Turn it in

Finals week here at USC has finally rolled its fat ass around, and students everywhere are busy drop kickin’ the books in a last ditch effort to validate their parent’s exorbitant expenditure of the ol’ retirement fund to make sure Junior gets a first-rate education, and has constant access to first-rate alcoholic beverages and first-rate loose women.

That being said, the study habits of your average panicked USC student are as varied as a bag full of odds and ends that you can grab (a “grab bag,” if you will).

USC has a number of first-rate libraries, donated by wealthy benefactors (as if there’s any other kind). Leavey Library houses four floors of knowledge in book form, and is also the first place to go if you happen to be Indian, because at any given Saturday night, the percentage of Indian students in Leavey rivals the percentage of intoxicated individuals at any given frat house. A friend idly wondered if USC Housing secretly sold space between the bookshelves for students who checked “Hindi” as their first language.

Leavey also houses a massive collection of DVD and VHS movies for viewing. On a desk sits a massive four-inch three-ring binder that is chock full of laminated pages filled with tiny lines with movie titles and codes. There are thousands of movies sitting there to be discovered, but whenever I go, the viewing room is full of people watching Lord of the Rings. The viewing room thankfully arranges the televisions to afford a reasonable amount of privacy, because when I was doing research (I swear) for a film paper on Blaxploitation and watching “Sweet Sweetback’s Badassssss Song,” I accidentally yanked out my headphone cable during the particularly raunchy, morally questionable, and outright vocal sex scene between the director’s twelve year old son and a prostitute. Couple this with the fact that you need to turn the television up a LOT to hear it on your headphones, and you basically get an awkward looking Chinese kid with poofy hair watching loud, hardcore illegal pornography in a library. I just about fell out of my chair trying to turn off the television as moans and groans shattered the silence (and sanctity) of the viewing room, but thankfully people were too engrossed with Frodo and Sam sticking their tongues down each others’ throats to notice.

Doheny Memorial Library is about a hundred yards away from Leavey Library, which means it is a hundred times less appealing for a college student. They house USC’s Cinema Library, which is basically even more movies than Leavey Library, with the added bonus of putting the televisions right next to each other so that hot sex involving minors gets a nice audience consisting of those sitting next to you. It goes without saying that I’ve yet to watch a movie there to spare myself potential embarassment.

Standing in line is way better than studying.

When it comes to refreshment, the average USC student turns to none other than Red Bull to give them the wings necessary to fly through finals (haha I am awesome). A case of the stuff can be had for $60 of your parents money, and has enough caffeine in there to keep a small third-world country on its toes for a week. If they’re not buying out cases of Red Bull, college kids are getting hyped up with Starbucks, or purchasing entire racks of pork rinds and beef jerky. There is nothing as sad as the sight of a bare chip rack, or worse, a chip rack consisting solely of “Lemon Flavored Lays” chips on Finals week. Thinking ahead, I’ve stockpiled a bag full of Jalapeno chips, the BMW of the potato chip world, and it hangs reassuringly in my closet right over my pool cue and dirty clothes.

But more recently, my studying beverage of choice is the legendary Jarritos, made in Mexico. As any soda aficionado will tell you, Mexican soda is the best on earth because Mexico has the highest per capita daily soda consumption in the world, and because they use pure sugar rather than that crappy high fructose corn syrup to flavor their carbonated beverages. Drinking Jarritos (or “hitting the ‘Harr,’” or “having a ‘Harr-d’ on for ‘Harr’” or “’Harr-boring’ a deep dark secret about ‘Harr’”) has the added benefit of being sold in awesome glass containers, and apparently giving me absurd pool playing powers for a brief amount of time. For example, after finishing a bottle, my opening break shot was sufficient to overcome the crappiness of our table and sink in one ball. This is noteworthy, considering par for Max and I is sinking in a negative number of balls, which is what happens when balls bounce into the air and fly off the table and almost break windows. When the dramatic and potentially legendary pool showdown happens between Ryan and I in a few weeks, I’ll secretly be chugging a case of Mandarina Jarritos between shots.

"Hecho en Mexico" means "Nectar of the Gods."

For those too lazy to leave the residence to actually purchase beverages, USC has slyly sent notes to our parents, offering to sell them a “finals aid package,” consisting of bulk candy and various other goods to help us poor, poor college students cope with the unbearable stress of a few tests. USC of course skims a great deal off the top of the sweet deal. My dad, never one to spend money needlessly, forwarded me the message with a list of ingredients and the price. “You want this?” he asked, “I think it’s a rip off and it’s not like USC needs any more money,” which I agreed with. “If you really want to help me with finals,” I offered, “take the money you would’ve spent on that thing and send it directly to me instead. I guarantee my grades will be higher.” Unfortunately, he didn’t see it my way.

