• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Morningside Heights = Wormhole
• First Year Friendships are for Fakies
• Stupid Shit Last Year's Frosh Did
• Letters to and from the Feditrix
• Meet Columbia's Least Employable Grads
• Drunken Email: Sloshed Slacker Salvation
• A Well-Engineered SEAS Survival Guide
• Engineers Get Jobs, But never Blowjobs
• Thirty Things to Do Before you Graduate
• Tips for Keeping Your Room Tidy and Your Roommate Pissed Off
• Pass that Class with Your Hot Ass
• Attack of the Killer Barnard Blowjob
• Apathy is for Jerks, Imperialism is for Turks
• Student Spends Summer Choking Chickens
• Columbia is Folsom Prison All Over Again
• Get Laid Quick, or your Genitals will Melt
• CUicide: A Proud Tradition

Your parents may have told you that college is "such an exciting opportunity!" or that it will be "the most important time of your life!" Your dad may have told you that his college experience was just so extraordinarily amazing and wonderful and groovy (the booze, the hookups, the hard drugs, the booze) that it makes him really only wish that he could remember more of it. Your mom may have said the Ivy League would be like Disney World for a snotty spoiled eighteen year old like you. But I bet your mom didn't tell you that college is just like prison —hardcore, don't-drop-your-soap, maximum-security, HBO-mini-series, unimaginable-sodomal-savagery prison. And that's because your mom's a wuss who ain't never ever even been to the big house. Snap, yo.

Chances are, you really don't know that much about prison either. Neither do I. But there was this kid at my bus stop in middle school who always wore really baggy pants and orange, low-cut v-neck shirts and said his cousin was in jail. Nobody really believed him, but he said it a lot, so I always figured that the guy had at least seen the prison movies on TV that my parents wouldn't let me watch. The only prison movie I'd ever seen was Cool Hand Luke, from which I had learned Important Lessons Number One and Two about prison: it is filled with (1) horrifying Deep South drawls and (2) smelly, putrid, rancid rain of man sweat. And that kid at the bus stop said his "cousin" told him that the rooms in prison are small and you don't get your own TV. That's Important Lesson Number Three.

Now compare those to the lessons a typical freshman learns about their dorm during Orientation week. See any coincidences? Also notice that everybody here listens to either Snoop Dogg or The Grateful Dead or both. The security officers are quick to show sharpness in their tempers and sheer brutality in their violence. A gang culture emerges almost immediately. There is a vomit stain on your shower curtain that is both post-modernly surreal in its starkness and unremittingly fierce in its odor.

Your room may have an overcrowding problem that verges on infestation. There may be excrement and semen on the walls. You may never be able to take a dump in privacy. Your roommate's personal hygiene may leave much to be desired. There may or may not be conjugal visits. You bought a pair of chinos just to watch them fly.

Either that, or you could be stuck in solitary, Guantanamo Bay-, Camp X-Ray all the way! Maybe if you're lucky somebody will come approximately once a week to take you out, blindfolded, to kick a soccer ball around for precisely fifteen minutes.

Early on, when I first entered this world of suffering, the Fed Orientation issue was my most prized possession. But then I bartered it to a big sophomore for two rolls of toilet paper, a pack of cigarettes, and a girlie magazine called Panty Pervert. We also had this home movie that the kid in the orange shirt showed us of a fifteen-year old girl doing really nasty things with a bottle of Stewart's Old Fashioned Birch Beer. He said his cousin made it.

There's good news, though. While in fact going to college bears several disturbing similarities to doing time in prison, your mom's right: it will be the best time of your life! The empire is crumbling around us. The United States government owes, according to the author's calculations, about one-point-seven-three gazillion times more money than there ever was in the whole universe times ten, a sum that it would not be feasible to even think about paying off until at least fiscal year 8347. By that time, your grandmother will be almost seven thousand years old and still collecting Social Security. The machines will become homicidally aware and eat your children. Disco will come back every ten years like clockwork. Faced with all that in your future, that football guy Bubba with all the tattoos and the single down the hall starts sounding like a very manageable risk. And the Columbia community cares: that's why they give you a rape whistle!