Sexiled For the First Time: Freshman Year in Retrospect
Published May 8, 2007
By Max C. Bookman
I feel like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing when he wakes up from a long strange trip in that trashed hotel room wondering how long he’s been there. Days? Weeks? What the fuck!
I didn’t exactly spend the entire year eating acid and tripping on outrageous psychedelics, but seriously, what have I done since August? As my ever-so hyped freshman year enters its twilight hours, what can I make of the first two semesters?
Back in high school, “college” was some far-off unfathomable, parent-free wonderland. It represented unsupervised indulgence in all the fun things previously controlled— particularly booze, drugs, and sex.
Before I ever got here, my only glimpses into this Elysium were through the likes of Animal House and Van Wilder. So, I joined a thousand clubs and wrote a “dope” admissions essay, hoping to attain sweet salvation.
Well, it turns out that UVM is not overflowing with oversexed 24 year-old blonde actresses, and frats actually aren’t very cool at all (huge lack of toga parties). But because “the college experience” has been portrayed so idyllically, it was fun coming across some of those more realistic clichés firsthand.
Like returning to the dorm drunk at 3am only to hear a fumble of pants, the clanging of belts, and see your roommate’s rosy head sticking through the door begging, “can I get the room tonight?” Door slams.
Although very inconvenient, that kind of shit is a twisted rite of passage for freshmen. I just got sexiled for the first time. Sick!
By September, we discovered that partying in the dorms (taking shots among semi-muted voices depending on the “chillness” of the RA) was pretty lame, so we ventured off campus.
We were shocked by the upperclassmen, their dazzling displays of gnarly facial hair, and their stories of how, “everyone at UVM was like, so much cooler and shit back in ’03.” Our egos were deflated when we’d show up at apartment parties and heard the hot upperclassman girls lament, “ugh, there’re so many freshmen here.”
During those downtown adventures, we chatted with great anticipation about living off campus junior year. We learned which pharmacy is the sweetest beer hookup, and how to navigate the Burlington streets at night (my rule: uphill is back to campus).
During the day, we picked up on the little intricacies of living on campus: the need to run to the bathroom after eating at Cook Commons, the despair of not having a car, the urge to take a nap after reading The Cynic.
Freshman year is a state of mind. It’s the eagerness to understand tradition, the desire to find purpose, and the thirst to make a lasting mark.
We may not have fond memories of smoking in public on 4/20, or chilling at the Underground, but we’ll make our own legends. In the future, we’ll recall how sweet the food was at the Davis Center, and how back in 2008, the SLAP hunger strike actually did something.
Less than a year ago, the terms “rise and shiner,” and “North Beach,” meant nothing, and Kornbread was just something we ate at thanksgiving.
Now we’re all Johnny Depp at the end of Fear and Loathing speeding down the open road, a confident grin on our face, armed with self-conviction, searching for opportunity, ready for what comes next.
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