Sophomore Year-In-Review

I said at the end of my Freshman Year-In-Review that I'd write another one of these as soon as year number two was knocked down, and here we are. So it's time to espouse the wisdom that can only come from another 30 credits of smart squeezed into my brain, and the experience that comes from having those credits wiped out by hundreds of cans of beer.

The Good:

  • Classes: Once again, classes manage to be surprisingly good, and there were only a few that I regret having taken. For whatever reason, last year was significantly harder. I must have gotten that much smarter from a summer of data entry.

  • Polisci 103: Intro to International Relations. Ow. This class was hard and dense, but interesting. Like a brick with an encyclopedia written on it. Unfortunately, the professor was drier than Bea Arthur's vagina and the class was all theory and no modern application. Okay though.

  • Polisci 209: Intro to Political Theory. Sounds boring, kinda interesting. The big plus here was that the entire class was spent going over the readings, so no reading was required. Because of this class, I hate Plato, Rousseau, and Marx even more than before, but now not because they are long and boring, but because they are wrong.

  • Polisci 217: Legal Studies. I was in the wrong damn class. Do I look like I'm prelaw? Maybe so, but I'm not.

  • Econ 102: What sort of sadistic professor makes a final with 70%? Jerk. But an interesting class nonetheless, as it provides plenty of ammunition to fire at your socialist-leaning friends. With graphs.

  • Journalism 201: A steaming pile of crap. Here you can learn about how the conservative controlled media spends all it's time sucking the cock of big business. And after that, the professor was surprised when he got an email complaining about his liberal bias. We had to read a book called "What Liberal Media" for chrissakes. It's be like assigning Ann Coulter and claiming you were trying to be neutral.

  • Philosophy 101: Big ass waste o' time. Not uninteresting, but not worth a whole semester of dumb kids trying to sounds smart by attempting to debunk pholosophical theory that has been upheld for hundreds of years. Obviously they know something academia doesn't.

  • English 169: Intro to Modern American Lit. This might not be so lame if we actually read good books. What was the professor's selection for poetry? Ginsburg? Frost? Eliot? Nope. We read Ron Wallace, UW poet leaureate, who writes like a pretentious Shel Silverstein. At least we got to watch Fight Club.

  • Com Arts 250: Intro to TV, Film, and Radio. I could have taken this class when I was twelve. Com Arts Majors are among the dumbest people in the school, consisting mostly of football players, sorority girls, and art pussies. The class had a lab even, which was spent watching such classics as The X-Files and Back to the Future.


Apartment Living: Beats the holy hell out of living in the 12x12 prison cell with an even crazier roommate that is the dorm room. Even though our apartment was shit, it was still approximately one bajillion times better. And living with a girlfriend turned out amazingly not bad. She never once had to be beaten with a sock with an orange in it (which leaves no bruises, for those of you uninitiated into the fine art of domestic abuse). I could smoke in the apartment without setting off fire alarms, yell after 11, and jerk it with much less paranoia because Emily, unlike my old roomate, comes home at predictible times. Sweet.

Classy Drinking: Unlike last year, the lot of us actually drank pretty well. Gin and tonic was my choice for the year, and we never had worse gin than Tanqueray (I just learned Fleischmann's makes gin, the thought of which makes me shudder). We also drank way more PBR than Blatz, which is unquestionably a step up. Wine was also consumed, and not just from a box. If you want the best bang for your buck, go for Yellowtail. It's not just good, it's good enough. This isn't to say we didn't have our nights of drinking spacebags (box wine sans box) and whatever bits of cheap liquor we could mix together, but we definitely improved our record.

Staying Home: Hands down, the best nights we had of drinking and hanging out were when we didn't leave the house. Why brave the weather and a housefull of assholes and freshman only to be rewarded with a warm cup of Milwaukee's Best Light and a shirt drenched in beer? Most weekends we proudly stayed home, drank, and played videogames with wild abandon, waking up to an inredible level of fith that usually wasn't cleaned up until the following Thursday. Not to mention the cumulative effect of half-assed cleaning jobs has left an eighth of an inch of 100% pure colombian nasty shit coating my apartment. I wish I had scotchgard.

