100 Things that Four Years of College will Teach You

How to build a beer bong. • Marijuana will not lead to heroin, but it might make you temporarily stupid, cause you to drop out and lead you into a job that makes heroin look like a decent way of escape. • The most interesting person on campus is the woman cleaning the men's room. • Skittles and Mountain Dew will enable you to write three essays in one night. • You can make a grilled-cheese sandwich with an iron. • Professors really don't care. • English literature. • Professors really do care. • You can't overgeneralize. • Speed is a three-days-on, one-day-off proposition. • Naked Jacuzzi parties with 70-year-old professors are not a good thing. • Postmodernism is a bunch of crap. • But not as crappy as most of the other explanations for human society. • Hitler was bad. • Never schedule classes before 8 a.m. • Or after Thursday afternoon. • French philosophers wouldn't know reality if it slapped them in the face. • Except Descartes. • And Foucault. • Oh, and Camus and Sartre. • Academic life is savage because the stakes are so low. • Schools make much of their money on books and parking. • Four years of college is actually five. • How to pronounce "Goethe." • You are the author of all the events and circumstances around you. • How to avoid eye contact. • Ramen is your friend. • Happy Hour lasts much longer than an hour. • Philosophy majors are doofuses. • Nietszche died in an insane asylum. • Marx really understood capitalism, but he still couldn't describe a socialist society you'd want to live in. • Never do more than two Jell-O shots. • When you hit 40, you'll wish you could go to college. • Journalism school will eat your brain; business school will eat your soul. • For a wide range of economic, geographic and social reasons, Germans have been cranky for much of this century. • English professors are wannabes. • Writing laws is like cutting off the heads of a hydra. • Moby Dick is better than almost anything on television. • Birkenstock is German for "hairy-toed." • The CEOs of most major corporations were liberal-arts majors. • Studying abroad is the best year you'll have in college. • Studying abroad for a year will delay your graduation another year. • Friedrich Schleiermacher knew more than the Reverend Robert Schuller about God. • It takes several bottles of cherry-flavored Chloraseptic to remove 3-foot-high letters that spell out "Free James Brown" from your dorm-room window. • People who join fraternities and sororities at Cal State Long Beach or Fullerton are clueless losers. • Strike Cal State Long Beach or Fullerton. • The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that we can know the position or the speed of a particle, but not both. • Community college can wipe away a whole host of sins. • Life is hell. Geology class is just a subset. • If you fall asleep in the library during finals week and dream you are playing basketball, when you leap up for a jump ball, you will scare many people sitting at your table. • Never ride through campus sitting on the back of a convertible with a cheerleader. • If you do, don't fall out. • If you do fall out, make sure the cheerleader lands on the bottom. • If you fall asleep at a library table, you should always check for drool before lifting your head. • Student diversity is a waste of time if you don't have at least one friend who is terrifyingly unlike you. • Bomb threats can be good things if they get you out of a midterm. • Student activists stopped getting laid in 1969. • Most students are Republicans, but they'll grow up. • Cologne and a ball cap are swell substitutes for a morning shower when you wake up five minutes before an 8 a.m. class. • Morality is frequently based on practicality—e.g., "cleanliness is next to godliness" means that bathing daily will allow you to enjoy the company of your fellows. • Coffee doesn't sober. • Men can begin to go bald at 18. • A little cologne goes a long way, but not far enough to cover up the smell of sweat on polyester. • Being a resident adviser means free room and board and cleaning up vomit after parties. • Vomit works like a hair gel, but it rarely smells as nice. • What a truism Blue Velvet villain Frank Booth's declaration "I'll fuck anything that moves" is. • You can turn off your television throughout graduate school and need to know just one thing: David Hasselhoff. • How terrifying it is to discover that you have fucked something merely because it moved. • Most of Planet of the Apes was filmed at UC Irvine. • Don't punch cement walls. • Don't kick glass doors. • Don't try Scottish-style head-butts in a bar fight. • If you hit someone with the fat end of a pool stick, you'll be left holding the small end. • Some of Bullwinkle was filmed at Chapman University. • Credit cards are a welcome mat at the entrance of hell. • How difficult it is as a freshman living in the dorms to eat the minimum 10 meals per week on your required dining-hall card. • How easy it is as a penniless senior living off campus to shamelessly sneak into the same dining hall whenever possible. • How easy it is for you and your three roommates to adjust to having one working shower and one working toilet in an apartment with two bathrooms. • The 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. job at a dorm desk leads directly to great stories in the school paper. • Do not throw pumpkins or flaming couches off rooftops. • How to play dumb when guys with badges show up at your doorstep asking questions about your roommate. • How to play REALLY dumb when guys show up at your doorstep asking questions about their underage daughters and your roommate. • Professors have seen most of the "research" articles you can buy in the backs of student-life publications. • In fact, they wrote some of them. • When they were undergrads. • The guy who looks like he'll become a stalker already is. • Combining the last ingredients left in your kitchen—like margarine, lasagna noodles, a can of peeled tomatoes, three-week-old hamburger meat and the cheese from a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese—does not make a delicious, economical or even edible meal. • Man CAN live on beer alone. • Trying to survive on a diet of Saltine crackers and an industrial-sized can of jalapeño peppers swiped from a Los Angeles County Fair booth will come back to bite you in the ass—literally. • If a lab-science professor wants students taking his class pass/fail to actually study, it's not a good idea to begin the semester by telling them they'll get a passing grade if they just show up. • Man CAN live on free happy-hour food alone. • The general-ed degree you received after three years at Saddleback College and four more at Cal State Fullerton won't get you into Yale Law School. • German teachers get real pissy when they find out a previous owner filled in all the answers in the textbook you bought used. • Most people understand nothing because they understand everything too soon. • All those grants and scholarships you got to attend a private university only pay for the first year. • You'll be repaying the loans you took out to pay for the other three years at a private university until you're well into your 30s. • Lots of pot does NOT help you before a biology midterm. • Lots of hallucinogens does NOT help before ANY midterm. • Working your way through college is a lot easier if you have a job. • The fish in aquariums at a sorority party do NOT like beer. • Dates get pissed off when you ask them if you can borrow some money after the dinner check arrives. • The store that cashes your check with no questions asked may be a front for the best card game in town. • Dates get REALLY pissed off when you ask them to get out and push your car after it runs out of gas after having made them pitch in for dinner. • Schools are designed to train you for industry, and American industry is about the production of desire. • Greeks may want no freaks, but they get 'em all anyway. • Bachelor pads that smell like Chino are a big turnoff. • Having sex while your roommate is sleeping in the next bed is an even bigger turnoff. • Telling your poli-sci professor he doesn't know shit BEFORE you get your final grades is not a good idea. • It's funny to joke about a class like the "The Symbology of LA Punk, 1978-1982," until you take it—and flunk.