How to choose the most vampire friendly college

So me and Erin were talking about The Vampire Diaries and villain decay the other afternoon when it struck me that Twilight is full of bullshit of the most obscene proportions (as in, more bullshit than the usual bullshit people bring up when discussing Twilight). Think about it--the Cullens pose as high school students forever? No wonder vampires say they've been damned to eternity in hell! I absolutely loved high school and even I wouldn't want to repeat it more than once.

This is a binturong. It's very cute and I just thought everyone should know this exists. It's screaming "HUG ME, HUMAN FRIENDS!"

Think about it. Edward tells Bella that they're posing as high school students so that they can blend in with a human town for the maximum amount of time. But is faking your own death every four versus every eight years such a pain in the ass that it's worth going through high school forever? Why not pose as college students? They'd be able to go all over the world, they'd be able to study absolutely anything instead of repeating Algebra Two over and over and over, and no one would care if they were weird. I can only conclude that Edward and Friends don't know how to find a vampire friendly college. This is a shame, as they're quite possibly the only people rich enough to afford higher education at the moment. So I thought I'd jot down some quick tips on choosing the proper college for America's most oppressed minority: vampires.

Find a college that offers night classes

Unless you're a bullshitty Twilight vampire (who I'm starting to suspect only repeats high school to meet underage girls) who isn't affected by sunlight, you're going to want to find a college that offers night classes. While evening classes have traditionally been seen as part of community and commuter colleges, designed to accommodate people who already have careers, many elite institutions are using night classes as a way to provide more flexible scheduling to students who have inflexible commitments (like, for example, the urge to slaughter small mammals and drink their blood).

Cornell offers plenty of night classes. In fact, starting mid-November, all classes that begin past three PM are night classes. I took a night class last year. Every Monday and Wednesday, I'd grab a milkshake from the dining room, climb to the freaking third floor of Morrill Hall, and promptly pass out while the teacher droned on and on about China. (Still aced the class, parents!). For matriculating vampires, finding the proper array of night classes is crucial to promoting a positive learning environment. Nothing detracts from an education like bursting into flames on the way to class. Or bursting into sparkly glitter.

Dining options: Ag schools, night life

Vampires traditionally display a wide variety of eating habits--well, for creatures that only eat blood, that is. Some vampires feed exclusively off humans. Others prefer animals. A few vampires feed exclusively off cats, but they're weird and we don't talk about them much. This is one of the complicating factors in defining 'vampire-friendly' colleges. Texas A&M has a big agricultural program, which is great if you're the kind of vampire who feeds off cows. But it's also in Texas, meaning that a lot of people have guns and Adeline Parks is more than willing to donate her giant silver earrings to melt into bullets. 

Got that, you bloodsucking varmits?

Pro tip--if you're the kind of vampire that feeds off humans, try going to a northern school. Why? Scarves! Nothing helps hide those suspicious neck marks like a school where everyone's always wearing scarves. Also, liberal northern college students will totally support your alternative lifestyle. Well, right up until the point where you start eating them (although, if you feed off those annoying drunk sorority girls who used to hang around under my window each night last year, you might find some surprising support)

Choosing Your Major: What Works For Eternity?

Lots of vampires are drawn to the easier majors--history, for example, since most of them have experienced it (though your paper on the taste of Queen Victoria's blood probably won't land you an A, even if it does have historical flavor). I'd like to encourage them to branch out a little more. Take something that isn't so open to changes that it's different every decade. You don't want to be one of those vampires who shows up to BIOM 3450 explaining how the liver produces blood and how to balance the four vital humors. 

And you don't want to quote this particular bit of medical wisdom. 

Physics can be useful. The basic laws really haven't changed since Newton stumbled on them. Of course, those basic laws really don't explain how a body can turn into mist or why you have an anathema towards religious symbols, but it's still good to know. Take something out of the box, like English. Hey, the undead don't really need jobs! Architecture is a good course if you like the idea of designing your own imperious lairs. Just don't take chemistry. I'm sitting in it right now and I'm being bored to death. 

