Why I left a big university for a shot at social sanity

I grew up feeling as self-conscious as an Arab polar bear.

Due to my family’s frequent moves, elementary school meant always being the new kid. Middle school amounted to physical torment for the unthinkable—liking a little rock band called Bon Jovi. And high school included mockery for apparently looking like a kid from The Addams Family. It couldn’t get worse than that.

Despite my school misfortunes, I always heard how much I would enjoy college. “It’s gonna be the best time of your life,” my aunt would say. I believed her.

She made it sound almost supernatural. I’d be transported to a magical world where everyone would automatically be my friend, treat me with respect and take me along on fun, life-transforming adventures. The bigger the school, the better—I thought.

What a crock.

I lasted one year at a traditional university.

Academically, I was an ace. But all first-year students were required to live on campus. “OK,” I said, “I’ll just choose a hall for studious, non-partiers like me.”

Wrong. There was only one such building, it had no space available, and I couldn’t afford it anyway. So I lived at Animal House. It was a real bargain—for demon spawn.

If you’re extremely introverted, being thrown into a co-ed dormitory full of obnoxious, boozing, doping Neanderthals isn’t exactly going to make you want to climb out of your shell. It would be like throwing a little girl who’s terrified of snakes into a pit filled with a mixture of the world’s most venomous serpents and then expecting her to get over her fear of the snapping creatures by “just having fun” with them.

Ready-made friendships don’t exist

My first roommate seemed friendly enough. A skate-and-surfboarder from California, he exuded a carefree attitude. He promised we’d get along just fine, making our way through the jungle together. He was even there to pursue the same degree.

Except, he wasn’t.

I ignorantly counted on him to help me ease into a new social life, to protect me from what I felt was a hostile environment. But he wasn’t concerned about me or his grades or how he’d pay for school. He was a rich kid in search of a good time, all the time. I didn’t fit into such a plan.

I felt trapped and abandoned. Absent an “easy friendship” with my roommate, I was lost. For weeks, social opportunities passed by as I huddled alone in my room, terrified.

I wanted a change.

“Ask, and it is given,” some new-age gurus say.

Smelly dude, smelly dude, what are they feeding you?

After a weekend away, I arrived back on campus to find that my partying, never-there roommate had moved out, replaced by a depressed, always-sleeping, seven-foot, near-albino stoner with a well-used, six-foot bong—and a fascinating body odor condition.

It was a smell that could turn fresh milk sour the very second you poured it on your morning cereal. It was a funk that could cling to a Teflon monkey. It was a stench so penetrating, I’m sure, that it could wake a dead man buried deep inside a mound of sulfur.

I had to spend half a semester with the noxious Nordic, long enough for his putrid scent to leave a stain on my already-sullied subconscious.

Surely, I thought, I’d now paid my freshman dues. Yet after a few peaceful-but-freezing winter weeks of having the room all to myself with the windows open as wide as they’d go, along came a whiny wannabe.