https://autismwish.org/s7por1ci This is a piece I published in June in VICE.  You can read it THERE …or read it below.

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source url Every June, as I am admiring the pithy speeches full of carefully worded wisdom delivered by people of accomplishment to various cap and gown clad audiences, I have the same reaction. I breathe a sigh of relief for not having had to write one. Then I am pulled into a vortex of anxiety about what I would have said had I been asked.  What exactly did I learn from 4 years of college, (besides how to quickly sign up for graduate school when I couldn’t find a job?)

https://www.techonicsltd.com/uncategorized/dfyhz7s4 Well, one thing I learned is to roll my eyes when I hear people tell brand new high school graduates that “college will be the best four years of your life.” For some of us, those years were pretty rough..

https://ict-pulse.com/2024/07/3e16b3nv Lets start with the physiological reasons. First of all, your brain isn’t finished cooking. An idea as basic to clear thinking and smart decision making as ‘considering the consequences’ doesn’t become a permanent plug-in until your frontal lobe finishes hooking up in your late twenties. Its no accident that organizations like ISIS, AL QAEDA, and the NFL are made up entirely of people from this demographic.

https://thefooduntold.com/food-science/8fhiioa Although I never saw myself as a big risk taker, when I was a college freshman, I had no problem jumping into a car full of strangers who stopped me on the street and asked me if I wanted to attend a new kind of religious meeting. Absolutely! Make room for me! Fortunately it turned out to be a harmless evening of chanting but the fact that I didn’t mind heading off to an undisclosed location without telling a soul is just the kind of hairpin I was back then. Below is film of me made sometime in the early seventies, smoking and drinking by the extremely flammable acetylene tanks used for welding outside the UC Berkeley art building. The joke here was that there were signs everywhere saying this behavior was forbidden. Ha ha! Get it?

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click The good news is that life actually gets easier after graduation. So in the interest of reassuring struggling students, I offer this partial catalog of some of the many bad ideas I accumulated during my college years.

go click here Honesty is not always the best policy. Neither is spontaneity

Maybe it’s a post teenage reaction to all those years of gaining leverage with your parents by pretending to be someone you are not or the result of 12 years of taking tests that make you race a clock, but by the time you get to college you are pretty certain that the best thing you can do is let your raw feelings be known the minute you feel them. That makes them real https://etbscreenwriting.com/zwbq6grrd7 . Its important to be Tramadol Online Coupons authentic, right?

Well, yes and no. As it turns out, one of the biggest lessons life has to teach you is that its possible to say “ Let me think about that and get back to you.” when negotiating delicate issues with loved ones, leaving emotional voice mail messages, or texting in the middle of the night. This applies across the board.

In college, its not uncommon for people to over-share their feelings. Its not necessary to apply the ‘total honesty’ template to everything. It took me much longer than it should have to learn that the answer to “How are you?” does not have to be, “Well, I thought I was getting a headache but I took two Advil and a chewable zinc so now I’m better but I might be getting a cold.”

No.

The proper answer is “Fine.” Period.

Also, and this is big, you will discover that unless it connects to a life threatening situation, there’s not very much your partner needs to know about your sexual history or past indiscretions. In most cases: the less said the better. Honesty be damned.

Much later in life you will realize that there’s a reason why your parents wound up so “compromised”. It because when they were your age they did the same stupid shit you are planning to do and it didn’t work. That’s why they made up irritating cliches like “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

here https://www.inaxorio.com/elhitfg60 NATURAL IS ALWAYS BEST and other half baked ideas

At some point during college, some budding visionary will say to you “ I don’t get why we have to wear deodorant. What could be more natural than body odor? In fact, why do we have to wear clothes? We should be allowed to take off our clothes whenever we feel like it. “

To this there is only one reply: “Interesting. Get back to me after your frontal lobe finishes hooking up, and we can discuss the idea of the consequences that will result from a life lived stinky. Or naked.”

Baboon males murder their rivals. Sand tiger shark mothers eat their young. Matricide, infanticide, and homicide are commonly found in nature. That means they are natural too.

https://gsaudemarketing.com.br/cil5s5y2b Tramadol Prescription Online  ALWAYS DRINK AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE

Why drink at all unless you’re planning to drink unlimited quantities? Isn’t the goal of drinking to get really fucked up?

Not that long ago, I was talking to my college student nephew who was suffering from a bad hangover. I said “How much did you drink last night?” He said “Not that much.”

When asked to be specific, he added “Like four vodka shots. And eight beers. And a bottle of wine.” To which I replied “Actually, that is not only ‘that much’, its the clinical definition of ‘that much.’

When you are in college, people see evenings full of blacking out as ‘a rite of passage.’ If you still drink like that in your thirties, people will start to leave pamphlets at your house and want to talk to you about ‘your problem.’

I still shudder when I remember whatever that was in those monstrous toddler sized jugs of purple liquid we all passed around. Or that drive I made home from a party, so drunk that not until I stopped to pay a toll on the SF Bay Bridge did I realize I had come all that way with the emergency break still on. Then there was the time I was sitting at a table in the kitchen of my first apartment, drinking and talking about whatever while making little sculptures out of rubber cement and setting them on fire. Yes, I managed to damage the ceiling of the kitchen and no, I can’t explain my motives to you now except to say that it seemed like a good idea to me at the time. Its almost like its important to people that age to invent a couple of brand new ways a month to get killed or injured.

