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In This Issue
- Fun Stuff to Do With Your Roommate
- Morningside Heights = Wormhole
- New York's Suprise Gift: Humidity!
- Letters to the Feditor
- Suggestions for Campus Political Dialogue
- Dodge-ing the Freshman 15
- First-Year Friendships Are For Fakeys
- Columbia's Least Employable Grads
- A Quick Briefing on Columbia-Speak
- Thirty Things To Do Before You Graduate Columbia
- CU is Like Folsom Prison
- Attack of the Killer Barnard Wymyn Blowjob
- Phil Steigman: Everyone's Class President
- John Jay Life Tried Without A Floor
- Some Stuff Your RA Might Have Left Out
- Housing and Dining Fed Fun Quiz
- Compliments of Health Services
- THEY WATCH
- What's a Fed Bash? Glad You Asked.
- The Staff of 21.0
Some Stuff Your RA Might Have Left Out
Kareem Shaya
Welcome to college, first-years. People back home may have told you that you are setting out on the best four years of your life. In many ways, they could be right. You will soon find, though, that you need to make some changes. Collegiate folk do things differently, and your first weeks and months here will be a crash course in fresh habits and new ways of doing old things. Thus we present a basic catalog of the biggest changes you will undergo and a primer of how to cope.
Making Friends
For many of you, this muscle has atrophied over years of disuse. In high school, throw a rock, and you’ll hit a friend. In college, rock-throwing is dangerous and we don’t do it. Here, making friends is a complicated game of emotions, compatibility, and “Are you in CC or SEAS? Cool … uh, so which dorm do you live in?” If a person’s answers to those two questions match yours, there is an 85% chance that they will attend your wedding and a 75% chance that they will have sex with you and/or your future spouse, simultaneously in 45% of those cases.
Style, or A Brief Treatise on Hipsterism
You may have worn suspenders in high school, but here you are greeted with a tabula rasa of fashion. More often than not, new Columbians fall victim to their inner hipster, a fiendish spirit with which we all grapple. When you find yourself in its grips, unfortunately you must play along until its strength subsides.
There is a cardinal rule that even the most faux-countercultural hipster respects: anything you wear must be ironic. For young men, this means T-shirts featuring children’s TV characters and polo shirts with the collars “popped.” What is that you say? Young men don’t like children’s TV characters and collars are meant to be folded? Precisely!
Hipster women generally wear floor-length skirts, utilitarian heels, large earrings, and an alluring but tasteful top. But remember, irony! Their smartly demure wardrobe is a sham. Hipster women perform fellatio so frequently that many develop Pavlovian, conditioned responses to mundane stimuli. Try running a faucet or closing a door – these are common hipster-fellatio triggers.
When you return home, people may smile and say, “It’s so nice to see you! You’ve really got that ‘New York’ look.” This is code for, “What are you, a homo now?” Respond with a simple, “Thank you.” This is code for, “Hipsters are the only people dumb enough to confuse open-mindedness with homosexuality. So yes, it looks like I am.”
Masturbation and its Facilitators
Coming from your lavish suburban homes with their big rooms and seclusive noise deadening, this will be the biggest challenge you face. If you can masturbate silently with one foot on the toilet, the other on the wall, and a free hand holding shut the door with the broken lock, then you are equipped to dealing with the masturbatory space constraints inherent to life in the big city. Those of you unable to masturbate without room to stretch out and pornography in surround sound on your home theater will find autogratification difficult.
Access to pornography will also be circumscribed. Gone are the days of locking yourself in a room to be alone with Jameson & Co. Attune your ears to the sound of an approaching roommate, and leave the computer’s cursor always at the ready, astride the X-it button in the window’s upper-right. Forget about the sound on your videos. From move-in forward, pornography will be a strictly mute affair.
Women: your nonsensical, albeit lovely vaginas have finally done you in. Good luck setting up the scented candles and bath oils that you need just to get aroused.
Food & Drink
Chinese food is no longer a special treat. “Chinese food,” of course, is a catch-all term for any non-John Jay food you’ll eat. Given the state of affairs in that wood-paneled eatery, Chinese food is your new best friend. This means that you’ll get to know such fun figures in local cuisine as the oh-so-hip Caffé Swish register girls. They’re great if you’re nice to them. Don’t be mean, or they’ll put pee-pee in your Coke.
