Staying On Campus Over The Summer Was The Worst Decision I Ever Made

Big_Blue8 years ago

It starts off as a concept from the gods: you will spend the summer in your college town living the dream and partying every night. You’ll live in the house. Either you’ll make tons of money working full time somewhere or you’ll snore through 3 easy credits, and the golf course that your university owns will continue to give you free golf rounds whenever you please simply contingent on the presentation of your student ID. Even better, the bars will still be open and crowded as ever, and tons of bombshell sorority girls will be in town with the same carefree mindset as you. What more can a man want?

Well, shooter, I’m here to diffuse any dreams you may have of living in your college town over the summer. Based on personal experience, it fucking sucks.

When I entered the summer after my freshman year, I was first off saddened by this simple fact: the wise forces that own the deed and security code to your fraternity house are not dumb, and will prohibit you from living there with the 5 other degenerates who decided not to move on to bigger and better things for the season (whether those things involve living on daddy’s trust fund in the Cayman Islands or simply working an internship in a city whose economy relies on more than just liquor sales to underage kids). No problem, though, because you will just sublet from some hotshot who lives in your senior house! You’ve been there before; it’s somewhat clean, has normal, not beer-covered beds (only the couches are beer covered), personal bathrooms, and ample space to squirrel away your stash of rye, Cocoa Puffs, and condoms… and all for less than $200 a month! Killer, right?

Wrong, motherfucker.

The senior house you will live in will be squalid, with the prior tenants apparently having measured their net worth in butter knives (no forks), couches (6 per room) and Cup-a-Soups (I personally counted 50 in the cupboard). This isn’t the cleaning service-maintained mansion that you are used too. There are stains everywhere that cannot be identified, lamps that don’t work, dead animals under staircases, pledges still trapped in secret compartments of the walls, and a mass of cleaning products that haven’t been opened, no doubt bought by parents for their sons and instantly hidden away in drawers for all eternity due to these (now) graduates’ lack of motivation when it comes to creating a reasonable, remotely sanitary living space. Shit sucks.

Another problem is that in the summer, with all the college kids away, you will see how the city normally gets on sans alcoholic coeds. The truth is, it doesn’t. Multiple days a week, I was woken up by hobos digging through my trash for Natural Light and Keystone cans for the generous $.10 deposit the great state of Michigan bequeaths unto them — which, being a moderate Democrat and Political Science kid, I can understand based on the socio-economic iniquities of our society. However, this is really fucking annoying at 5:00 A.M. the morning after a hooch-powered bender. There is no worse way to wake up than hearing some jerk cut open your trash bags and spread the contents across your backyard in search of the goldmine of aluminum cans that Keith Stone’s most valued consumer base provides the transient community. Furthermore, being the roommate that has to shovel that shit up at the end of the day, only to see it parsed through again the next morning, really makes you want to put land mines around your garbage bins and wait Predator-style for the ubiquitous shopping carts to rattle by on trash day. Maybe this is how people become Republican.

Another thing that sucks is the food selection. You’re a hotshot. In your mind, you can grill steak, hamburgers, pork chops, more hamburgers, and you’ve even figured out how to bake sweet potato fries and nuke frozen vegetables, all necessary seeing as your favorite carry-out place is closed for the summer. In reality, you are no Emeril Lagasse, and you will burn everything; even things that never touch heat. You will learn that even Easy Mac is beyond your realm of manufacture, partially because you get off at 4 P.M. and are consistently wasted by the time you are ready to make dinner. You’ll live on Oreos and Lunchables until mid-July, at which time you will simply die of malnutrition.

Besides the lack of sanitation and chef-cooked meals, the final nail in the coffin is the lack of women.
Think about it: what father ditches their daughter to the bog of loneliness and poor living conditions that is a summertime college town when they could be sending their princess to Cabo or, at the very least, a plum lifeguarding job at the country club?

None.

The result is a summer college town populated by isolated pockets of dudes, maybe 4-6 per house, who learn after the first week that going to the bars is a useless exercise unless you want to spend quality time with townies or Old Chuck, the 80-year-old that is always toasting with the college revelers on semester bar nights. Great guy — unmatched in sports talk — but he’s no Kate Upton lookalike, and you definitely don’t want to take him home (he’ll eat all of your uncooked Easy Mac).

So please, go home for the summer. Hell, go to Antarctica, or maybe even South Sudan during a drought. Both of those places are far superior to your college town when the college kids are away. Run away after finals and don’t come back until freshman orientation is over. You’ll return a smarter, richer, and more worldly man. Or something like that..