My teams name at trivia tonight is “The Charlotte Bronte Book Club”. I can die happy

When I first came to college, I decided that I wanted to be like Van Wilder.  I loved the movie when I saw it as a freshman in high school and by my freshman year of college, I decided I was going to be the title character ‘Van’.  To me, Van was a person who knew exactly who he was, exactly who everyone else was, and knew exactly where he was in the world.  In fact, a lot of my phrases I used freshman year were taken directly from the movie.  But as my life became inundated with the swirl of college shenanigans, I ended 5 year obsession with the movie, and soon completely forgot about it. But last night I watched it again with a friend.  After years of not even thinking about it, the movie seemed like all my friends from high school; stuck in a different time. Instead of looking at the main characters’ seven years in college as a funny conflict in the plot, I had a sense of jealousy that he had refused to grow up.

If you have not seen Van Wilder, the plot revolves around a popular student named ‘Van’ entering his 7^th year at college (Ryan Reynolds) who meets a beautiful reporter for the school paper (Tara Reid) who helps him move on from college and graduate. When I saw the movie though, the last twenty minute montage of Van working really hard to graduate and growing up in the process was painful instead of happy. By the time Van had his graduation party [which includes my favorite romantic kiss in all of cinema] I was emotionally drained. I was inundated with a flood of introspective memories from the last 4 years of my college career.  As Van celebrated finally growing up, I sat there upset that I had grown up a long time ago. In Van Wilder, the registrar tells Tara Reid that it took Van until his sophomore year to “break out of his shell.” I look back at my 4 years, and I have no clue when or even if I ever broke out of my shell. Of all my years at college, I never got blackout drunk. I only got really drunk twice. And every time I have to listen to a crazy story of drunken hijinks, I am forced to recognize that those stories will never include me, and I may never be able to relate. My drunken stories usually end with “and then I got a stomach ache and gassy so I went to sleep”.

Van also had an intelligent beautiful woman in his life that helped him grow as a person, just as he helped her grow. It ends up being an endearing codependence of two seemingly opposite people, helping balance the others life out. But when it comes to romance, I can’t relate. Even now, as I reach the point in my life where I am looking for someone to have a more emotional connection with, I can’t help but be embarrassed by my lack of history an experience. Eventually, thinking about love in terms of Selena Gomez and Jessica Simpson songs gets frustratingly simplistic. Van Wilder may not be a love guru but at least he had enough experience with different women to know when there was one that was “different”. And when the right one did come along, he was able to overcome a number of obstacles, including her current boyfriend to find a way to be together.

I am now 90% done with my college career. College is pretty much over for me. (1221 days since I started college, Only 144 remaining.) When Van Wilder ends, it is not clear where Van is going with his life. He does not have a job set up; all he has is a new perfect girlfriend and a college degree. But that is all he needed to have a happy ending. Now that I am approaching my end, I also am not sure where I am going in life. I am well versed in useless academia jargon but no actual training for a job.  If this were an uplifting piece of writing, I would use the next few sentences to reassure the reader that not everything is confused and chaotic; that everything will work out like always, but that is not what this is. Truthfully, I have no clue where I am going, and I am not even sure where I am now. Just like Brittney Spears, who sang “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman”, I can’t decide if I am a kid, a grown up or something in between. I can’t decide who I like, what I want to be or even what I did for the last 4 years of my life. And when I am done with this cliché quarter life crisis, I will come out alive, but stuck wondering whether I made the right choices to end up wherever I end up. The only thing that is certain is Van Wilder came out with a sequel, and I hope my life’s sequel is a little bit more successful.   

           Satire is funniest when it is closest to the truth. But I often cannot tell which is which and I am not the only person in my generation to have this problem. I think part of the blame has to go to Stephen Colbert. In an enlightening conversation with a conservative peer, he explained to me how he hated John Stewart because he was too liberal, but Stephen Colbert was really funny. When I clarified that Stephen Colbert was actually making fun of conservatives too, he incredulously did not believe me and walked away. When recounting this story to a friend later on, he told me how he had a similar experience with fellow audience members when he went to see the Colbert Report in person. It is tempting to blame these ignoramuses’ stupidity on their political ideology but sadly I have made similar mistakes on Tumblr and Twitter.

