Page Four THE MICHIGAN DAILY I Thursday; September 9, 1976 i I r COX ISLAND AMERICA'S FAVORITE HOT DOG SPICY CHILI, MUSTARD & ONIONS PIus--ONASSIS MINI BREAKFAST Scrambled Eggs, Sausage, Toast and Jelly-99c ALSO--We Have an Ice Cream Menu SHAKES, MALTS, SUNDAES THE ONLY ONASSIS CONEY ISLAND in ANN ARBOR 414 E. WILLIAM My first t By JEFFREY SELBST THERE IS A SPURIOUS myth which abounds in the minds of those who are about to scurry off to the Great Adventure- which is to say orientation and the assorted joys of college-that the experience is going to be fun, and make you all sort of world- ly to boot. Yok, yok, yok. The truth of the matter is that my first two years at the Uni- versity of Michigan were ones of rare, unparallelled horror. Now granted I was sixteen, and impressionable as hell, some- what shy for having been thrust into an alien environment of eighteen and nineteen-year olds at Merry Markley, a world which I could scarcely comprehend. But the fact is that I learned quick- ly how to cope, and coping itself became the preeminent objective of my school experience. Jeff Selbst, a former Daily Arts Editor, left behind his per- ilous University career this month for fame and fortune in the Big Apple. years: Sad but true -.. ONE THING AT the University of Michigan you don't have to wait in line for .. . DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR CALL 764-0558 TO SUBSCRIBE IT ALL BEGAN AT orientation, with my sullen roommate from North Carolina, a burned-out type who talked (when he talked' f high school dope raids, and the Importance of Knowing Where To Get the Best Acid. Then, to impress me lest I should fail t t care about that, he told me how he was taking college classes a' a nearby university when he was only sixteen and a senior in high school. I was unimpressed, and he got more sullen. His name was Mark Smith, and that was discouraging, for that had been the name of a close friend of mine at home. Too, the rest of my group had a kind of beery, jockish stupidity thai I loathed, and so I stuck to myself mainly for three whole glori ous days. Then September came on little cat feet. I moved into the dorm (Markley, which was to become my home for two long years), and settled in to meet my first real roommate, and take some challenging University-type courses. I was enrolled in Cal- culus115, Astronomy 111, Music Composition 221, and French 103. I nearly failed Calculus. The fact is, I did step on that damn- ed 'M' on the Diag during orientation, and I failed my first exam, which just happened to be in 115. I then compiled a marvelous record of D's and E's which would have netted me my first fail- ure ever, except that the munificent Math Department decided that no student should receive any less for 115 than he or she re- ceived on the final exam. I studied hard, and got a C. FRENCH WAS A BREEZE, and Astronomy a sufficient bore that I nearly failed that as well. Music Composition was fun, and I toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a composer. But my professor, a fat, sweaty, sadistic ass, successfully dissuaded me from the idea by mere example. I got a B. So, the nearly all-A student of high school troops home to Mumsy and Papa with a big, beautiful 2.272 GPA to show for his first term away from the nest. That Christmas was Trauma No. 1. At least, by Christmas I wasn't living with my original room- mate any longer. Freddie Felix B., the boor from Dearborn Heights, was to constitute my first exposure to living with other people., HE WAS UTTERLY impossible, doing things like setting me a bedtime to which he expected me to adhere (nice people don't have to stay up past ten-thirty), sweeping his half of the room only, and making up endless charts and schedules. I was allowed to play my music (as he referred to it) only between the hours of ten and bedtime. Thirty minutes a day. And whenever I could sneak it in otherwise. Which was difficult. Because he took naps. Every afternoon. For hours. Snoring. With the lights off. Aaagh! Two months were all I could stomach, and at Halloween I moved in with someone I didn't know, on the other end of the dorm altogether. He was a half-crazed theatre student named Mark. But that's something I'd still rather not go into. Mary was the only friend I had in the dorm before Mark. Mary and I went to the same high school, had both graduated a year early, and were both fairly lonely. She joined the Word of God, and I, though atheist, hung around the edges. But it was Mary's roommate, Mandy, who got me back into what I loved, the theater. I seem to be getting ahead of myself. I JOINED THE DAILY near the beginning of the second term, and my stint there lasted three weeks (it wouldn't be until two years later that I would rejoin). I was scared away from it by a person whom I considered to be a petty tyrant