Excerpts
So very, very... free.

"Signing my early-admissions contract with Saint Mary's still stands as the best decision I have ever made--and my life is rich with good decisions, such as the time I refused a date with a person wearing a sunvisor sideways and a tee shirt that read
'ASK ME ABOUT MY BEER NUTS.'"
 


"I did things that I in my high school uniform jumper did not think myself capable of; stripped my soul own to its orderly Catholic neutrons and blew the whole smash apart.  I knelt down in the Indiana gravel, appalled, and scraped it back together as best I could.  And then I went to my Latin American Policy discussion lab."


"There were tunnels beneath my school, subterraneous veins through which only students and the mostly-female staff were allowed to flow.  It was dark down there, and drippy, but  ninety percent of the time this was preferable to the South Bend weather aboveground."


"The Catholic Church doesn't teach much about Purgatory anymore, preferring instead to stage it live on Earth in the form of Freshman Orientation at its institutions of higher learning."

 

"I lived much of my freshman year in a state of suspension.  I mean this literally." 
 


"There were two opportunities to socialize as a freshman at Saint Mary's.  You could go to a dorm party, and drink until you threw up, or you could go to a dance, and wear a pretty dress, and drink until you threw up on glitter."


"A disturbing majority of female college graduates, when asked about room selection, had they the ability to point to an X-ray of their very souls, would indicate a long, dark fracture and say something along the lines of, 'Yeah.  Right there, junior year, when Jill and I decided to get a double room and Renee thought we were all going to stay in the triple.'"


"A shuttle runs between Saint Mary's and Notre Dame.  It's a bus, really, stopping at all SMC dorms and most major points of Notre Dame interest, but I refused to refer to it as such.  You take the bus to stupefying jobs in cubicle burial farms and have to sit next to people who insist upon  conducting conversations with the exhaust fumes.  You take a shuttle into space, to the airport, and in general exactly where you want to go."


"If I had the dating mentality of a twelve and a half year old when I first came to college, by the time I was on my second boyfriend I was maybe seventeen.  And seventeen-year-olds do some stupid, stupid things.  They cheat on their boyfriends.  With a seminarian.  While the boyfriend is out of town, teaching underprivileged children."

Order a drink!