Life Lessons for a College Freshman

Yesterday I got the chance to visit my brother Brian during his summer orientation at my alma mater, the University of St. Thomas.

When I showed up to meet him, he was sitting quietly near the end of one of the tables in the cafeteria, stuck sitting by a few uninteresting students. I felt bad for him when I sat down, quickly realizing that while the two guys near him seemed nice enough, they were apparently incapable of a conversation beyond the level of “this food sucks.” There was a cute girl seated next to him who had the attention of a number of young men at the table, but she was clearly incapable of talking about anything other than herself. Her words quickly became a dull drone about her future career options that I found deeply irritating. This is something that Brian is going to have to get used to at St. Thomas.

In the past, I (like every man) was guilty of giving a boring girl my attention, just because I thought that if I seemed like a nice enough guy, then maybe she would like me. Since St. Thomas features an abundance of beautiful, vacuous women, I ended up wasting a hell of a lot of time during my first two years of college trying to maintain any reasonable semblance of interesting conversation with these overly tan make-up recepticles. Looking back, I don’t understand why I ever thought that I had a chance with these girls – I was afraid to be myself and I resembled an unnatural combination of a young Neil Diamond and Dallas Mavericks center Shawn Bradley.

Once I became aware of what was going on, I quickly shifted from this meek, ineffectual position and re-directed my frustration into efforts to horrify and alienate women. A favorite game of mine in college was to engage a drunk girl and see how long I could make fun of her to her face before she realized what I was doing. My friends often coaxed me into this, and a favorite pastime of theirs also become recreational alienation. Among my favorite memories was the time that my friend Pete Fritz approached a girl at a bar and said to her, “Hi, I’m Pete. If I had to pick one word to describe myself, it would be ‘racist’.”

I feel badly that Brian will have to learn to navigate the world of beautiful women for himself. The initial stages of this journey can be both intimidating and intoxicating, and filled with false successes and moral victories. It is imperitive that he move beyond these stages and allow himself to be motivated solely by hatred and fear of women. Brian must drink deep from this forbidden goblet of malice and quench his soul in the waters of estrangement. He must find other men who will join him on this perilous journey through the dark forests of discomfort and inelegance. He will be tested down to the very fibers of his being, but if he emerges alive, he may become even more clumsy with women than his legendary older brother.

Godspeed, young squire.