As kids find chemical aids to help them study, the unintended result usually is that built-up energy goes right into “not studying,” but with more gusto. And who better to look to for an embarrassing but entertaining way to come down off being massively hyper than the country of Japan. Last week, we had an auction with “Study Bucks,” which was paper money R.A.s handed if they caught you studying. Eventually, “studying” ended up being “asking an R.A. politely for some Study Bucks,” and with a Gamecube up for grabs, people were “studying” like mad. The resulting bidding war was epic, with our entire floor’s combined study bucks losing out barely to a three-floor coalition. Unfazed, we bought Dance Dance Revolution for the X-Box.

For those unfamiliar, DDR involves hitting timed arrows with your feet along with the music. But c’mon, if I needed to tell you that, you need to find a good quality jack and lift that damn boulder you’ve been hiding under. Either that, or befriend any Asian kid. DDR is well known for making people lose weight in the most embarrassing manner possible, and in one case, giving some fat kid a heart attack, making it as lethal as Korean favorite “Starcraft,” wherein grown Korean men will literally play for two days straight, go into the internet café bathroom, and promptly die. Although I’m sure the Daily Trojan would leap at the possibility of the headline “Idiot Freshmen Kill Selves Playing Video Game: ‘We all thought the spasms was just part of the game,’ onlookers say,” the Cinema Floor, although frankly the epitome of geekiness, is healthy enough to avoid such a misfortune.

Before my brother Jimmy had the ambition of pumping himself up and benching me, he had a nobler ambition – to rock cock at Dance Dance Revolution. He scoffed at the shitty soft pads so cheaply available, and went online and bought two huge custom constructed metal pads that cost fifty dollars and all of his pride to ship. If our friendly UPS guy knew he was throwing his back out because he was lugging a huge heavy box full of two Dance Dance Revolution dance pads, I’m sure he would drop them, turn around, and huff the exhaust from his brown truck until life was worth living again. Jimmy learned a few songs by heart, and became sufficiently proficient at the game before abandoning the endeavor completely. He is still good enough to turn a few heads at an arcade, but not good enough that onlookers will watch and shake their heads while voicing their opinion that our generation is going down the tubes with this damn techno music and spastic dancing.

A side effect of Jimmy’s quest for excellence was that I got dragged along to, which means I am embarrassingly good at DDR as well. Nowhere near the level of my brother, but enough so that people new to the game would consider me a coordinated demigod of dancing in four predetermined areas. While I still suck compared to most people who’ve played the game any amount of time, I daresay I turned a few heads on our floor as I got jiggy with the game myself on a particularly lame Saturday night. If my future self traveled back in time and told my past self “Past Freddie, this is Future Freddie. At college you spend Saturday nights playing DDR,” I think Past Freddie would just sit down and cry, shouting “I don’t believe you! You lie!” in between the tears of bitter rage and deep shame.

An additional distraction for college students living in New Residential College is the constant danger of fire alarms. The alarm went off for the fifth time this week, and when the fire department came by, they didn’t even stop at the building. They drove by, did a quick visual check for smoke, and then busted back to the firehouse for some hot strip poker, or to hose each other off, or whatever it is firemen do in their free time. As we stood around freezing our collective asses off in the Los Angeles night, Ed (from Canada) pulled out a hacky sack and we hacked to stay warm and stay alive.

Ed is from Vancouver, and he and I share a great deal in common, being from the northwest. Most surprisingly, terms northwestern-ers use commonly draw bewildered stares from everyone else. People in Socal thought we were speaking a different language when we used words such as “Gore-tex” (the votes vice-presidential candidate Al Gore got in Texas in the 2000 election?), “Carabineer,” (a sort of Mexican food?), “Teva,” (a sort of Mexican alcoholic beverage?), and “Nalgene,” (a sort of Mexican infectious mold?). Although we’re both huge dirty hippies in the eyes of everyone else, and should be able to hacky sack with ease while discussing the merits of various Grateful Dead bootlegs, we both are a failure to our stereotype, and cannot do either with any degree of ease.

If fire alarms aren’t enough, then college students are notoriously good at inventing ways to distract themselves. The newest fad for the Cinema Floor is a rousing game of “Penguin Protector,” where we take Eric’s electric inflatable penguin and hurl stuffed penguins at it in an attempt to knock it down (two points for a head hit, and one for a body hit). The danger of this particular game lies in the potential of hitting a sprinkler head, whereupon hundreds of gallons of dirty, rusty water will spray out in an attempt to douse a non-existent fire, and cause thousands of dollars of water damage to the building and all its occupants (three points). If one sprinkler goes, the whole system goes along with it, including the oddly placed sprinklers in the bloody shower. I know that if a fire happens in the building when I’m taking a shower, I would really need a few extra hundred gallons of dirty water spraying all over me just in case something starts burning in the shower.

With all of these options on top of first rate booze and broads, it’s no wonder USC is such a popular school.

-f.w.