Many people use the terms “in college” and “drunk” interchangeably, and for good, comedically well-trodden reason. Here’s a good rule of thumb to avoid trouble: if you ever wake up somewhere that’s not your bed and don’t remember how you got there, run. Run fast. In most such cases, you have already done something unforgivably shameful.
With these bits of sage advice, you should have little trouble navigating your first few weeks here. After that, your success is contingent on how well you internalize this guidance. The “CC or SEAS … which dorm?” recipe for making friends won’t work well for long after classes start. Try coming up with another question, something like, “So where are you from?” (if the subject’s hometown is within 500 miles of yours, intercourse is customary). I know you can do it too.
Making Friends
For many of you, this muscle has atrophied over years of disuse. In high school, throw a rock, and you’ll hit a friend. In college, rock-throwing is dangerous and we don’t do it. Here, making friends is a complicated game of emotions, compatibility, and “Are you in CC or SEAS? Cool … uh, so which dorm do you live in?” If a person’s answers to those two questions match yours, there is an 85% chance that they will attend your wedding and a 75% chance that they will have sex with you and/or your future spouse, simultaneously in 45% of those cases.
Style, or A Brief Treatise on Hipsterism
You may have worn suspenders in high school, but here you are greeted with a tabula rasa of fashion. More often than not, new Columbians fall victim to their inner hipster, a fiendish spirit with which we all grapple. When you find yourself in its grips, unfortunately you must play along until its strength subsides.
There is a cardinal rule that even the most faux-countercultural hipster respects: anything you wear must be ironic. For young men, this means T-shirts featuring children’s TV characters and polo shirts with the collars “popped.” What is that you say? Young men don’t like children’s TV characters and collars are meant to be folded? Precisely!
Hipster women generally wear floor-length skirts, utilitarian heels, large earrings, and an alluring but tasteful top. But remember, irony! Their smartly demure wardrobe is a sham. Hipster women perform fellatio so frequently that many develop Pavlovian, conditioned responses to mundane stimuli. Try running a faucet or closing a door – these are common hipster-fellatio triggers.
When you return home, people may smile and say, “It’s so nice to see you! You’ve really got that ‘New York’ look.” This is code for, “What are you, a homo now?” Respond with a simple, “Thank you.” This is code for, “Hipsters are the only people dumb enough to confuse open-mindedness with homosexuality. So yes, it looks like I am.”
Masturbation and its Facilitators
Coming from your lavish suburban homes with their big rooms and seclusive noise deadening, this will be the biggest challenge you face. If you can masturbate silently with one foot on the toilet, the other on the wall, and a free hand holding shut the door with the broken lock, then you are equipped to dealing with the masturbatory space constraints inherent to life in the big city. Those of you unable to masturbate without room to stretch out and pornography in surround sound on your home theater will find autogratification difficult.
Access to pornography will also be circumscribed. Gone are the days of locking yourself in a room to be alone with Jameson & Co. Attune your ears to the sound of an approaching roommate, and leave the computer’s cursor always at the ready, astride the X-it button in the window’s upper-right. Forget about the sound on your videos. From move-in forward, pornography will be a strictly mute affair.
Women: your nonsensical, albeit lovely vaginas have finally done you in. Good luck setting up the scented candles and bath oils that you need just to get aroused.
Food & Drink
Chinese food is no longer a special treat. “Chinese food,” of course, is a catch-all term for any non-John Jay food you’ll eat. Given the state of affairs in that wood-paneled eatery, Chinese food is your new best friend. This means that you’ll get to know such fun figures in local cuisine as the oh-so-hip Caffé Swish register girls. They’re great if you’re nice to them. Don’t be mean, or they’ll put pee-pee in your Coke.
Many people use the terms “in college” and “drunk” interchangeably, and for good, comedically well-trodden reason. Here’s a good rule of thumb to avoid trouble: if you ever wake up somewhere that’s not your bed and don’t remember how you got there, run. Run fast. In most such cases, you have already done something unforgivably shameful.
With these bits of sage advice, you should have little trouble navigating your first few weeks here. After that, your success is contingent on how well you internalize this guidance. The “CC or SEAS … which dorm?” recipe for making friends won’t work well for long after classes start. Try coming up with another question, something like, “So where are you from?” (if the subject’s hometown is within 500 miles of yours, intercourse is customary). I know you can do it too.