         Tumblr and Twitter are incredible hotbeds for clever media. And a lot of these are brilliant satirical blogs that make any internet junkie chuckle. For example, I recently started following poorblackkid.com on tumblr. This is a witty blog made in response to a Forbes letter suggesting if poor black kids work really super-duper hard and study with ‘computers’ and ‘websites’, they can succeed, because that is what the white, middle-aged author would do. One of my problems with laughing at the satirical response was that I was already laughing at the original letter, under the impression that it was itself a satire. This is not the first time I have confused satire for ignorance. Earlier in the week, I thought “Shit Girls Say” was satire. Or every time I see a new twitter user with the cliché formula Twitter_handle = [insert your identity]+[insert your gender]+problems, I think “Boy this is so clever”.

         The problem is not everything is satire. Every time someone says something ignorant, I write it off in my head thinking “Boy that is exactly what an ignorant person would say!” I do not even entertain the possibility that the people I interact with in this world are ill-informed. The sad effect of this is by giving ignorant people the benefit of the doubt and laughing at their offensive language, I reinforce their beliefs that what they are saying is ok. 

“someone had been removed from your friend list.” It was a good message to start out my night.  After having the “unfriender” app for a month I had become complacent to know that the only people to disappear and reappear on my friend list would be idiots who delete their profile for 4 days at a time.   But when I clicked a link to inquire which friend it was, I saw that a real, live person had deleted me from their friend list. 

Confused and inexplicably angry, I stalked my old “friend” to look for clues about their recent actions. Had this person been someone who was clearing out their friends, and felt that they needed 300 or less friends, I probably would have accepted that I was not worth the trouble and moved on, but this was not the case.  The person in question had 1251 friends.  And somehow I got the chopping block.  Is it really possible that this kid had 1251 good friends, and I was the 1252nd best friend?  I doubt it.  He still knows me by name, and we were still friendly enough that we said hi to each other in the halls if there was nowhere to avert our eyes to, so this could not have been the case.

But then I considered that maybe he did not like me.  I like to think that I am a very likable person and I firmly believe that your actions and emotions towards others will be replicated in most situations, so if i am nice to him, he should be nice to me! Still, I checked my statuses to make sure I had not said anything wildly offensive in the last week to inspire this act of hate.  Seeing nothing but pompous meta-jokes, I determined he could not have done it based on that.

In the end I decided I would refriend him as a big joke inside my head. The most recent status he had was this…. (I enjoyed this)

(I would like to point out that my “How can it be awkward?” comment was liked by the perpetrator here, so at least he had a good sense of humor about the ordeal. 

How to start a kiss is a magical mystery of modern interaction that when the moment is right, I can’t help to show I am a squib.  Remember when Hermoine helps Ron with his levitation spell by explaining “its wingardium leviosa, not wingardium leviosa”?  Well that is what it is like to figure out how to start a kiss.  You know dam well how to do it, and you know the subtle actions to take, but there is a lingering fear that if you make the slightest move wrong you will be sitting there waving your wand in the air with no magic happening.  Between which side to tip your head and how to let her know that you are doing a dive bomb for her lips, the ritual is a mystery.  

                While on my way out to lunch with a professor and some other physics majors, a glimmer of light caught my eye.  Turning to the right, a magnificent piece of machinery lay in front of me.   Sitting next to a disheveled general physics student was a new type of calculator I had never seen before.  Its sleek black color and silver outline looked straight out of the future.  A big direction pad was situated in the center of the device, its pointers seeming to be directing your attention to the beautiful machinery around it.  On the top, a brilliant backlit screen showed a colorful array of equations. 

                Soon my fellow nerds swooped around the magic device as well to examine it.  As the student started to explain, the new calculator was made by TI and could graph in different colors.  The other physics majors joined me cooing at the biggest major advance in pocket calculators since the late 90’s.  We marveled at its new software that seemed intuitive and modernized. 

                Realizing we all had to eat lunch soon; we left the calculator and continued our conversations.  I still really want that calculator. 

What? HOOK-UP is evolving? HOOK-UP evolved into DATING!