The point of college is to make you useless in the revolution. Or something like that. It's to make you fully incapable of relating to a regular person. It's to steal any connection to community you could hold, remaking your brain for the cultish worlds of finance or blue-chip galleries or publishing or sometimes, even more school. It erases the weed-smoking ignorant anger and quiet cross-cultural connection and normal fitting pants of adolescence, washing your cerebellum with mind-numbing lectures, CIA-created drugs with numbers in them, and serene landscapes built with the profits of slavery and murder. It's to teach you how to read any anxiety on the brow of an Anglo-Saxon woman as you grow distant from your favorite cousins.
You can laugh at art-school fashion victims like Emhoff but that’s what your insides look like.
It makes you smug, college, and the 20% of the stuff you grasp as bullshit doesn't stick because you can take it in some downward direction. You know it's corporatism, or No Logo stuff, or whatever, but you HATE HR ladies and Asian queers with fades more so you joke and joke about them. You hate every band guy over 20 years old you've ever met. You resent new graffiti writers, girls from high school who post funny memes on IG, which is dead anyway. You sit in Seward Park and joke about detonating the vest at an Ion Pack party even though that's literally a Red Scare joke.
You do not understand that these people are just you with a slightly better understanding of what the real joke is. You are all afraid of a regular guy anyway, the guy in fast-fashion Amiri knockoffs and a bubble who complimented your Dunks on the 2 train, the elderly couple who speak no English feeding pigeons, the Yeat fan who literally works at your deli, Elise at Labor, or any of the barbacks at Mr. Fong's. You snicker with friends, and your white buddies or your straight buddies or your cis buddies or whatever get a little uneasy but join in anyway, because you all know the score but won't speak to it. You laugh so hard at an Alltimers video you burp really hard and Violet's cat jumps up and runs out of the room.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I saw Humboldt County, a cute coming-of-age thing about a bunch of white people fleeing the academy to grow and sell weed. There's DEA shit. It's Jeremy Strong's first movie and he does all the faces you know him for. Chris Messina is beast in it, too, and Bogdanovich plays an emotionally-distant father. Isn't a movie about white people selling weed in California, like, the opposite of that brainbarf I just wrote? No, I think. Humboldt County is about finding the 'normal' life you never got a chance to have, abandoning the competition, judgment, and greed we teach gifted kids, for a more fulfilling life, and also getting absolutely wrecked by the government for minor-ass shit. (Growing weed yourself without permits for commercial use is literally still illegal in CA.)
Strong's character Peter is an alright med student but his dad, who is his professor fails him because his bedside is utter dogshit. Look at that - Dad is school, school is dad.* So this is more a movie for people whose parents did all that shit too, and maybe less so first-gen college kids or whatever. We lost, too.
Peter fucks the actress who plays the patient in a test he flunks in the first scene. Fairuza fucking Balk's Bogart (nicknamed because she hogs joints) drives him out to her found and blended family in Humboldt County, a collective of weed growers constantly under the watch of the DEA. Peter gets stuck there, and a bunch of people who used to teach at UCLA and Stanford point guns at him and make fun of him for being a square. Peter learns how to be a regular, tragedy strikes, he stands up to his dad - it's all really good. A core character succumbs to hubris, the sort of greed and lack of concern necessary for something like academic success, and they fucking die, man.
One of these days, I am going to say hello to the guys that sell weed on my block. I don't smoke weed and there are two bodegas that sell eighths two blocks from my house, but they're all men my age and I heard "Summo" (RIP Dolph) the first time out of one of their cars and I Shazamed it like an asshole.
I will also try to have empathy for my fellow fallen heads, especially the ones that know that shit is fucked and there could be a different way. The finance Jack & Jill guy, who asked if my parents care when I date white people. The finance two-tattoo-sleeves lesbian who exploded because I didn't help clean after a party. The 28-year-old teacher woman in group who I told, in group, that I was afraid of her. My dude from elementary school who I hang out with in Europe who hasn't finished undergrad yet. My little brother, who is in a frat at Syracuse. My buddy, who went to a Claremont-McKenna and claims to have never smoked a cigarette.
* Jeremy Strong dealing with dad stuff, getting high - come on you freaks! Just watch the movie, it's even on HBO