I am never alone in college. Sure, I have the elevator to myself occasionally and sometimes my roommate is at class when I’m not, but usually there is always someone else nearby. This is drastically different from my high school experience.

Of course I would spend every high school moment from that morning bell—which seemed to ring earlier and earlier as my senior year wore on—to the final bell with my friends by my side. I was part of a bunch of different groups, all of which met after or before school and surrounded me with people. But at home, I had solitude.

With both my parents working and my brother off at college, I spent many nights doing homework, watching bad television and heating up leftovers all by myself. Some may think that would be lonely, but I really liked the peace and quiet.

It’s never quiet here. And sometimes I like it; with all the commotion, I haven’t had time to get homesick or have a culture shock freak out. There’s a feeling of community when I walk around campus and see someone I know or when I strike up a conversation with a stranger in the dining hall. Yet every once in awhile I realize… I never have a moment to myself. Read More »

While biking up an extraordinarily large and difficult hill in Spin class this morning (made even more difficult by the night of binge drinking that preceded it), I was startled out of my zone by a rather raucous shout of, “COME ON, BABY!” I wasn’t sure who was screaming, or who baby was, but I didn’t care; I lost my groove. I started feeling the pain in my legs, the burning in my quads, and my whole ride was off. But I kept going. And so did she.

“WOO”“LET’S DO THIS!”“PEDAL. DO IT DO IT DO IT.” It was quite clear that this loud and rather burly woman was screaming at herself - pushing herself – but, why? Was there something wrong with internal dialogue?? With all the adrenaline pumping through my body, I wanted to pull a Christopher Carter and knock that bitch off her bike. Read More »

“See? This is us in my living room? Isn’t he cute? He’d be so much cuter if his face wasn’t squished by my head…”

This sentence isn’t offensive on it’s own, but couple it with an hour’s worth of similar utterances, and you’ve got one of the most annoying situations in life: The Girl Who Won’t Stop Talking About Her Boyfriend.

I was recently in the presence of such a girl, and found myself silently contemplating all the ways in which I could force her mouth shut permanently.

Trying to do work around one of these female specimens is impossible. You just can’t do it. No matter how interested you try to make yourself look in whatever work is in front of you, Girl Who Won’t Stop Talking About Her Boyfriend will continually engage you in superficial drivel.

The shallow conversation she tries to engage you in will always be one-sided, however. Even though she’ll ask you questions that will keep you away from you work, she’ll routinely answer those questions herself, not having even a second to wait while you search your head for something remotely friendly to say.

Girl Who Won’t Stop Talking About Her Boyfriend usually picks single people to torture. It’s a subconscious, animal-like sense that she has about her—she can smell singleness like a shark smells bloody fish heads. Read More »