Home is where the heart is - but school is where the booze is.
Free food and drink, a kind face, a warm bed - no I'm not talking about the homeless shelter, I'm talking about the other place I often wake up in the morning - HOME. Ah, how sweet it truly is. No human can truly appreciate home until they've been to college. Then home becomes a merciful refuge from the filthy den of aniquity we call our dorm, apartment, or in my pitiful case, frat house.
The wonders of home continue to astound me each time I return. Granted, I am from Chicago, so going home is like a vacation in itself being that it involved a vehicle other than a Campus Cruiser. But there is no denying the benefits of eating the food I can never afford at Ralph's (Godiva Raspberry Truffle ice cream, Salsa Verde Doritos, clean water) while relaxing on a couch on which no one has ever hooked up or puked.
Home is a place where I can shower without living in fear of a roach attack. Kind folks called my "parents" actually "make dinner" - with meat, even! And now that I'm a home-from-college-badass, I don't even have to worry about a curfew or coming home drunk and having to make up some story about a bum pouring whiskey down my throat against my will.
However, I am not going to say everything about home is rosy. Whenever I head back to the Midwest, I inevitably have to run into someone from high school, which then means answering a series of mindless and asinine questions, the most popular of which seems to be, "If you go to school in southern California, where's your tan?" This amuses me to no end. Yes I go to school in SoCal, the key words there being "go to" and "school." If school consisted of outdoor classes between the hours of 10 and 2 that meet at Venice Beach, then maybe I'd have some more color. Sadly, at my prison of a school, they actually sit us down in buildings with rooves and make us learn during the daylight hours. Horrific, isn't it? Idiot.
Another one of the classics is "Do you see a lot of famous people?" Again, that crazy concept of "school" comes in to play. Yeah, you know what, actually I can't swing a dead cat on my campus without hitting someone famous. Hell, in COMM 204 I sat next to Mandy Moore and my professor was Ben Stein. Really! No, actually, you back country hick from Iowa/Indiana/Missoura Rural State College, the famous people actually choose to stick around their own mansions in Pacific Palisades rather than South Central L.A. Weird, I know! Damn movie stars.
I swear. Some of these people need a swift kick. Honestly, though, there is some undeniable charm to your hometown, especially amongst the humble townsfolk. There's that guy who never quite made it to a community college and now splits his time between working at a Quick E Mart and smoking as much herbal refreshment as he can get his hands on. And who can forget Whitney, high school's most ambitious young salutatorian, now on probation from Harvard facing drug charges. Ah, how college enhances young lives. Enhances, ruins, whatever. It's college, anyway.
Well, all this talk about home has made me tired. Time to go back to my bed (The sheets have been washed! Sweet luxury!) and bask in the glory of a quiet place with no disturbances or responsibility...eh, who am I kidding...I wish I was wasted. |