Evaluate Your Housing Options

Who doesn't like to live in the dorms? Sane people! Also, vampires! While dorm life is great if you want to live on top of people who smell bad and leave their hair in the shower, the normal tolerance levels generally stop at someone hauling in a coffin to replace their bed (though if you do need to sleep all day, you'll find yourself in good company). There's a nice source of food nearby, but you don't want to get lazy and end up with the Freshman Fifteen-People-Whose-Iron-Levels-Are-Suspiciously-Low. 

For this reason, it's recommended that vampire students find a place off campus. Cornell has some lovely old fashioned houses built back in the 1800's up on the picturesque Forest Home Drive. Regular students can't even afford a doormat for one of those places, but for some of your older vampires, it'll be like stepping back in time to their childhoods (the cars whizzing up and down picturesque Forest Home Drive will ruin this image, so it's probably best to wear earmuffs to get the full effect. An off campus apartment can also be nice, provided you don't mind the scent of decay coming from the week old bananas in your trash can. Hell, you're a vampire, so you probably love it. In which case--can I start using your trashcans? Because mine stink. 

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Thanks for the page views, girls from High Rise Five who don't understand comedy!


Here's a nice video, just for you!

How to 'help' your friends move

So I'm finally back in VA and out of that cramped forced triple in Hell Rise Five. While I'll miss my friends over the summer, I sure won't miss that awful dump. Seven stories of misery and pain, filled with the pungent odor of weed and the awkwardness of sharing an elevator with five other strangers who live next door to you. I'll forever remember the joy of the elevator stopping at every freaking floor on the way down, the tiny little kitchen I was forced to share with far too many other people I hated, and how the stairs didn't go down to the ground floor. Apparently, that was supposed to make the building 'riot-proof'

But before I could hit the road and head home, I had to get all of everyone's crap out of my dorm room. And since my mom drove up to get me in her minivan, I offered to help my friends get their stuff into storage. Ayesha's going back to India over the summer, so it's not like she can take all her stuff on the plane (heck, the way airlines are these days, they probably make you bring your own crappy peanut bags and charge you for them). Asta's off to Baton Rouge. Audrey and Sarah will be up here over the summer and don't want to haul all their crap back to the midwest.

 The common sense solution would be to rent a storage locker until Audrey and Sarah get back, at which point they can move everyone's stuff into their apartment. If they split the costs four ways, they'd only need to pay fifteen bucks each. But we're college students. What's fifteen bucks when you could store your expensive textbooks, favorite clothing, and cookware people actually eat off in a dark pit filled with spiders?

We loaded up a cart I'd dragged away from a bunch of boys busy loading bedding into another minivan. They're men, they can lift their own freaking sheets. So we pile the cart with boxes of bedding and that freaking annoying fan that keeps falling off the window and drag them out to the car. We shove in Ayesha's clothing, which is partially stuffed in plastic trash bags we stole from the bathroom, and we shove in Audrey's snowboard and climbing gear and ski equipment . . . you know, I'm thinking she should probably pick one sport and stick with it.

Then we drive down to the ski house, the vaguely remembered site of the salsa incident, and carry heavy boxes across the street, dodging buses and vans and whatnot. Turns out, the basement where Audrey's friends promised she could store her stuff is nothing more than a gigantic hole in the ground. A hole guarded by bees, filled with flies and old newspapers, smelling of mildew and decay. The Pit.

Also, you can only get in there by stooping under the porch, so carrying boxes under it is a whole lot of fun! (Not really).

The next day, we had to help Asta and Xinting get Asta and Sarah's stuff out of Balch Hall--the all women dorm, build before the invention of wide hallways and elevator access (but after the invention of dark, horrible pits). We grab the first cart we can find and wheel it over to the elevator. Then we wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. Because the elevator is one of those primitive contraptions with a gate you need to close by hand, it can often take hours to arrive at your floor, especially when people on all other floors are trying to do the exact same thing as you. And of course, my friends live on the sixth floor. The elevator only goes up to the fifth.