Tramadol Tablets Online follow url THE MAGICAL PRISM OF ‘POTENTIAL’

Everyone in college gets free points in “potential” just for attending. For only these four special years, a brooding student who is sleeping through classes and never turning in assignments can still seem like a genius or a prodigy, an embryonic Charles Bukowski or Sylvia Plath. Why? Because anyone can be anything! Who knows what will happen!

Sadly, after you graduate, the magic starts rapidly leaking out of that winsome notion. Now you only get points for what you actually DO. As this begins to occur to you, the anxiety can be overwhelming.

To put it more harshly, a moody 45 year old with a beautiful soul who is still ‘wasting their God given talent’ working at an automotive supply store is, in fact, a depressed person who works at an automotive supply store. Period. There are always exceptions but as a general rule, if you meet someone who is full of excuses about why they have never accomplished anything they set out to do, you’re probably looking at a personality disorder.

https://splendormedicinaregenerativa.com/20c2k0j88m5 here BAD SEX.

College sex is where your poorly developed ideas about spontaneity, substance abuse and passion for its own sake unite with your sense of yourself as a sophisticate to create a perfect storm. This was already a tinderbox before “campus rape culture” became a phrase you hear or read every day.

You may never again give a more poorly chosen group of people a roll in the hay than you do in college. Some of them will literally turn out to be people you would avoid sitting next to on public transportation. Others you will pretend not to recognize when you run into them years later.

Sexually speaking, there’s a lot of faking going on in college. But because college students wrongly believe that being in college means they have achieved some level of worldly refinement, they also assume that when a sexual misfire occurs and no one says a word about it, its probably because there is something terribly wrong with them.

The truth is that young guys barely know where anything is on a woman. (which is not to imply that they necesssarily know that much more after they graduate.) To any neophytes reading this, may I offer a valuable word of advice: If you suspect you don’t know what you are doing, you are probably fooling no one. In that case, for God’s sake, don’t do it harder.

https://brako.com/en/xaet8gevqx Buy Cheapest Tramadol FINDING THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE

You will never in any other period of your life have so many convoluted conversations about the meaning of existence with people who have given it almost no thought or have so little experience to back up their theories.

The good news is that unless you become a philosopher, an astro-physicist or someone who likes to sign up for New Age retreats, as time goes on you will stop thinking this is a problem you need to roll up your sleeves and solve.

https://www.adroitprojectconsultants.com/2024/07/25/6z55ercy57j go site CRUSHING DEBT

College loans are mandatory for many. There is no question that they leave a big scar. But in a variety of ways, you can have much better control over this in your adult life. Even better, in the future its unlikely that you will incur that much debt that quickly without also gaining possession of something fancy that will impress your friends.

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Living in a dorm is like agreeing to cohabit with everyone who shares your lane on the freeway. For that reason I am happy to report that unless you wind up in prison or sign up for a Carnival Cruise, you may never have to live with as random a group of wasters again.

follow url Tramadol Online Uk Reviews THE TEDIUM OF WRITING COHERENTLY

Your college papers may be the last coherent writing you ever have to do where you will be carefully judged and critiqued on your ability to substantiate an argument or assimilate a piece of material. Blogging, song lyrics, poetry, political speeches, legal briefs, government policy and literary masterpieces are just a few of the areas of post graduate writing that will not require you to make any sense.

More good news: As far as I know, there is still no law that says you have to become a writer.

https://www.pathwaysmagazineonline.com/l45dibiem https://www.inaxorio.com/0y02x6lqn1w THE TREACHERY OF BEING COOL

During your college years, a frightening premium is placed on having a lot of insider knowledge about transitory things. You must keep your head down and master the art of the wry but all knowing facial expression as you commit to memory the details of a seemingly limitless list of bands, sports stars, cutting edge Improv groups, comedians, cast members of SNL, comic book artists and poet/philosophers your generation thinks are the game changers. You will also need to attend a lot of events in support of all of these things wearing the right kind of clothes and consuming the right kind of substances.

On the bright side, it turns out that this is so much work, the list has no expiration date. As you get older, you will be unwilling to waste that much time on pop culture ever again. Many adults hold onto the list they learned in college for the rest of their lives.

see go here WHITE KNUCKLE STUDYING

You will never again study as hard for something you don’t specifically need to know. In your real life, studying will be related to things like the DMV.

However do not make the mistake of believing that the only point of being in college is to get a good grade. In fact you will find that many of the important people you meet later and/or employers will never ask to see your college transcripts. They will, however, expect you to actually know stuff.

This is why the biggest waste of your time is finding ways to cheat. Use your time to develop an affinity for learning.

College is a fantastic place to develop secondary and tertiary passions. Look for things that interest you outside your “requirements” because they will come in very handy later in life to help heal the wounds that come from being kicked hard in the primary passion center. That will definitely happen, no matter what you pursue. You will get knocked down in your area of expertise and have to pick yourself up again.

Secondary passions help you keep going. By caring about botany or literature or abnormal psychology, you will be better able to maintain your sense of purpose as a member of humanity.

So on balance, while your college years may not be the best four years of your life, you can definitely turn them profitable if you make a point of training yourself to be excited by the learning. Its not only the greatest gift. but it’s also a path to joy as you enter the more sedentary but generally happier years of greater maturity where you can look forward to less vomiting and fewer crab infested sex partners.