Things To Know About Your College Year

AH, WELCOME TO THE WANING DAYS OF AUGUST. A quick survey of the failing calendar finds us grasping helplessly at the fading days of summer, fumbling awkwardly towards the unknown post-Labor Day universe. It is time to reflect on a season of basking in the glow of sunshine and freedom. It is a time to consider the onslaught of autumn, and with it, inevitable change. A time to get one last fuck in with the dude or dudette you’ve been lovin’ up on all summer, before you both return to your normal lives.
Postcard-esque, isn’t it? Classic Americana. Norman Rockwell shit.
But what next?
For many a young American, it’s time for that step away from parents’ basements, and into the carefree, debt-inducing, alcohol- and sex-fueled world of college. Many a periodical will attempt to walk you through the perils and promise of university life, but not Headshots. We’re going to tell you what is guaranteed to happen to you over your freshman year of post-secondary life.

1. You Will Become An Asshole

 

This is the sad truth. You’re going to be exposed to writers and writings and thinking that will blow your fucking mind. Žižek, Foucault, the good Shakespeare they don’t let you read in high school, Woolf, Saunders, de Beauvoir, Kant, Zupančič. The list is infinite. Your understanding of fiction, philosophy, family, physiology, psychology, and fucking will be changed forever.
The problem is, you won’t truly understand any of it until sophomore or junior year, so your twisted little brain will espouse a Sparknotes version during petty bar arguments, and you’ll look like a total dick to anyone who read the second 20 pages of any of the texts from the authors above.

2. You Will Know Heartbreak

 

This is inevitable. Even the virgins will have their hearts torn from their chests, thrown to the floor, and danced on. Love, or what passes for love, infects freshmen like syphilis on frosh week, except there’s no ointment that can treat the ailment of heartbreak. You’ll try everything to win that heart back (alcohol, drugs, poetry) but in the end, hearts broken are rarely mended, and hearts stolen are rarely returned.
Your only recourse is to hope that pity sex or revenge sex from an ex’s vengeful best friend or roommate finds you. It ain’t love, but it ain’t nuthin’. And ain’t nuthin’ worse than nuthin’.

3. You Will Learn That Dudes Are All Douchebags

 

Look, Headshots is a man. At least, that’s what our doctor tells us. What we’re saying is: We have a penis. There’s 22-and-a-half women who can confirm that. So we have some experience with being a man, or a boy rather, in our late teens and early 20s. And that demographic consists of the worst people over. WORST. PEOPLE. EVER. (Besides grad students, obvi).
An 18- to 25-year-old male will stab himself in the back for the tiniest taste of some yum yum, the smallest piece of a coed’s hoohoo, the slightest survey of a girl’s syllabus. And then once they’ve savored the salty treat, once they’ve stuck their works cited in a coed’s endnotes, they’ll throw it away and move on to the next course.
Ladies, my advice? Go lesbian — or at least bi — until you get to grad school.

4. You Will Develop a Dependency on Substances

 

This is where the good times come in. Well, good times in a sad, self-defeating, self-destructive kind of way.
You’ve left the care of your parents, though you’re still cashing their checks, and eventually someone will hand you an alcoholic beverage, a marijuana cigarette, a pill of some sort, a powder of some kind, and you’ll indulge because at that given moment you’re either sad, or happy, or hopeful, or woeful, or just plain fucking bored, and you’ll like it. You’ll like how it makes you smarter, hotter, more confident, less you, more the other guy or gal.
For a while (or like for many of us the rest our time on God’s green earth) you’ll manage these indulgences. But somewhere down the line, one of them will become your friend, your fiend, your love. Be careful. And make sure it’s not heroin.
That shit’ll kill you like mayonnaise.

5. You Will Never Want to Leave

 

The image we’ve created above is not meant to scare you into a trade school or a lifetime of barista-ing. These are not horror stories, but rather tales of warning, born of experience.
Truth is, freshman year of college will be the best (and worst) year of your life. And sophomore year will build on the latter’s victories and defeats, as will junior, as will senior. And then, because you’ve become so enamored with the life, with learning but not working, with spending but not earning, with living but not committing, you’ll go on to grad school, or at least delay graduation (and gratification, something we hope you’ll learn by the end of your sophomore year, amirite ladies?) because that place in time that is the bliss of college is finite, and you’ll want to stay there forever.
But you can’t. Because you owe the government $45K. So you’ll need a job. And let us be as honest with you now as we’ve ever been: Jobs suck