Yes, this building has six stories

So there I was, waiting for half an hour on the fifth floor as my friends ran up and down, bringing boxes full of random crap down to the cart. Boxes of stuff like cookware that probably should have been taped shut were instead just hanging open (to provide easy access to the spiders in The Pit). Sarah also left behind a binder full of loose-leaf paper and a CD that, despite it being flat and square, she decided to balance precariously on the top of the box, instead of putting it on the bottom. It fell out four times.

We played charades in the hallway until Asta finished packing her last box. I was always it, either because I'm the most creative one or the only one willing to act out pop culture milestones. Ayesha and Audrey are surprisingly good at guessing my charades. TV show? 'Game of Thrones'. Book? 'A Game of Thrones'. Book? 'A Clash of Kings'. They cut me off before I could act out 'A Dance with Dragons', which is a pity, because I had some great dance moves planned.

Somehow, we manage to get everything in the car and back over to the ski house. I decided to wait with the car as the girls carried their stuff down into the parts of The Pit that aren't even lit by a single bare, dangling bulb. As we leave, up pulls a pick-up truck driven by a girl wearing a headlamp. Clearly, someone came prepared.

Six Dining Hall Meals No One Eats

So I'm giving a young friend of mine a tour of Cornell later today. Right now, I'm in my Creative Writing class analyzing poetry with my hipster teacher, who has the exact same beard as every other graduate student in the English department. I'm thinking about three major sales points for Cornell: great academics, wonderful diversity, and excellent food. The all-you-can-eat sushi bar is a major component of that (I live for sushi).

But no matter how good the dining hall food is, there's some things that no one ever eats.

Any Ice Cream Flavor Beyond Mint Chocolate Chip, Cookies and Cream, Chocolate, 

and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

It's not that difficult, people.

The ice cream freezers in Cornell dining halls have room for four flavors. Listed above are the only four flavors which anyone ever eats. The obvious conclusion is to put those four flavors in every ice cream freezer. I'm not sure if they've got a weird contract with the distributor, or if there's some weird kid over in Dickson who eats absolutely nothing but lemon sorbet, but the dining staff insists on stocking the freezers with flavors nobody likes. 

My English teacher just admitted the poem we were analyzing was probably meaningless, and continued analyzing it anyway. 

No one eats that purple sludge they call raspberry ice cream. Or the white sticky stuff they pretend is Italian ice. Or the strawberry that has frozen bits of what are supposed to be fruit and are actually just big chips of ice. They just sit there for days and days, until someone (maybe the mice) finishes them off. Drop in a tub of the flavors everyone likes, and it'll vanish in a nanosecond. 

I was out to dinner with a group of six people once, and the only ice cream flavor left was raspberry  Only one of us got any, and she took one taste before throwing it out. There is no greater waste than raspberry ice cream

Soup

This is one of those foods that's great for spilling on yourself and not much else. The main campus dining hall, Oakenshields (named after that dwarf from The Hobbit, probably due to an alumni with a weird sense of humor), has a soup station in the middle of the room that never sees a line, and in other dining halls, the soup containers are tucked so far into the corners that most people don't even know they're there.

This is because soup isn't a food. It's not really a beverage, either. It's some weird hybrid of both. When people think about what they want for dinner, they never think of soup. Seriously. They have this cream of broccoli stuff that's heavier than your average textbook and this sweet and sour stuff that is filled with unidentifiable particles. The clam chowder may or may not have actual clam in it, and the french onion has neither cheese, bread, or actual onions.

My hipster English teacher doesn't know he's got one strand of hair sticking up straight out of the back of his head. He's like a freaking backwards unicorn.

Vegetable Sushi

This stuff tends to contain carrots, and we all know how much I hate carrots. But that's not the real reason no one ever eats it. Sushi is for fish. It's supposed to be exotic. It's not just a wad of rice and carrots.

Now wrap it in rice. Yay. 

Also, they always serve California rolls on the worst possible nights. I hate California rolls; they taste exactly like soy sauce. Maybe that's because I put too much soy sauce on them. Some nights they have tuna rolls or shrimp or even horseradish--the girl next to me just asked if D'Artagnan was a character on a TV show. Seriously?--but they never have the good ones on the nights I'm actually there. 

