Dear 18-year-old, naïve, longhaired, tie-dye-headband-wearing self,
Sup, g? You chillin’? Yeah, you’re chillin’. You just wrapped up that four-year contest of sweaty dick swinging known as all-boys high school and now you’re ready to kill it this summer. Senior week in Ocean City is swiftly approaching and the only things on your mind are the carcinogenic ocean air and half-baked Natty Lights surely waiting on the other side. From there, it’s three months of unencumbered peril with your friends until you head off to the land of the Dirty Terps for four years on your own.
College is gonna be so tight, right? While all the other kids aced their way into dorms reeking of cheese, you cared a tad less than them, ironically allowing you to sign a lease at an RA-free apartment. You’ve got the most baller setup out of all your friends. Your pad will be THE pad. You can see it now: “Oh, can’t throw an office-hoes-and-C.E.Bros party in your dorm because it violates the university’s code of conduct? Come on over to my apartment, a magical place that eludes campus borders and all rules therein.” You’re fucking STOKED… ARE YOU NOT?
Well, you don’t know me, but I know you. And guess what—you make me extremely uncomfortable to look at. Right now, you are a duplicitous skid mark on the underpants of what will prospectively be known as the Class of 2014. While I commend your zeal and bottomless appetite for this brave new world ahead of you, I don’t necessarily like you right now.
But hey, who’s to say my opinion of you won’t change? You might encounter some lessons over the next four years that make you way easier to tolerate. You will NOT cherish these lessons because most will undoubtedly regard alcohol.
The Green Apple UV Vodka Lesson is a fun one to look forward to. One weekend this fall, one of your hometown buddies (I can’t tell you which because THAT WOULD SPOIL THE SURPRISE!) will visit with a 30-pack and handle of Green Apple UV vodka. This particular variety of liquor has yet to touch your lips, so naturally you will over-indulge yourself with this puzzling potion. After about five shots, you will sprint to the toilet, knock over the useless coffee table that will sit in the hallway all year, hug the porcelain goddess, and yawn in Technicolor like never before. Such will be your inaugural year’s defining lesson—one that teaches you to stay the fuck away from colored liquor for the rest of your mundane existence.
Then comes the miraculous sophomore year. Jump ahead to the upper echelon of your college career: you will acquire a cool freelancing job where you unmask the wisdom and fables that have gotten you to said upper echelon. As a freelancer, you will discuss this pubescent phase of college and how day drinking is the newest craze among your friends. Who you spend your time drinking with is important, but you will quickly determine which people you can stomach for more than five hours at a time. You know—those people that DON’T say you have bad hair, or that your piss sounds feminine when hitting the urinal.
You will keep most of those regular friends around during junior year, your first taste of squalid living. I want to take a second to warn you that your living arrangements this year require TONS of getting used to. You will catch three mice in one weekend. You will live with friends who refuse to flush their own shit down the toilet. You will not remember what fresh air smells like after two months. Other than escalated drinking and declining work ethic, renting this shithole will define your junior year. No real lesson to learn here, because you will live with those same incompetent “friendmates” senior year, too.
Last and CERTAINLY least, senior year. Of course, you will get as blackout as you usually do, but these will be slightly sentimental because you will start counting the number of weekends left. It’s a suffocating feeling. Fortunately for you—18-year-old, naïve, longhaired, tie-dye-headband-wearing self—you will feel satisfied with the enigmatic four years that have become your undergraduate tenure at the University of Maryland.
You’ll laugh, cry, and laugh some more. But the most important thing of all is this—you’ll be incredibly wiser than you are right now.
How am I predicting your future? You kind of remind me of myself when I was you. Just please don’t deviate from the plan I laid out for you. I don’t want you fucking up the space-time continuum and ending up as a garbage man or starving writer or something.
Actually, you will probably assume one of those two occupations. Just do what makes you happy, I guess.
With all the cynical love in my heart,
You
A-Mac is a regular columnist for BroBible.
[Photo: Ditty_about_summer/Shutterstock]