What Happens When Girls Go to College: An Abridged Timeline

Young adulthood is typically a time to "find yourself."  "Finding yourself" is a white-people term for trying on a bunch of different personalities until you either a) find one that you can tolerate assuming for the rest of your life or b) forget about trying to appear a certain way to people and find friends who are okay with it when you start acting like a puppy around them (not that I do that...).  In high school, I went through a lot of phases, including - but not limited to - a punk-rocker, a hippie, a hipster, a lax chick, a horse-girl, and an art freak.

Going HAM?

Enter college, when I became a biddie.  College is a time when girls leave stereotypes behind and begin developing into the successful individuals they'll someday pretend to be.

First, they lose the ability to dress themselves.  Moving into a dorm has only 2 advantages: vending machines in the same building where you sleep and increasing your wardrobe by about 30 new closets.  The problem is that girls think other girls care what they wear.  NEWS FLASH, when you ask me "how does this look?" I have no idea if you're referring to your lipstick or which boot you should wear but I will say "that's cute!" just to be safe.  Maybe your mom picked out your outfits in high school, but get a grip because I can guarantee no one cares what you wear as much as you do.  You look the same no matter what.

Then, they gain the freshman fifteen.  These days this term does not necessarily connote the  trademark weight gain caused by too much unlimited frozen custard at the dining hall or pre-paid-by-Daddy Starbucks at the library.  In fact, many naive freshman will claim they lose weight at college from all that "walking to class" (read: "being too poor and lazy to buy food), but soon enough they'll start drinking beer and on goes the gut.  Anyway, the freshman fifteen could be anything from fifteen sexual partners to fifteen hundred dollars of credit card debt.

Following that, they gradually lose their moral compass for awhile (see the verbal irony there?).  I can't stress how important it is to go through a time in your life when you make a whole bunch of mistakes (both harmless and harmful, but that's the fun...skip class and road-trip to Canada now, worry about consequences later!).  When you have kids you get to tell them fun, filtered stories about how you regret doing Blahddy-Blah with Blah-Blu-Blah or Blahdy-Blahing after going Blah with Blah, all the while painfully pining for your glory days when your life didn't consist of tracking how much it costs to fill up a mini-van and trolling CookingLight.com.  YIKES.

After that happens, girls are usually juniors or seniors which means the raw reality of nine-to-five is descending like a cold, heavy, deceivingly-slow glacier.  They have to start pretending like they're graduating tomorrow and talk incessantly about how much they hate it (full tutorial on that is coming soon, because I'm quickly becoming an expert).  This is when they probably start to get internships and jobs and the next thing you know all their friends are getting engaged so about this time they'll enter into a serious relationship (you know what they say: "ring before spring," "get hitched before you get ditched," "if by May you don't find a date, your future you will hate").  They might actually like this kid or it could just be that he's an accounting major and has the potential to earn a fat stack.  Either way, this is the stage during which they determine the rest of their lives.

Lastly, they become alumnae, proudly clutching a wine coolers in one hand and their degrees in communications or hospitality and tourism management in the other.  Stay tuned for an upcoming post about post-grad biddies!

Like faxes and stuff!