Vegetarian sushi is a horrible invention. Sushi implies fish, preferably raw. Making sushi without fish is like making a sandwich with only two slices of bread.  

Stir-Fried Bok Choy

This dish lives at the Asian station. It is suspiciously shiny. Never trust food that looks like the hood of a BMW in a car commercial. Also, they put scrambled eggs in it, and sometimes the eggs are only runny blobs that look suspiciously like saliva. It smells like salt, possibly because salt is the only ingredient, possibly because the only way to make bok choy edible is to drench it in salt. In fact, I think I hate bok choy worse than carrots. At least carrots have an interesting color. 

Sometimes they put meat in the stir fry. They favor seafood, which is why you'll occasionally see tiny octopus tentacles sticking out of the green, shiny strands, covered in dripping bits of runny eggs. This is not appetizing. I don't even think it's legal. I see the chefs mixing up bowls of stir-fry the size of a Mini Cooper, throwing tentacles and bok choy and eggs into the air, and all I can think it, I used to like Asian food.

The 'Fresh' Fruit

Cornell is big on locally grown fruit. But sometimes, they can go overboard. I'm pretty sure the oranges were grown in New York, because they're tiny, tasteless, and covered with little black spots. Also, they're quite flammable. 

If the blond girl in the Alpha Phi v-neck turns to the left, she'll give half the class a peek at her nipple. Seriously, wear a camisole!

Every banana in the fruit bin is covered with spots--though they make excellent props if your roommates are reenacting Charlie's Angels and pretending to shoot each other in the hallway. All the apples are bruised and some have been chewed on by bugs. And those are the only three pieces of fruit you always see, unless you count that bucket of pathetic honeydew melon slices that no body likes but for some reason appears in every fruit salad.

Does real honeydew melon ever look this appetizing. No. No, it does not. I'm expecting there's some kind of melon growers conspiracy going on. They're keeping all the pretty melons somewhere else and selling the gooey green cubes. 

The Gluten Free Corner

There's a big sign in the corner of one of my dining halls that says 'Gluten Free', but there's never any actual food there. Cornell's the second most vegan friendly college in the country, we have a kosher station in the--geez, Alpha Phi girl just used the word 'like' eighteen times!--Appel dining hall, and we have soy milk in every freezer--and now the shy premed girl is talking about her yeast infection!--but the gluten free section is as empty as the stomachs of every man, woman, or child on campus with a gluten allergy.

I really don't understand what they have against gluten free food. According to Taylor, it's only about 1% of the population who's allergic to gluten, but we mark our vegan dishes, and veganism's a (really weird) choice. The gluten free zone's more abandoned than the old observatory, which is probably haunted.

And my hipster professor wants to know why I'm staring at my screen so intently. I could tell him that's because he knows absolutely nothing about good writing, but I'm relying on him to give me an easy A, so I guess I better start paying attention. 

The Eight People You Meet In Your Dorm

There's nothing quite like moving into a dorm the first time. 

My home away from sanitary bathrooms. 

There's all these strange people you've never met and you're being forced to play all these dumb icebreaker games. But you've been there before. You did this in high school and at summer camp. You know that in about three days, these people will splinter into the same old roles and cliques. Here's a few. 

The Absent RA

The RA is supposed to support students, answer their questions, and help them get used to college life. Unfortunately  no one's seen him all semester. You glimpsed him at the Homecoming game sitting in a flock of Beta Phis and in the kitchen three weeks ago making pancakes on your tiny dorm stove, but he's really more of an idea than a school employee. He hasn't blown the whistle on the stoners who hang out in the lounge because he's feeding off their pot stashes. Lives in a frat and uses his room in the dorm to store extra clothing. 

The Stoners

They're the reason the lounge smells like pot. I don't have a very sensitive nose (I need my mom or Taylor to tell me when food's gone bad), so I can't really tell if they've been smoking or not. It doesn't really bother me, since I don't use the lounge in the first place, but they can be annoyingly loud sometimes and I can't really steal the brownies from the kitchen because I think they're been spiked. 

