a whim to visit the main university library to scope out how many other people are sticking around and do some leisure reading there. Yes, I visit the library for fun. I get it, I’m a nerd.

Be that as it may, this particular library is usually - nay, always - packed to capacity during the semester with students who are diligently working, students who are pretending to be diligently working, and students who are unashamedly on their laptops just playing Farmville. This is a reality I found difficult to adjust to after being at a small university where hardly anyone ever studied in the library (meaning that if you were at the library, you could always find a great unoccupied study space). Because it can be difficult to find an open table, my friends and I tend to tackle the situation with a slight degree of stealth and deception.

The first person to arrive at the library for the evening does some reconnaissance work to find a table in a good location being occupied by only one person. They go up to that person and ask if they can sit at the table, acting as if they will be alone the entire time. Then the next person comes to the library after getting a text message from the first person with instructions on how to find the table in question, and pretends they weren’t expecting to see the first person there (i.e., “what a coincidence meeting you here”, etc.). After this, the power balance of the table’s ownership shifts to us, since we now have two people sitting at the table, whereas the other person who was there first is alone. Gradually, everyone else in our entourage who was planning to study in the library that evening shows up, until the table is occupied entirely by us.

But I digress. Walking through this library during the middle of the day during a school break was almost creepy in a way, like being in one of the episodes of The Twilight Zone where the protagonist is wondering through a desolate landscape. I first ventured up to the second floor and sat down by the giant windows that look out towards the lake (a table by the window is prime “real estate” when the library is crowded). I read a little bit of my book, but found it hard to concentrate, as the only other people on the floor were a couple of girls who were talking rather loudly. Fair enough, I thought, since this was the “open” study area where people could normally talk as loud as they wanted. I headed for the second floor study room that was designated as “quiet.” Again, I sat down by the windows so I could look out upon the recently-thawed lake with reverence. There were a few people sitting by themselves at different tables, all right next to the windows (see, what did I say about prime real estate?), and almost everyone was respecting the rules of the quiet study room, which is to say, they were being quiet. Except for the guy sitting right behind me. About five minutes after I sat down and opened my book, he began mumbling to himself while looking at some flashcards.

You know those hypothetical calculations people do that show the percentages of how much of each ethnicity, sex, etc. there would be if the world’s total population was reduced to 100? I have a feeling if the same math was applied to the library population, say, if there were only ten people in the library, nine out of ten would be considerate of the people around them while they studied. The tenth person is an asshole who doesn’t show any concern for those around him or her, and so they blast the music running through their earphones, yell at their friends across the room, or just whisper to themselves in a room where even the faintest sound is deafening, like this guy was. Am I overreacting? Maybe so, but I feel that the point of a university library is to be able to study without any distractions whatsoever. Because I’m passive-aggressive, though, I simply packed up my things for the second time and headed for the third floor quiet study room, where I finally found the peace and quiet I was looking for.

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Date: March 28, 2010
File under: college library

On Chipotle.

As a college student in the 21st century, it dawned on me that my contemporary college experience would be remiss without at least one visit to the local Chipotle restaurant, a staple franchise of college towns all across the United States. In my high school days, my friends and I would frequent (and I mean, really frequent) our town’s Taco Bell, because…well, it was cheap, and we had little else to do. Consequently, almost all of our stories from high school start or end at Taco Bell. Since high school, however, I have laid off of the Mexican fast food, mostly because it’s never been very appealing to my palate. I haven’t even found a Taco Bell outside of my hometown that I enjoy eating at.

Having said that, I will eat pretty much anything, and I am always up for new experiences, regardless of how many times in the past I’ve tried “something different” at a restaurant and come away disappointed. So, I enlisted the help of a friend who was a Chipotle veteran to embark upon my quest to this well-revered and much discussed home of burritos. Chipotle’s main competition, at least in the city where our college is, is Qdoba, and for my money, I can’t really tell the two apart. They both seem like quasi-upscale establishments that charge twice the reasonable amount for glorified bastardizations of Mexican cuisine. I decided to be open-minded, however, and I forked over $8 (!) for a two-pound burrito and fountain drink. Mind you, I could get a feast that would feed an entire family for $8 at Taco Bell. I wanted guacamole in my burrito, but they told me that would be extra, so I passed on it. I ended up getting a barbacoa burrito on the recommendation of a podcast where the hosts were discussing their affection for Chipotle, and in truth, it was pretty delicious.

Having not eaten anything all day prior to visiting Chipotle, I was easily able to put away the entire burrito, which I’ve heard is not an easy feat. We gathered our belongings and headed off to the library, wherein, upon arrival, I immediately felt my stomach begging me to purge it of its contents, which I did (that wording makes it sound like I have an eating disorder, but no worries, this was done through the “natural” process). I felt better…for a while. Then I had to use the bathroom again. And again. Even when I woke up the next day having not eaten anything else since visiting Chipotle, it felt like anything in my body that was not a vital organ or blood was making a hasty escape for the outside world via my stool. Indeed, Chipotle is a fierce enemy of the intestinal tract. I feel lucky to have escaped this culinary experience intact without any sort of internal hemorrhaging. It really was that bad. Contemplating this, I have decided to avoid Chipotle for the near future, as well as Qdoba for good measure.

How all of the 90 lb. girls with fake tans on campus can eat this stuff every day remains a mystery to me.

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Date: March 27, 2010
File under: food near-death experience slightly sexist the college experience college

On Girls Who Learn Foreign Languages.

Since transferring from a small state school to a substantially larger state school, I have had a long-standing suspicion of mine confirmed. My new school is big enough to necessitate having an entire building dedicated to housing all of the school’s foreign languages departments, and within this building there is a disturbingly disproprtional hot-chick-to-non-hot-chick ratio. Well, maybe “disturbing” isn’t the right adjective, because this is a great fringe benefit for those who, like me, are studying the liberal arts at college. You won’t find this much attractiveness in one place in the engineering or computer science buildings, that much is certain.

But there is something about this natural phenomenon that is slightly disconcerting, and that is that the French classes do not attract the attractive among us. What the hell is up with that? Haven’t us Americans always been taught to believe the positive stereotype that French chicks are all amazingly hot? French is, after all, the so-called “language of love,” and love is obviously equivalent with shallow skin-deep attraction.

Of course, it’s not always sunshine and green grass; sometimes girls manage to shatter the illusion of their own attractiveness. Case in point: the girl who was standing out in the hallway repeatedly saying “¿Cómo estás?” and “Chimichangassss!” as if they were punchlines. It was cute the first time…but by the literal ninth time you repeated yourself, you were beating a dead horse and digging yourself a hole.

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Date: March 24, 2010
File under: girls liberal arts slightly sexist college