et’s just all agree that no college or university is absolutely perfect. That being said I will further make excuses and tell you that I have no problem making fun of crazy situations as I myself am the poster child of situations gone awry. I was not the insecure, overweight, cake-wielding bully in school who tormented and destroyed the angelic vision of a fenced-in recess by throwing tennis balls at the small kids’ heads. Nor did I ever target the nerdy kids by tying their shoes together and laughing as they fell on their faces. It was not Vicky Pray who was in attendance at cheerleading or drama practice or the various sporting events while in school.

No, I was something different—a whole other brand of human who has fond childhood memories of trying to purchase fire hydrants in Maine . Yeah, and okay, it was me who in advanced placement United States history thought Britain , England and the U.K. were separate countries. As a kid, my sister Wendy was so concerned about boosting my intelligence that she even called me Helen Keller to constantly remind me to listen and hear what was going on in my surroundings. And just maybe there was a time that I spilled my milk at dinner every night in succession for two years to the point that a sippy cup became my new best friend.

So, now that you are all comfortable laughing at me it’s about time that we all laugh together about St. Rose. But first a rant of questions that plagues me and will now plague you.

Does anybody ever wonder if Saint Rose President Mark Sullivan knows that the squirrel situation on campus is out of control? Or that all of the food in the cafeteria simultaneously makes people fat and sick due to an overload of carbohydrates? Will there never be an activity that doesn’t end at nine p.m. and feel like a high school event five years too late?

Okay it’s time to get personal. First off, the library books in the Neil Hellman Library are older than my longtime dead great grandmother. Apparently researching here goes backwards so that we can already know if our theories have been disproved or not without ever having to wait to find out. Second, the doctors and nurses at Health Services are obviously trying to kill all of the students by teaching them that warm clothes and Tylenol cure bronchitis, the flu, and ultimately saves lives. Hospitals have no use now that we have health services to save the day or end it with our death. Oh, and the lawn? Who wouldn’t want a mud pit ninety percent of the time to practice for track, play mud Frisbee, and have an exciting game of volleyball? Here at Saint Rose we can brag that we have a field with “personality.” Grass is overrated anyway.

Okay, so I don’t have any answers to these questions now that you are all twitching. But I can make you feel better with the theory that all of our tuition dollars are being spent on a four year lesson in staged humor. That’s right, maybe it’s a conspiracy. Perhaps those squirrels were planted there to psychologically break us down and test to see if our grades suffer as a result of the “no one cares syndrome.” The food is bad and you starve to death—no one cares. The squirrels go on a killing spree and make a team effort to drag our corpses to the nearest tree for a feast—no one cares. The cafeteria workers—okay they definitely don’t care. All of the activities as a whole are guaranteed to get rained out or have an attendance rate of 10 people and no one cares.

That’s right, St Rose doesn’t love you. There is no love affair there. Saint Rose loves Starbucks, Quizno’s, the Victorian houses and the lawn (when it’s not a mud pit). These things provide the picture perfect scene to bring more students in and mentally break them down before revealing the charade and kicking them out there into the real world.

The students have been duped into learning how to live in the real world by accident. All of the crazy off kilter aspects of Saint Rose teach you to laugh when something goes wrong and mom and pop aren’t there to hold your hand. Saint Rose teaches you reality in that nothing is perfect and squirrels will always be trumped up on Nicotine for as long as tobacco’s around and there’s nothing that you can do about it. This school essentially teaches you real life. There are no fountains here or grand hideous cement structures, but here you can count on the fact that there will always be something funny and weird.

When there are things that don’t go the right way you can burn a hole through your brain getting mad or you can laugh at it. There may be thousands of things that you generally can’t rely on in life, but at Saint Rose there will always be squirrels jumping from trash cans, squirrels holding relay races across campus, and squirrels switching from the destruction of tulip bulbs to the destruction of people walking to class. It could be worse and at least there is something to laugh about after a bad day. Saint Rose students are not starving children in Ethiopia , they merely have to deal with ridiculous situations and learn how to deal with life. As Dory from Finding Nemo would say “what’s the matter Mr. Grumpy gills?” Go laugh at stupid things while you can and give the terrorist squirrels my regards on your way home. ■