Two more weeks, two more weeks, two more weeks... two more weeks and we're all home free. This semester has simultaneously gone by in a flash and taken forever. It feels like I've hardly gone out and drank—although I do nothing else on the weekends, besides sleep until 2 PM and watch football—and it feels like I'm repeating all my classes for the third time.
I'm excited to go home and be finished with this semester, but don't misunderstand me. I'm not one of those people whose away messages are constantly proclaiming "Two more weeks until I see my favorites!" or "studying... three more days until my favorites!" I always have a strong urge to kill their favorites. In my experience, the people who build up their incredible friendships at home are the ones who have nothing to talk about outside of school.
Why do people get so excited about leaving here? What is this, a Japanese internment camp? You don't work, you don't have to worry about meals, you're constantly surrounded by friends, you can go out and drink five nights of the week and this is the last bastion of, among other things, your childhood.
Do you really want to graduate and get into that fabled "real world?" Do you know what my primary concern was today? Putting Christmas lights up in my room. I don't want to worry about how to pay the rent or whether or not my boss is sexually harassing me (yes, it goes both ways).
All you people who are always dying to go home have to look around. This is the most fun you are going to have in your entire life. You have no responsibilities, no one telling you what to do and when to do it, no worries bigger than getting so drunk that you can't tell the difference between "borderline" and "so ugly your friends will ex-communicate you." You want to go home? Drop out, stupid. Smaller lines for my friends and I down in the basement. By the way, when you leave college, getting smashed three nights a week is called "alcoholism." Here, it has called "being social."
Alcoholism has to be the most entertaining disease in the history of diseases. As long as you're not beating your spouse and drinking your paycheck, what other disease provides such good times between friends? Do cancer patients put their hoods up over their face after they put their sweatshirts on backwards and try to find the next ward blind?
The term "favorites" cracks me up too. Who do you hang around with here, super-villains? Sure you have friends at home, as we all do. However, you're having more fun with your friends here than you are with your friends at home. Friends from the past are great, possibly the greatest things in the world, but that's where they are from: the past. What do we all end up doing every time we get together with the old gang from high school, have new and exciting experiences, as we do here at school, or rehash old war stories from tenth grade physics class that have been told a thousand times before?
I know what you are all saying (especially my friends from Ringwood and Don Bosco Prep). You're screaming, "Listen prick, high school was great! I had the time of my life! Just because you're having a better time in college doesn't mean that we all have to spurn our old comrades!"
OK stupid, pay attention. Old friends are great, and—as I previously stated—maybe the best thing in the world; just don't sell out your college life in order to try and recapture days gone by. The days of you and your buddies stealing liquor from old man Dean's convenience store after school and drinking yourselves silly are long and gone. Your friends are still there, but the times are gone.
Everyone has to realize that these four (maybe five) years of college are going to be looked back upon as the best ones in our lives. Unless you're planning on being a secret agent, porn star, or rocker after you get your degree, going out to a crappy basement party at two in the morning and drinking enough tequila to kill a young rhinoceros is not going to be topped. You want to include those "favorites?" Invite them along. These are your golden years, young Scrantonites, so grab hold. Otherwise when you reach that stage when you're sitting in your rocker and drinking Metamucil by the gallon, the only memories you'll have from college will be sitting in your dorm room and dreaming about shooting spitballs at old man Harris in study hall.
I know it's only a week before finals, but get out there this weekend. Worried about Microbiology? Experience fermentation's greatest by-product through the time-honored process of chugging! That Psychology exam getting you down? Therapeutic beer pong! The Darker Romantics exam looking bleak? Um... take shots! Get obliterated, oh ye scholars, for the days of Natty Ice and free beer are soon gone.