Much like any other person who went away to college and spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to sleep in cramped rooms with strangers, exist for months at a time on starch and seasoning packets alone, and broaden my burgeoning intellect, I learned many important life lessons during those four formative years:

• When you live in a dorm, make sure you shower in flip-flops. There is perhaps no fungus on the planet with as much chutzpah as the fungus that lives between the tiles in a communal bathroom and since you will need your extra money to buy chicken wings and ramen, you really don’t want to have to waste your precious funds on spray cans of Tinactin. • No matter how beautifully your Big Sister decorated the bottle of cheap champagne she bought you with puffy paint and your sorority letters, that bottle of cheap champagne should still be viewed for exactly what it is: a liquid demonic entity. And should you guzzle it, you will be lying facedown in the bushes outside … Continue reading →

Here’s an important lesson to internalize, my friends: people rarely change. While it’s possible for someone to maybe tweak his or her mindset and behavior and become, say, more patient, more reflective, or less quick to anger, an entire personality overhaul is never going to happen unless you’re dealing with someone who’s just spent a year surviving on bark and rain water in the wilderness – and even then it’s a slippery slope because you just know that person’s conventional behavior will slide right back in the second he swallows his first Hostess Sno-Ball. Change is hard. Change is inconvenient. And that inconvenience is why the committed liars will always lie, the horrifically selfish will never morph superhero-style into selfless crusaders, and a person who registers in the negative range on the emotional intelligence scale will very likely never fully understand (or care) that his actions lead to painful effects for which he is completely responsible. It’s a messy world out there and assh*les who have no problem being assh*les will rarely volunteer to remain … Continue reading →