Game over

This is the last one. After six semesters of writing about squirrels and Britney Spears and working in the word “hottie” as often as possible, I’m graduating.\nI don’t agree with goodbye-themed columns in principle, but here we are. I feel I owe some closure to the three people who actually read this – Mom, Dad and Shakira. OK, I’ll be honest. My mom and dad stopped reading my column long ago after the novelty wore off. Gracias, Shakira. Ésto es para tí.\nAs I prepare to leave the undergraduate ‘hood, I have so many questions about life after college. Will it still be socially acceptable to use a plastic storage bin as a punch bowl? Will my peers still recreationally destroy furniture and other various household items? Will a man dressed as some sort of super hero still throw free condoms and Tootsie Rolls at me from a moving van as I walk down the street?\nI guess this is where I’m supposed to list off my favorite college experiences. Using staplers, buying textbooks, waiting for the bus, checking out hotties – these are the memories I can share with my grandkids. When seniors start reminiscing, they usually dwell on the happy and rosy memories. Let’s mix it up, shall we?\nMy first real IU experience – freshman orientation – was terocious. (“Terocious” is a combination of terrible and atrocious. Borrow it if you like.) After a pitiful seminar where orientation staffers tried to use the word “diversity” as often as humanly possible as if it would somehow make us forget that we were sitting in a sea of homogonous white kids, I decided to skip out on the rest of the day’s sessions and take a nap in my allotted dorm room. As soon as I snuck away from the pack I got lost on campus. For an hour.\nIn my evening leisure time I wandered around Wright Quad and was accosted by an orientation leader who gave me a bag of free Pizza Express breadsticks.\nFree food is the ultimate way to win new friends, right? Wrong. I went back to the dorm, excited about the inevitable popularity breadsticks would bring.\nAs soon as I shouted down the hallway, “Who wants free breadsticks?” everyone started shutting their doors in my face.\nIf any of you door-shutting, free-food elitists are reading this right now, I hope you have to pay for every breadstick you get for the rest of your life. \nBut don’t pity me. In my four years of undergraduate studies I’ve made many wonderful friends (more than 250, according to Facebook) who have assured me that they would gladly take a breadstick from me any day of the week.\nFor three years I’ve thought about what I would say here in this last column.\nNever forget the lessons of college. Like don’t try to make friends with breadsticks. It doesn’t work, even if you’re a hottie. Please recycle. Insert love-related Beatles lyric here.