College boys love their caps

Weather: Icy. Very icy. (I just don’t want to fall and die…)
Freshman Fifteen: Actually, I lost weight over Winter Break. But it’s back now.
Classes: Fiction writing, concepts of mathematics, statistics, biology, emotion/cognition, and a student-taught course about the status of females in America.
No. of Times Locked Out of Room: 2.
Pints of Ben & Jerry’s Consumed: 1/2.

One important thing I’ve learned — something that will probably prove to be much more useful than memorizing the base-pairs of DNA but slightly less useful than successfully balancing a sandwich, drink, cookies and fruit all the way from the student center to my dorm — is that college boys love their caps.

Technically, it’s not just caps; any headgear will do. My roommate actually came home crying one night because a frat boy got mad at her for keeping his favorite visor. (Said visor was obtained by my roomie in a poker match that said frat boy supposedly took an entire week to recover from.)

Most of the guys on my floor, including my RA Andy and my friends Ryan and Dave, are obsessively, notoriously protective of their sports caps (for the Redwings, Red Sox, and Cornhuskers, respectively). Ryan is actually quite the prankster, so when we were outlining the boundaries of just what exactly was prank-able and what was not, I asked about his hat. His only response was a glare and a low growl akin to that of a mother lion protecting its den. I took that to mean it was off-limits.

I think the affinity boys have for their hats directly relates to the fact that they don’t have to clean them. Quite possibly the only thing worse than spilling something onto your favorite pair of jeans is having to wash it off. Most college students, boys and girls — though boys are generally much worse about it — dread laundry day like no other. Come Sunday night, that 8-page paper isn’t looking quite so bad, especially in comparison to the pile of clothing that started smelling back on Wednesday. But then again, today’s the last day of clean underwear, so the options are pretty grim either way.

The luckiest people are the kids who go home for the weekends. Sure, they don’t get to enjoy the best part of the week with their buddies, but they also don’t have to sort every item of clothing they own into whites, lights, brights, darks and delicates. The unluckiest people are the mothers of the kids who go home for the weekends.

Actually, in all seriousness, I do feel kind of sorry for my friends who leave Friday nights and return Monday mornings. It’s all well and good to see your parents — I really and trully miss mine — but part of going to college is taking a step away from home. I might be wrong, but if you’re living on a meal plan during the week and mommy’s cooking on Saturday and Sunday, I don’t think you’ve taken much of a step.

And of course, my criticism of those dependencies have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my own options are so limited. (Nothing at all.) But while we’re on the subject, no I can’t go home, no I can’t give my dirty laundry to my mom, and no I can’t sit and do crosswords with my dad on a lazy Sunday afternoon. To be honest, it’s really weird, if you think about it too much, to realize that you can talk to your parents with a phone, and only with a phone. That the fastest you can get home is in 3 hours, not counting the time it takes to buy tickets and get to the airport. That the people you’ve dealt with day-in and day-out for 18 years are gone, living on their own like they did before you were born, and you’re, to some extent, on your own too.

Yes, very weird indeed.

But when you’re happy, at college and at home, you learn to appreciate being in each place when you’re actually there, and to not miss the other place so much that you get sad. Because if you do let yourself ache and long too much, you’re just wasting your own time.

Speaking of enjoying college life — and not wasting time — I have a picture to email to one of my floor mates. I’m pretty sure he’ll agree that his hat looks pretty good on my pig. Almost as sure as I am that he’ll pay the ransom…