The Bad:

Dishes: Living in an apartment is great and all, but if there is one thing I hate, it's doing dishes. As long as I can remember, I have been spoiled by living in a house with a dishwasher, and now that I don't, I'm suffering. It's a downward spiral, because the more dishes build up, the less I want to do them, until the sink has turned into its own ecosystem mimicking the conditions under which life was created on earth. Ick. But they must be done, and unfortunately I am usually the one to do them because Emily is "employed". Just turn the TV up real loud and pay attention to that instead of the fossilized chunk ranch dressing about to fall on your shoe.

The City of Madison: This is not to say that Madison is some hick-ass cowtown (only almost), but there just ain't shit to do here that I haven't already done. I've basically ate at all the restaurants I can afford, spent too much time in the unions, seen all the sights and been everywhere that's worth going and not worth going, even the suburbs (shudder). Walking up and down state and eating at Noodles & Company can only amuse a man so many times. At least Target is always fun. The sad thing is that having access to a car hasn't made the city any less boring, because it gives me tho ability to go out to Wal-Mart and Circuit City and even (gasp) Bed, Bath, and Beyond! I'm sure once I can hit the bars a whole new realm of the city will open up to me, because that's all anyone here does anyway. Maybe the worst city to be straight-edge, second only to New Orleans. But you don't deserve to have fun if you're straight-edge, so fuck you.

Eating: One never really realizes how much they take dorm food for granted until they have to cook on their own. Oh, how I long for the sweet flavor of the saturday morning breakfast cheeseburger. Everything I eat now comes from the freezer or a box. I literally live in constant fear of scurvy. The one source of vitamins I have is my bi-weekly pound of bagged carrot sticks. Everything else is just caloric filler, such as pudding cups, frozen salisbury steak, and flavor ice. My advice to anyone who is new to cooking for themselves: Don't buy anything that will go bad within six months. You won't use all of it, and it will only serve to give your fridge a delightfully pungent aroma. Maybe I'll resort to home canning and pickling. Or maybe I should just stop being so fucking lazy and fry a damn egg.

The Ugly:

House Parties: Last year, these were under "The Bad". This year, it's gotten that much worse. I don't know if people have become bigger assholes or there are just more of them, but it's not even worth going out anymore unless we are desperate to get drunk and fresh out of Robitussin and rubbing alcohol. Maybe they weren't so bad last year because drinking at home (the dorm)could mean you'd end up in all manner of deep shit, but I actually think the whole scene has gotten worse. The girls are bitchier, the guys are sleazier, and everyone has regressed into retarded alcoholic cavepeople.

Being Employed: At the begining of the year, I tried to get a job. No luck. In the middle of the year, I tried to get a job. No luck. Right now I'm trying to get a job. Definitely no luck. I can't believe that everyone else in the city is somehow more qualified that me, despite the fact that I have witnessed some of the most egregious examples of shitty customer service ever, including witnessing a Blockbuster employee roll his eyes and sigh loudly when asked if they had a movie. I know better than to basically tell a cutomer to "get the fuck out, you're interrupting my important work of sitting at the register and possibly jerking off" when they ask a simple question. Yet that guy is hired, and I am not. Bastards, all of you.

The Drama: I don't know that the fuck was in the air this year, and I'm not going to go into specifics, but what the hell is wrong with everyone? It seems like everyone I know had huge problems with their roomates, friends, or significant others. I blame it on people being dumb as hell. Somehow Emily and I managed to escape largely unscathed, despite the fact we're dating AND living together. I'm surprised nobody is dead.

And that's the breakdown for the year of the sophomore. It may seem self-absorbed to broadcast my thoughts to the lot of you, but heed them, and let them serve as a warning to those of you younger and less observant/brilliant than I. Like I said, self-absorbed.