College: The Dangerous Land of Mistakes

As you may or may not have already learned, college is the land of mistakes. This magical land is where you forget your clicker for the quiz on the FIRST DAY OF CLASS, realize that your writing book was needed the one day you didn't bring it to class, and your physics book is the heaviest textbook in the history of the world, especially when you have to walk up a heavily inclined cement road. As any adult would inform you in an overly-sweetened tone of voice, "You learn from your mistakes! That is how you get better!" Puke. We still have to be mortified in the presence of our peers. To my horror, I did in fact experience many, many mistakes my first few weeks as a college freshman.

Notes to self:
1. You can pretend that wearing a lanyard with your student ID card is cool for a while, but you will eventually be shot down by wandering eyes of the upperclassman.
2. Asking your professor questions in class is especially hard when you don't actually know what you're confused about (*cough, physics, cough cough*).
3. Being unproductive is easy, fun, and extremely common. "I should do my physics homework. Oh, hey. They're serving spaghetti in the cafeteria for lunch? I'm gonna spend all this time thinking about pasta and marinara sauce instead!"
4. Pretending you know what you're doing in a lab class is the key to success. Literally. If you just sit there and act like you understand how the velocity of this affects the acceleration of this, nobody will ask you for answers and bother you. They'll just continue to sit and wallow in sadness and confusion and you'll be doing the same, but confidently.
5. The bagels at Einstein Bros Bagels in the new academic building here are the greatest gift to mankind. If you haven't had one, you're missing out on the experience of a lifetime. And strawberry cream cheese.
6. The lower campus meal building is chaos every weekday at exactly noon. If you don't know exactly what you're getting at exactly what food place when you walk into that building, you will be wondering around and blocking everybody's way like a flipping dweebus. And no one wants to run into a dweebus with their food. Cause that will result in a dweebus with ketchup and freshly made chicken tenders in various places of their UW-Madison sweatshirt which SHOULDN'T BE WORN HERE ANYWAYS.
7. Nobody should talk to me when I'm studying. No talking, no loud music, no crinkling wrappers, no ordering pizza, no page flipping, no frantic running in and out of the room, no coughing, no sneezing, no breathing. Whatsoever. Okay, I may have gotten carried away with that one. Maybe.
8. If there is someone walking very closely behind you for a very long period of time they are either a) A total freak who needs to get the frickers away or b) Someone who is texting. In which you would respond by slowing down at a nice rate so that they almost run into you and hurt themselves cause you're so strong. Just kidding. I slow down really fast.

Now that those notes are taken, you can fly by school without ever making a mistake again, right? NO. WRONG. WRONG, WRONG. You will still forget to pay attention to your randomly-smiley Spanish professor, you will still forget to write your name on your research paper, you will still forget shoes, and you will STILL never learn how important it is to put wintergreen Lifesaver mints in your pencil bag.

But hey, college is he land of mistakes. And the center of it is YOU.