Being a senior girl at Oberlin is like being a made man with no operation beneath him. Nobody gets whacked in the cornfields.  The Feve accepts credit cards. The only profitable coke you’d opt to move is a drink people die in South America because of. Once you’re 21, Safety and Security recedes to the same part of your brain in which you might be prompted to wake up one day humming the theme to Ghostbusters. The only pay-off I made recently was to an old friend who helped me settle a bet pursuant to the conquest of a younger man’s affections. Last I checked, I had to wait in line for pierogies at Stevenson like everybody else. You should have seen the smug grin on the face of the Mudd lady as she counted out the six 20’s I’d handed her to pay my library fines. And no, I didn’t tell her to wipe that face off her head, b-tch.

Picture this: Free time, couch time, potluck, a creeping sense of both vigilance and doom, power and expiration, a passing visionary moment settled with a shrug, stoicism lost to self-deprecation, the burning fire of a last hurrah stamped out by the boiling urge to just head-butt the exit.

When I was a freshman, some bearded, bumbling, semi-improvised human confusing shamelessness with self-discovery wrote an article about me called “Poseidon Eyes” in this here very Oberlin Review. The senior guy, a hairy alpha-male aligning his own sexual entitlement with the insights of Darwin, who minutes after the article’s publication commandeered it as a way to woo me, is suddenly a person with whom I can almost sympathize: Now that it’s my turn on the couch, it’s really not quite so far-(off) a cry, “Who wants to smoke hookah? Who wants to f--- me?” 

At the ‘Sco, first-year girls in push-up bras are freaking with jocks from Zechiel, and I’m trying to crack the conundrum of getting a 19 year old to buy me a beer. By the way, we decided the bittie can be a boy if it’s a betty who’s macking. SILF replaces MILF as the objectifying acronym. And f--- you, because this column is not Sex and the City.

A curious thing happens. Remember middle-school?  Contemplating blow-jobs and bulimia, rolling my eyes until they got stuck in my head; crying over Holden Caulfield; being so resentful of my older brother that I had to settle for experiencing hand-me-down and therefore unauthentically the good-kind-of-pain over Kurt Cobain’s death; taking advanced math because of Good Will Hunting; writing teen angst poetry in anticipation of high school; wondering why Fiona Apple would want to appear as Kate-Moss-heroin-chic in “Criminal” the video. I suppose at each successive liminal stage of life, old themes re-emerge, loaded with inexhaustible ammunition:  I’m mature but I’m still making faces, know you’re not wrong but still think you’re an a--hole, cross off everything on my list but still cry at the Registrar’s, do the reading but miss class and tell myself it’s my get-out-of-jail-free-card.  And what do you know, this rhetorical device recalls that of Alanis Morrisette’s “Hand in My Pocket,” one of my favorite songs from my 4th grade year.  I used to have feist; now it’s a band name.

I don’t really like Boston, but think I’m living Goodfellas; they don’t teach Salinger in college, but they do teach David Copperfield; Elliot Smith took a knife to the heart and a hurricane devoured my city; and this has gotta be worse than pre-teen teen angst poetry.

I take long showers because the school’s paying for it, and study Canada until the water runs into my eyes and I can’t see.  Road trips loom ahead as possible panaceas for stultifying weekends.  The last time I scored was in an intramural soccer game, but boy was it worth it.  Once Wu-Tang Restaurant decides to hire me, I’ll be able to watch Premiership on my own couch.  Wanna come hang out?