FollowThey say college is a time to reinvent yourself. And this is true. The fetters are off, all those personas you always wished you could have held are now yours for the taking as you situate yourself in a new location away from your friends and family who have known you for years. There’s no one familiar around to help perpetuate the person you’ve always been before.
Now, in this transformation process you don’t want to look like some wannabe. You really have to sell that you’ve been this new and improved you since pre-college. Retroactively reinvent yourself, or in laymen’s terms: lie.
This is My Fair Lady and you’re Audrey Hepburn. As a recent graduate of freshman year, I have the credentials to be your coach, teaching you all the cadences and particularities of the new type of person you want to be.
And I probably have a good idea of who the old you is because, to be frank, considering you will be attending UC Berkeley, the old you was probably a huge loser in high school. No shame in it. Don’t worry.
You’ve probably been shoved into your fair share of lockers, are pretty familiar with what the bottom of a toilet bowl looks like, and your various body parts have grown numb to the effects of purple nurples, wet willies, Charlie horses, and much much more.
While you were integrating disks and washers, your friends were probably out on alcohol fueled lawless orgy adventures.
But alas, your suffering will be no longer, because the Berkeley admissions office has whisked the nerdiest of the nerdiest from high school and congregated them in some sort of weird social experiment, exposing these kids to things they were previously blind to like alcohol, sex, and laundry.
In this bizarre new world, the power dynamics of yore have been dismantled and there’s a new social hierarchy in place, one that you can master no matter what your previous class denomination might have been. Typically the upper echelon nerds verging on lower echelon cool kids in high school will assume the top of the food chain in their new environment. But this is not a caste system; with some good acting chops and a bit of elbow grease you could end up King of Cal if you were once a straight up nerd or even a lower echelon nerd.
With a few easy lessons I’ll have you saying, “The reason we are lacking rain in Berkeley is plain and simple: we are in a drought” the way a cool kid does.
1. Talk the Talk
There are two very important vocabulary words that you need to learn. The first one is, and I don’t have to tell you NorCal natives, “hella.” The other word is “dank.” In a place of higher learning one would expect that bright young students would increase their vocabulary over four years, but thanks to these two simple words, you can utter far fewer words and sound like a college educated caveman.
For today’s etymology lesson: hella is a contraction of “hell of a,” meaning really or very, and originating from San Francisco. The American lexicon adopted the word when James Hetfield of Metallica introduced the word to pop culture, through song lyrics and interviews in the 80’s – or at least that’s what Wikipedia tells me.
The word “dank,” in it’s archaic form, means “disagreeably damp, musty, and typically cold.” Now the word means, good, great, and everything in between. Originally the word was appropriated to describe particularly potent marijuana. Since weed dispensaries are far more accessible than, let’s say, college advisors in Berkeley, the word caught on.
With these two weapons in your arsenal you no longer have to use any adjectives. Everything can either be “hella something” or “not hella something,” or “dank” or “not dank.” And if you’re feeling really saucy, you can even call something hella dank (warning: use in extreme cases only).
If you talk like this all of your innocent freshman friends will think you’re a pro.
2. Don’t be a Noob
You must approach every new situation as if it’s second nature. When some twerpy freshman claims they’ve been doing something their whole life, get to the task at hand and look like a helpless that just shat themselves, it inspires a certain kind of infuriation and disgust that leaves me pondering why God would be so cruel to put them on this Earth.
One thing that people miserably fail at in particular is shotgunning a beer. This one might not be too difficult for you nerds to pick up, considering it’s all about fluid mechanics. Lucky for you, you can transfer a skill that made you a huge nerd in high school and apply it to something that will make you cool in college.
Here’s how: hold the beer can horizontally with the bottom tipped slightly upwards. With a key puncture a whole in the bottom part of the can, where an air pocket will now have formed. Put your mouth over the hole, make the beer can vertical, and open the tab. All you have to do is keep your gullet open and fluid mechanics will do the rest.
If you do this with ease your peers will respect you and maybe even be sexually attracted to you.
3. Join a Sorority or Fraternity
Greek life is sort of like the Catholic Church or Little League in that you can experience a sense of belonging to a community, make lifelong friends, and have precious memories. But also like the two, some of the core tenets are controversial and if you speak out about any of the three organizations you might find yourself with a little red laser dot in the middle of your forehead.
If one analogy wasn’t enough to describe Greek life, here’s another. If you’re playing a game of chutes and ladders, landing on a ladder is sort of like joining a fraternity or sorority, while landing on a chute is sort of like living in Foothill.
And for a third analogy: Greek life is sort of like lunch tables in high school. Greek life is the cool kids table. But, there’s even a hierarchy within the cool kids’ table. So you could sit at the coolest part of the cool kids table if you join the right frat or sorority. With a few easy payments, you can sit at the table you could only dreamed of sitting at in high school.
4. Make Up a Good Back Story
You’re going to want to tell people that you were cooler than you actually were, but not too cool, or you’ll be exposed as the fraud that you are. The first rule is that you shouldn’t lie about where you’re from and definitely don’t do fake accents. I’ve seen it and it will make you look like a psychopath.
If you wind up in some sitcom-esque situation where you cross paths with someone who grew up in your supposed hometown you could completely blow your cover and lose your status, while if you succeed in convincing someone that you grew up in a cooler place than you actually did, you will only be perceived as a little bit cooler. The risk is much higher than the reward.
Also, don’t brag about your sexual conquests. Potential baes do not want to hear about your past backseat make outs and most people see right through a fabricated story of the best sex of your life. Moral of the story: people won’t think you’re cool, they will suspect you have tiny genitalia.
The best way to reveal your past coolness is to do it implicitly. For example, you could borrow your cool friend’s letterman jacket and then take a picture of yourself posing like John Heisman. The same applies for cheerleading outfits. Then hang the picture on your dorm wall next to the one of you photoshopped with the hottest guy/girl in your grade at prom. Your roommate will think you’re cool and spread the word all over campus.
That’s all you really need to know. Now you’re a proper cool kid. Enjoy taking all that pent up resentment from high school and transferring it into vicious social climbing to spite all those who were way cooler than you just a year before.
To the class of 2019: welcome to the land of opportunity, scrubs!
No Comments