and who also hap- pened to be arts editor at the time. It was at the end of my Daily time that Mandy enticed me into working prop crew for the first original Musket musical since 1962, an allegedly-plagiarized bomb known as Counterpoint, pen- ned by a pre-med student who taught a Course Mart course in. Musical Theatre. It wasn't a debit to me that the show was insipid, for I was there to find companionship, a good time, camaraderie, and sex. n What actually happened though, was that on closing night, while ) packing the prop truck somewhere after midnight, in the wee e hours of April 1, 1974, I fell out of the truck and fractured my o kneecap. t Dauntlessly I went to the cast party ( ho ho; get it?), thinking the fall had only occasioned a bruise. Later that day, around noon, I was driven to the health service (when the limb steadfastly re- fused to move at all) and my knee was diagnosed. Cracked. , Splintered. In a cast for a month. t I HAD GAINED TWENTY pounds that year, and during the month of April, moped a lot. The BEB (Blubber Emotional Barometer) was a clear indication of my mood. A rather uneventful summer came ane went, and lo, back to Markley, only to find that;I had been assigned a psychotic for a roommate. Everyone came to know and love this creep as "Shit", though his real name putatively was Bill. Lots of lovely tricks in his nifty repertoire, such as vomiting on my knapsack in the middle of the night, destroying term papers I'd written, and oth- er acts of willful nastiness. Though my gradepoint rose that year, it was still incredibly low. I did have one triumph (garnering my first A here to boot) - -I was in a creative writing class, in which I wrote 'a funny, cynical little short storyabout a pair of gayroommates, and it won an Underclassperson Hopwood. I attended the ceremony proudly, but my glory lasted only ten seconds-as I ran up, de- corously grabbed the envelope, and ran back to my seat. I had an incredible post-Hopwood letdown. MY WRITING (which was supposedly what I was studying here at the Big 'U') took a turn for the worse. I wrote some pedes- trian fantasies (influenced as I'd been by Prof. Eric Rabkin's Fantasy class), a comedy of manners, and one or two attempts at Real Deep Stuff. Why, I nearly laughed myself sick, when I thought about it. The same year, a very close friend was sued in the Central Student Judiciary. The suit was based on an illegality never com- mitted, brought before inept judges, the trial was a zoo, and my friend lost the suit. Whoever thought college could provide you with legal hassles. But because of that, I met a whole new clique, almost every one of whose members I quickly came to despise. It was the sort of clique that would provoke you into joining so they could have the fun of rejecting you good and proper once you were in. I WENT HOME, and got a job in a shortening factory for the summer, and suddenly, school seemed greatly more tolerable. Certainly more so than working with quantities, ofunrendered fat day in and day out. Not to mention the glue I'd be covered with at the end of the day. And subtly, things seemed to change after that. I decided towards the end of my second year that I really didn't like people very much at all, so I rather had it in mind to isolate my person. Where better to do it than go live in the Living Mausoleum, the Vera Baits houses at North Campus? So I went off to live there, and surprise, I had an ELI (Eng- lish Language Institute) roommate from Iran, a charming fellow by the name of Faramarz. Marz and I became good friends, and by December, I'd half decided I approved of humanity again. Now the problem was, 'with my new guarded optimism, I was stuck out in the boondocks themselves, North Campus. By this time, too, I had been called by the Daily, and been asked to re- join the staff. The arts editor with whom I'd tangled was two years gone-wouldn't I come back? Who could resist such an appeal? So it was only my first two years at Michigan which were the most horrible of my life, and not, mind you, 'because of one unbearably traumatic experience. No, my misery was fueled by an unreasonably high proportion of minor catastrophes -- the kind that every student expects to encouter in his of her first two years at the University. Right? Wrong. Don't think I mean that every entering freshperson will bs unexpectably miserable here at school. B ut open those starry little eyes folks. haoreobsgtn chargeout o t0 go -about iti? ,. pntoesaryltl ysfls I I Hold your fire!.... get a charge out of Jacobson's by mailing in the request form below. Once you qualify for a charge account, you'll receive the personal touch of immediate identification and the ease of speedy shopping, plus the latest fashion news in seasonal mailings and catalogs. 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