The monotony of constantly being asked “how was your break” is slowly killing me. Nevertheless, I will divulge that my break was somewhat educational. I learned some valuable and unexpected lessons by doing nothing more than, well, nothing. I inadvertently lived off the free samples of food handed out in the eatery of my local shopping mall, therefore learning of a possible primary food source should I ever become homeless. Furthermore, though my mom did teach me to always take a piss before leaving the house, she never did get around to telling me that cutting up a credit card doesn’t prevent you from being charged an annual fee. With every day came another lesson, always at my expense. Since this is only an article and not a book, I’ll let you in on the three most important life lessons that the last month provided.
1. Getting to the airport too early can be as risky as getting there too late. Like the vast majority of you, I didn’t get the recommended eight hours of sleep the night after my last final. In fact, with my flight the next day at 10 a.m., I didn’t really sleep at all. Why bother? I had a month to catch up and only one more responsibility to attend to, getting to the airport on time – or so I thought. Having eaten a bellyful of McDonald’s breakfast – the only McDonald’s food worth eating – I got out the latest issue of Cosmo and sat down at my gate. That was an hour and a half before the expected time of departure. Fifteen minutes after the expected time of departure, I awoke just in time to see my plane taking off without me.
2. Soft-core porn is more than just a masturbation aid. The only time I hear someone mention Cinemax is in reference to soft-core porn and I hear Cinemax mentioned a lot. Now that my parents upgraded to digital cable, I have on-demand soft-core porn courtesy of Cinemax. With all the free time I had over break, I was able to work my way through some of the big name soft-core porn mini-series – “Pleasure Cove” and “Forbidden Island.” It turns out that bottom of the barrel actors being force-fed the corniest of lines with 50-year old special effects occurring in the background makes for an enjoyable viewing experience. My personal favorite – “We have to get back to the others and feed them my breast milk, it’s their only chance for survival.” Unlike most people, I fast-forward through the sex to get to the dialogue. A side note, the name of a soft-core porn series is like the name of a Chinese restaurant. In either case, whether it be Lucky Fortune or Forbidden Fortune, when you see that name in front of you, there is no mistaking what you are looking at.
3. Though your mom’s requests may often seem reasonable, the logic behind them frequently is not. This occured on the day of my flight back to Rochester. Leaving my house for the last time this winter break, my mom grabbed my arm and cynically asked me, “Where’s your jacket?” I tried to explain to her that the jacket was unnecessary. It takes roughly three seconds to get from the airport to the taxi and another three to get from the taxi to my dorm. Being a mother though, she wouldn’t have it. This is what she told me – “The plane’s going to crash, Andrew, and you’re going to survive the crash, but then freeze to death because you don’t have a jacket, you schmuck.” I’m sure my mom would want me to tell you that she’s an accomplished lawyer and a former UR graduate, but Mom, the ridiculousness of that comment makes you the true schmuck.
Now that I’ve returned to campus, I’m back to waking up at the crack of dawn because the blinds are too thin to block the sunlight. I’m back to buying “guaranteed low-priced” textbooks from the bookstore even though Amazon is selling those same books at prices low enough to make them affordable to poverty-stricken kids from third world countries who are being sponsored by the Christian Children’s Fund. I’m back to taking five pages of notes on the first day of class while somehow all of my friends played the name game in their classes and passed around a bowl of candy.
There are some perks, of course, to being back at college. In the words of myself the first time I got drunk at a frat party, “there are hot bitches everywhere!” Over break, there were only two hot bitches – my two dogs. I still stand by their being hot, though.
Schwartz can be reached aschwartz@campustimes.org
