How to be a freshman
Complain about everything. Complain about the weather, cafeteria food, people, missions week, seriously anything—it doesn’t really matter. Note that you are one of the few people on this planet to take part in post-secondary education, but don’t let this privileged position rob you of your critical edge. More than anything else, complain about your course load. Consider every assignment, midterm, and paper not as an opportunity for growth and understanding, but as a cruel and meaningless sentence. Peruse your syllabi with the same shocked and offended demeanour appropriate for scanning a new parking ticket. Come to know all your professors as cruel and bitter sadists. Complain more than ever during the busiest stretches of the semester. Refresh your status on Facebook every hour with the total pages you still have to read or write on any given night. Google images of Sudanese refugees and mirror their pained expressions. Contemplate whether you want to live in a world that demands you to finish your True Colours test the night before your Psychology midterm, and make a list of objects, pharmaceuticals, or windows in your dorm room that could assist you in a suicide attempt.
Stop taking care of yourself. Make it observably clear to anyone within arm’s reach that this is your first attempt at living away from your mom. Justify your sparse showering practices with a diatribe against Western water consumption. Race your friends to the Freshman 15. Eat vegetables only if they are part of your cheeseburger. Buy more sweatpants. Wear them daily. Consider anything with a collar “dressy.” Believe that others are seeing the real you and not your pit stains and bad skin. Participate in No-Shave November mainly because this is how you’ve been living since September. Win the Moustache March Pageant for the same reason. Impress yourself twice a semester when you remember to wash your sheets. Offer only a blank stare when someone asks where the vacuum is.
Make romance a priority. Imagine each marginally friendly girl as the mother of your children. Make every first move a friendship request on Facebook. Pull an all-nighter lurking the profiles of potential candidates. Become visibly offended when any of your interests are already in a relationship. Spend the better part of the night with someone’s beach vacation photo album. Pull another all-nighter renovating your own profile. Untag unflattering pictures and list erudite books you’ve never read. Quote a Rob Bell profundity in your status bar. Begin to investigate what the Bible actually says about homosexuality. Message someone for a date when you see her favourite book is also The Shack. Make out one night in the Back 40. Accidentally graze her purity ring and promptly end the session. Go out drinking with your dorm mates. Continue to hold weekly meetings where you bemoan your respective and frustrated love lives. Realize that male bonding is far superior to anything a woman can offer you.
Ryan Froese
Everything makes sense and is funny, but, you lost me with “Begin to investigate what the Bible actually says about homosexuality.” Is that something first years do? I don’t understand what you’re saying about either freshmen or homosexuality with that statement.