Rather than tell long and drawn out stories about my first year roommate who loved to study topless, flexing and grunting, and who slept with the window open throughout winter because "it makes me feel like I'm back in Oregon," and who spent hours locked in the bathroom humming show tunes, and on, and on, and on ...

I'm not going to tell those stories. They are very sensitive portions of the past that, quite frankly, that I think my roommate would like to forget. I'm rather wait until he runs for political office.

So instead, I am going to tell other long and drawn out stories about my first year at school--a year that arguably was the turning point of my life. When I entered my first year, I was a maladjusted, sexually frustrated 17-year-old whose idea of a good time was a night of computer games. And when my first year ended? Well, I could legally vote--and that's probably about it.

But I did encounter three things in my first year that have haunted me throughout my college experience: Harvard arrogance, Harvard social life and Harvard humor.

Harvard Arrogance

"What will I tell my parents when I flunk out of school?"

That was the key question as I fled a group interview for a first-year seminar on the works of Orwell and Agee. I had entered the interview under the foolish impression that we weren't supposed to have yet read the works of Orwell and Agee. But two of the interview participants had brushed up on their English lit the previous night. They dominated the entire interview, dazzling the world-famous professor with details of the more intricate plot twists of the books.

I was stunned by their motivation, and tried to exchange glances of mutual sympathy with the other students at the interview who also had not done any background reading. Instead, I encountered furrowed brows and hands raised to speak! No fewer than five consecutive comments began, "Now I haven't read that particular book, or anything by Orwell or Agee, or any English literature at all, really, but it seems to me as if..."

I sat completely mute. To keep myself from panicking, I imagined that I wasn't in an interview with 10 Harvard students smug in their knowledge that they knew so much more than me. I pretended I was a bird, soaring well overhead, flying free and fast and far and aiming my excrement right on the tops of their heads.

Of course, I didn't get into the seminar. And by that time already I was convinced that my Harvard academic life would be a failure. As it turns out, I would do well, and some of the people who did get into that seminar almost failed out of school. And while I have relived my bird fantasy hundreds of times, in other classes and sections, I have at least stopeed mistaking Harvard arrogance for real intelligence.

Harvard Social Life

Not to generalize, but every single relationship that I witnessed in my first year--bar none--had the following form:

Boy and girl study. Boy and girl go out with roommates on weekends. Boy and girl complain that they have no romantic life. Boy and girl wish for that first girlfriend/boyfriend.

Boy meets girl.

Boy and girl spend a little time together. Boy and girl spend a little more time together. Boy and girl are convinced they will never be apart for the rest of their lives.