THE BELL LAP: The Ultimate College Visit

It’s about that time of year when the glamour of Back To School has worn off and you remember how depressing this school really is. With a long weekend at Yale just around the corner, we decided to throw together some pointers for performing the ultimate college trip. If you take one message away from this guide, let it be this: do everything “to the max.”

1. Don’t secure sleeping arrangements.

There are a few basic options for sleeping at another college: 1) Rely on a friend of a friend (horrible idea). 2) Sleep on the floor (pretty terrible). 3) Crash on the futon of a co-ed who takes pity on you (depressing). Or, 4) Get blackout and pull a sleepover/hook-up with anyone who will talk to you.

By not arranging a bed to return to later in the night, you create a “pressure situation” in which you have to either make power moves or find yourself sleeping naked while sitting “Indian-style” behind a vending machine. You can either be clutch like MJ or throw up a brick, but either way you will rest easy knowing you played to win.

On a related note, it is a scientific fact that hooking up with people is much easier when you are visiting other campuses. You know how people always like foreigners for no particular reason? Being at a different school is like being a foreigner—your allure is pre-written and has little to do with your actual merits as a human.

2. Steal shit.

Anyone who has ever been to a high school wrestling meet knows the ways of capitalizing on disordered chaos and turning it into a Salvation Army give-away for sweatpants and stuff. In other words, wrestling dudes may have been suspicious characters, but they were always good at bogarting free gear. First you “check someone’s oil,” then you steal his pants. Only the latter part of this behavior should be emulated.

The old aphorism, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” holds no weight at another college. For one, you can sneak into the dining hall and literally consume a free lunch. But if you want some other shit, don’t go to the campus bookstore and buy it like a tool: Simply lurk into the closest dorm and start checking all the doors like you’re playing that level in Mario Bros. 3. As long as you follow that other aphorism, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,”a odds are you’ll walk away with something useful.

Basically, you should adopt the anachronistic theory of “orientalism”: The purpose of visiting a foreign land is not to interact with the land itself, but rather to sample the “local goods.”

3. Remember the Golden Rule: No one will ever find you.b

What does it feel like to be invisible? Thanks to the invention of the “College Visit,” humankind is finally able to answer this question. Sure, the Facebook leaves you exposed to cyber-stalking, but we all know it’s mad hard to perform a successful “global search.” In fact, this is another reason you should not try to make any friends at another college. For one thing, it’s lame and worthless, but more importantly, it will leave a trail of acquaintances in your wake—and that may be your downfall.

Final Word: In the movie “Kindergarten Cop,” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Detective Richard Kimble, a lonely police officer who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher, juices a bad girl on the run, and then hits the road. Combining themes of foreigners, school, and juicing, the movie is really a metaphor for the perfect college visit. Get in, wreak havoc, get out.

See you on I-95, you sick d-bags!

a Incidentally, Catizone did look a gift horse in the mouth last time we took a trip and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

b Our friend the Snake claims that this is not entirely true, based on the fact that he was once banned from the George Washington University campus for an entire year after being caught stealing a sign on camera. Watch out for Big Brother.