College Isn't Like Movies About College (But My First Day Kind of Was)

The 80s was full of wacky college movies and maybe, since I was just a child, I don't seem to get the appeal of them. There's Animal House, St. Elmo's Fire and Revenge of the Nerds. Then Van Wilder, and I guess to a certain extent, the American Pie series, decided the "reach out" to my generation. I've seen very few of these, not because of their inaccuracy, but because of their lack of appeal. Though their inaccuracies may be part of the reason these movies seem pretty lame. The premises are mostly the same. Drink, get laid, don't get kicked out of school, repeat. So basically they're like high school movies, except there's drinking every day and not at a end of the year party, so I guess in that regard, these movies are relatively kind of accurate.

I never had the idealized version of college that these movies presented, mostly because I had no interest in joining a frat, and a lot of these movies center around getting in a frat, being in a frat, or waging war on another frat. I just wanted college to be a lot better than high school, and that hope was definitely fulfilled. There were no crazy parties (there were parties), there were no Girls Gone Wild moments, no crazy drug freak outs, but I definitely matured as a person and became less sheltered. I really didn't know what to expect going into college other than it was going to be different than high school. It was something that I realized immediately.

I moved into the dorms a couple days into Welcome Week because I wanted to catch a concert in San Diego before I moved in. Once I got my stuff in the dorms, and got my parents to finally leave, I went to go see all my friends that I had made at summer orientation (sadly I keep in touch with 0 of them now). This was before I had a cell phone (back in the year 2000...) so I would occasionally find myself knocking on a door with nobody home. The one person I really wanted to see was my friend Gwen, who I had bonded over Radiohead with during the aforementioned summer orientation program. We had kept in touch over the summer, and I had found the Kid A leak on Napster. Her dorm wasn't too far from mine so I decided I needed to tell her of my awesome find immediately.

Over our e-mails during the summer, I knew a few things about her: she had a boyfriend who went to a college up north, she was getting a single room (no roommate), and we liked a lot of the same music (Radiohead aside). What I didn't know was that these three facts were going to make my introduction to college extremely uncomfortable. See, when I knocked on her door, I could hear music and I could hear Gwen giggling, so I was pretty sure she was there (no roommate). When she opened the door she was in a towel, so I felt kind of embarassed, that I was catching her on her way to her shower. She was happy to see me and asked for a second so she could change and of course, I obliged. So she opened the door, full clothed, and invited me in, only for me to find a corpse in her bed. She introduced the corpse to me as her boyfriend, who got up and shook my hand. He was a nice guy, I told her about my Kid A find, and she was excited. She invited me to brunch with her and her boyfriend and I told her I'd get her a copy of the leak then. I left the room and immediately started to process everything: she wasn't going for a shower and there was a reason that music was playing in her room... and I almost started to hyperventilate.

Even with 4 older sisters, I have never walked in on anyone having sex or anything even close. I'm pretty sure this was the first and only time in my life that anything like this had happened. Luckily Gwen made it as easy as possible on me. If we were in the movies, this event would've played out differently. I would've knocked to no answer, opened the unlocked door and would've heard her scream at the top of her lungs. He would've chased me out of the dorms with a baseball bat and I would've found refuge in the skanky girls sorority house to which more embarassment would probably be doled out.

Lucky for me, college wasn't like the movies.