It was one of those countless nights, when we should have been outside in this fleeting weather, recklessly indulging in the ephemeral fall bliss, trying to convince the younger kids that here at Oberlin College, we are at once defiantly-stoned, world-traveled and foreverlounging. And when you are a senior, you should aspire to be as high and soaring as the frisbees we send gliding through the air in defiance of the coming winter winds, depression, isolation, hibernation. But instead, we shrugged our senior responsibilities and lay strewn like dirty clothes across the couch, paused The Office because we had an idea we needed to talk about: Oberlin should really just be a two-year community college.

“It’s great when you’re young. It’s nurturing, perfect. But then you grow and Oberlin doesn’t grow with you.”

“That’s what I love about Oberlin: I get older, it stays the same age.”

“Yeah, except I don’t love it.”

“When we were younger, we had older boys; now the older boys are our age, and all we can do is look to the young ones.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Oberlin could change as you changed?”

“But it doesn’t. So you ought to pack up after sophomore year, transfer to NYU, seek your fortune and grow up.”

For a moment we treasured our group insightfulness, but momentary brilliance collapses into jest, the show goes back on, and here arrested in our youth, at our very best we are cheeky, saucy, maybe pithy, but never wise.

When we were freshmen, the seniors had presence — affected or not — you knew who they were, they took up space, they had beards, they did younger girls and then disposed of them, they threw parties with kegs and $1 jello shots. Maybe it’s a perspective thing, kind of like how as a senior in high school, the incoming freshmen suddenly looked much smaller than you ever imagined you were at the same age. Perhaps seniors only exist to those who look up to them. We’re the same as seniors always were, but now that it’s our turn, we don’t look like I remember they did.

So, to fill the shoes of this quintessential “senior male,” we’re going to man-up and throw a party this weekend. We’re thinking a good theme would be The Graduate. But not because we’re about to graduate from college — for the other reason. But if you have any ideas, please send to kmooney@oberlin.edu or call me at (504) 473- 6876. See you Saturday night. Literally.

We women at Oberlin really have quite a predicament: Trying to find a man here is like walking into Fairchild Co-op and asking for a hamburger. And if you do manage to find a few guys you like, you’ll then discover you have a doppelganger, a girl who happened to date him and him and him before you did, until you both drown in this recyclable pool of questionably-sustainable men. And suddenly the female race turns against one another, you’re about to declare war, all because in this version of the state of nature there is a dearth of dick. Oh doppelganger, oh doppelganger, how I wish we could have bonded rather than competed. But now you and all the men we had in common graduated…