>>> Points in Case
By staff writer Court Sullivan
Issue #5 – May 2000
-Subscribing to a newspaper to your dorm room is about the messiest thing ever. Every day you get to make your room a little messier. It’s like, “Yes, I’d like to subscribe to a year’s worth of shit on my floor.” The only good thing about having a week’s worth of newspaper scattered all over the floor is that it serves as a good “puke-protector” by the time the weekend comes. At least subscribing to “Points in Case” is clean and free.
-Speaking of paper on the floor, how annoying is it when you’re walking barefoot and stray papers stick to your foot?! It’s amazing how pissed off you can get at a piece of paper, but even when you try to shake it off it just hangs on. My roommate must wonder what the hell is going on as I’m standing in the middle of my room yelling “Goddamnit!” and shaking my foot like a maniac. Then I rip it from my foot in anger and end up stepping on it again a minute later.
-You know what the most worthless thing you can buy for school is? The 10-pack of ball-point pens. You put two on your desk, three in your backpack, one in your pocket, let two people borrow a pen, and by the time the week is over you’ve lost them all. Then the other 2 seem to last for the entire semester. What the hell is that?!
-I have a few shirts that I seem to wear all the time. They’re always laying around, but they seem pretty clean. Those are the “high-ground” shirts—the ones that find high places away from the floor, like on top of your dresser or bedpost, and somehow manage to avoid the dorm-floor filth. Then there’s the “bottom-feeder” shirts, which always attach themselves to the floor like those damn immobile fish in big fish tanks. I always hated those fish.
-What is the rule for washing shirts anyway? You can’t always wash a shirt just because you’ve worn it once. But then there’s the people who brag about not having done a wash since the beginning of the semester. It’s like, “Hey everyone, I’m the dirtiest fucking person on the hall!”
-There are three different kinds of people who come to your dorm room. The ones who knock out of courtesy and then kind of open the door as you’re saying “come in”. That’s normal. Then there are people who barge right in and just start looking around for something. Then they turn to you in frustration as if you’re the employee on duty and ask if you have something or where it is. Is there a sign on my door saying “Hi, we’re open!”?? NO! So knock like everyone else! But the people you want to smack the hardest are the timid people who knock lightly and you say “come in” and then they knock again and you yell “COME IN!” and then they barely crack the door like they’re going to walk in on something. “It’s unlocked for a reason dumbfuck!” Then you turn around and it’s some hot girl you’ve never talked to before, wanting to borrow duck tape or something. Damnit.
-I wonder what it was like when people used to be able to study at their desks. Now it’s just a place to put your computer. By the time you set up your monitor, speakers, and keyboard, there’s room for about half of your mouse pad. And there’s nothing more annoying than having to continually pick up your mouse and put it on the other side of the pad just to get the fucking arrow across the screen.
-They tell you that studying on your bed somehow psychologically screws you up, but I swear there are some people who think their bed is a desk. In fact, it’s usually the same people who end up using their bed as storage space for everything imaginable. They have shit piled up everywhere on their beds during the day! It takes them like half an hour just to clear off enough space to go to sleep.
-Last Tuesday the graduate students at the business school were having some afternoon picnic with 4 kegs and barbeque. A guy in my fraternity found out about it 45 minutes before it was over. Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that grad students could never finish 4 kegs, but this guy takes it upon himself to alert everyone immediately: “Brothers, the graduate students are in trouble and we must help them. Please show your support by coming to the Business School with pitchers and funnels.” Apparently this was a code red situation, because about 20 of us showed up promptly and inhaled all remaining alcohol. It’s like as soon as you’re a grad student you forget about all your responsibilities to the keg. Didn’t most of these people just graduate from college? What happened!
-For us undergrads, the entire purpose of college parties is to kick kegs. As soon as the kegs are kicked, it’s like a signal to either find another party with more beer in the kegs or find someone to hook up with. Everyone migrates to the same “next” party and steadily you begin to realize whether it’s your night to be a trooper and serve your duty to all remaining kegs on campus or to a member of the opposite sex. Both people wake up in the morning eventually, but only one can usually brag about his accomplishments…and boy do guys love to brag about how much they drank!
-Guys are so desperate to find reasons to hook up with just about anyone. Recently, one of my friends got defensive about hooking up with a girl who was not so cute. He responded, “I’m attracted to her physically, not facially.” Well said.
-Have you ever noticed how easy it is to spot a prospective student on campus? They can’t help it, they just stick out! Remember when you were just visiting the campus and you thought you could act cool and no one would notice you weren’t in college? Now it’s like, what the fuck were we thinking. It’s even funnier when they bring them through in big tour groups. It’s like they’re walking through a zoo pointing and staring at different animals. Except the kids in the morning tour groups complain that they can’t see the animals.
-Remember when you had to actually go to the store to buy T-shirts in high school? Now I get a new one for free every week. And you can pretty much recognize everyone’s T-shirt in college: it’s either the free credit card application T-shirt, the T-shirt from some soft-drink promotion, the uni-sport intramural champion T-shirt, a frat T-shirt, a dorm T-shirt, or some campus organization. A lot of them are even dated too, so you can tell just how old they are. That way, when you’re a senior, you can be that guy who always wears his outgrown shirts from freshman year.
-We just finished finals, and I was reflecting on which is worse, writing a paper, or studying for an exam. When you’re start studying for an exam, you can actually stare at the book and your notes and convince yourself that you’re getting something done. When you start a paper, you can keep staring at the computer and pretend you’re outlining the paper in your head or something, but no matter what, you still haven’t written a goddamn thing.
-Once you’ve gotten a paper started, the key to finishing it is to learn how to write the same thing over and over again in different ways. By varying your approach to sentence structure, you can repeat the same fucking ideas in order to complete your paper once you begin. See.
-College girls in particular have issues with cell phones. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in the library and all of a sudden some girl’s cell phone goes off. First of all, half of them have it programmed to play the loudest, most annoying ring possible like “it’s a small world after all” or some shit! Then they dig through their backpacks and purses like they can’t find it just so we can all hear the song ten times through. Then there’s these girls that say hello and carry on a conversation for the whole fucking library to hear! You try to ignore them, but the conversation is just so stupid you can’t help but listen and thank God you are somewhat normal.