The Girlfriend/Boyfriend Combo Pack

This technically counts as one person, because they are together all the time. They sit in the hallway where you can't help but step over them every time you want to use the bathroom. They are joined at the hip in a way that most Siamese twins can't achieve, and spend enough time kissing that they not only share diseases, but long stretches of their DNA. The Boyfriend doesn't even care that the Girlfriend has been brushing her teeth with a Q-tip for the past week and a half. Answers to a single name, like 'Janica', and are never seen alone. If they break up, you can expect to hear two people crying in the hallway every night for a month. Loudly. 

The Roommate of the Girlfriend/Boyfriend Combo Pack

Despite the fact she lives with the Human Centipede, she seems oddly nonplussed  If you peek in her room, you'll find her typing away on her English paper while the Girlfriend/Boyfriend Combo Pack spoons in bed. You'll see this over and over, and eventually you start to wonder if she's actually okay with it, is too polite to say anything, or just kind of . . . likes it.

The Starcraft Nerd

You don't see much of him. He's usually in his room, but he will come out of his den to eat and attend classes. He brings his computer (usually an expensive one) everywhere he goes. And he will always be playing Starcraft. The only time he isn't playing Starcraft is when he's studying. Always an engineering student and almost always a male Asian, the Starcraft Nerd rarely speaks to people in person. Despite this fact, he's a member of the Starcraft club and spends every weekend hanging out with friends, so in a way he's much more social than you are.

. 

The Hipster With The Dumb Tattoo

Like this, plus stupid tattoos

According to the other architecture majors, she really regrets it. Who on earth would regret getting quotation marks tattooed on their wrists? This California chick has a really dumb name and has a big Bob Marley poster hanging on her wall. She's the only one in our suite with a printer and I'd rather walk down to the community center than use hers and actually have to spend time in her room. She and her friends get together and never ever shut up. If someone says something ironic, I bet she'll hold up her wrists and everyone will laugh. At her. Also, she has several nose piercings.

The Sorority Girls

In their matching knee-length coats, expensive scarves, and eyeliner, these college students are notorious both for their pack-hunting behavior and their high-pitched roars. It's not unusual to see a herd of twenty or more hanging out in the lobby of the community center. They posses high tolerance for inclement weather, as they'll walk out in 20 degree weather without any pants on. The only tee-shirts they wear are ones with Greek letters on them. White, Asian, or black, they all look the same. Possibly, it's because they're all sisters.

The Naked Person

There's nothing offensive about this! Honest!

Some people just don't like to wear clothing. You know what? That's okay. We're all born naked. We all shower naked. The human body is a beautiful, organic form. Perfect the way it is. Fat, thin, short, tall (as long as you don't have copious acne). Anyway, this is the one person in the dorm who isn't afraid of the human form. They rarely wear a shirt and have no problem with sitting nude in their dorm room when nobody else is there. This is why it's important everybody knocks before entering the room. If you knock, this person will generally be more than happy to put on a shirt. Just knock. Please.
Less benign forms include the girl currently standing in the kitchen, making hot cocoa without any pants on. Her mug is shaped like a naked female torso. 

The Seven Professors You Meet in College

The blond chick is still unconscious.

Don't panic, it's seven AM on a Tuesday, and said blond chick is my sleeping roommate, Audrey. I can't blame her for sleeping; I wish I was still asleep. But no, I've got to do this Spanish worksheet that's due today. And I can't do it in another class, because Spanish is my first class.

Yeah, sometimes I do work for other classes (or my blog) in class. It depends on how good the professor is. Fun fact: there's only seven professors in the world. The rest are just faceless robots standing behind a podium. Here you go.

The Communist

This professor emigrated from the USSR in 1991 and believes Gorbachev was a CIA plant sent to destroy the greatest empire of all time. Lecturing in a thick Eastern European accent, he's nearly as hard to understand as the thought process behind the Bay of Pigs. No matter what class he teaches, he will find room in every lecture to explain why the West is corrupt and evil. You will learn a great deal about American imperialism, mutually-assured destruction, and Karl Marx.

Every dude in the class will try to grow this beard.

For a few weeks, you will hang a hammer and sickle over your desk, until you get your tuition bill and realize that only through the ownership of private property will you ever pay off your student loans.

The Overpaid Humanities Professor

She's finally got tenure and no longer has to pretend to be interested in students. Makes eighty thousand a year teaching classes like 'Television in Society' and 'Early Modern Erotica', and 'Introduction to the French Cinema'. Despite being a tenured professor, she nevertheless pretends that she's no older than her graduate students and feigns a kind of manic enthusiasm for practically everything. Her specialty is something like 16th century Ottoman rug designs or traditional Mongolian fashion design, yet her work is considered much more valuable than that of a high school teacher in the inner city, trying to encourage students to escape poverty.

The Cool TA

This is the TA who comes to class every day wearing a tee-shirt from a classic rock band and prefers chilling with students as to doing any work. She will never mark you absent nor take off points for late work. Will teach you several innovative curse words and the locations of the best bars on campus. Best professor imaginable until you go on to the next level in that class and realize you didn't learn anything at all.

The Lame TA

A hipster just out of graduate school who can't keep his eyes off the curvy Indian girl with the plunging neckline in the front row. He'll read the types of genetic mutation off the Power Point and get the definitions wrong. If this is a subject matter you know very well, you will be supremely irritated by all these little errors. He'll keep looking over his shoulder as if he hasn't yet internalized the fact that he, and he alone, is the only teacher of the class. Now the scantily dressed Indian girl is talking about her favorite poem, using language from her Feminist Studies class and explaining that she likes how defiant said poem is, because it's about defiance. The Lame TA stares at her in reverence, says something flirtatious, and hopes that she'll teach the class for him.

The Mad Scientist

Everyone's favorite professor. Welcoming, low-key, and eager to direct students to follow their passions, it's nevertheless difficult to take him seriously because he looks like this.

It's like his hair is trying to run away from his thoughts

Will have a lab on campus and several species of bug named after him. He's the reason the bio department has a walrus skull sitting in a cabinet, along with a ratty stuffed platypus and the head of a miniature deer (I'm pretty sure it's a dik-dik, and I'm pretty sure the name comes from what you have to be to cut off one's head and toss it in a cabinet). An expert on animal communication who knows nothing about the mating patterns of his own species, The Mad Scientist is the only person who knows why the word 'sperm' is written in tiny text in the corner of every lab manual. His breath also smells like old gym socks.

The Made Up Professor

This professor only ever appears in bars and at parties, usually right after some kind of bet has been made. From about 9:00 to 10:30, he's known as Professor Daniels or Doctor Morgan. Then the good stuff runs out and you hear about Doctor Chair and Professor Beer Pong. A longtime member of the Trivia department, he's an authority on everything from the Oscar winners in 1977 to the main exports of Tajikistan. Only possesses a 50/50 accuracy ratio (as compared with Wikipedia) at best. The accuracy ratio declines over time.

The Professor Whose Tests Are Easy (For The Professor)

This man wants everyone in his class to get an A. If only the students wanted it as much as he did! Seriously, people, these questions aren't that hard! They're all true or false! Unfortunately, this professor teaches biology, and so the answer to about half the questions happens to be It Depends On A Wide Variety Of External Factors, Which May Or May Not Matter, Depending On How The Question Is Worded. As you struggle to pick apart the minute inflections of grammar, you'll get an excellent course in English and psychology. You will develop excellent critical thinking skills (starting with thinking critically about your professor). Despite the fact his tests are perfectly easy, he will nevertheless interrupt the final exam six times to explain typos, clarify ambiguous wording, and strike questions from the test after he's realized we didn't actually cover the material. By the end of the semester, you still won't know what the ADH/RAAS cycle is, but you'll be secure in the knowledge you can always look it up in that two-hundred dollar textbook he made you buy.