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The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. It was tense.
Bank closes at 4:30.
I showed up at 4:39
thinking it closed at 5.
Never. Again.
Overheard in class: No, I don't brush my hair unless it's the weekend.
Let's play "how long will it be before my entire hall calls I'm gay?"
Went to McDonald's to get a McChicken...my card got declined. Wish I was kidding.
Retweet to the guy who said "The Price Is Right is an underrated show."
93 days, as of Thursday, until Commencement.
Now that the Super Bowl is over, where am I going to get my advertisement for constipation medicine?
When your tax refund is deposited and you're all "yay" and then "oh bills."
KANSAN.COM | THURSDAY, FEB. 11, 2016
I dyed part of my hair purple and none of my coworkers noticed. #stealthy
Took a nap last night...
and by nap I mean I
woke up 14 hours later
just in time for my 9
o'clock class.
Seeing HOLY DAMN JUSTIN BIEBER trending on Twitter makes me want to delete my account forever. Beliebe that.
I can't change! I'm like a chameleon: always a lizard
I'm more excited for Pokemon Go than anything else in the world right now
Today in class I learned that the yellow skittles in a bag of skittles contain 20% of your daily vitamin C
Not even Beyoncé can lure me to TIDAL.
I would be dead without coffee
I would vote for whoever wrote the "Ted Cruz Likes Nickelback"
Freshman year I spent the entire Late Night in the Phog talking about The Human Centipede. True story
Taylor Swift's Speak Now is the best album of 2016.
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Issawi: Take advantage of opportunities in college for real, committed love
► DANYA ISSAWI
@danyaasawi
love, if examined through a scientific lens, is seemingly simple. We can break it down into a few essential factors, like proximity, physical attractiveness and age. The list goes on, and under these conditions, it's essentially a glorified biological response to our instinctual drive to procreate.
But, if you have an ounce of curiosity beneath the cloak of cynicism that envelops the concept, you might wonder if love is more. You could be curious as to why we lust after love — why we crave it. You might find yourself questioning what the underlying implications of falling in love are. And you might wonder if love is something much closer than a far-off idea, something more tangible, and if it can actually be found in college.
We grew up with a falsified idea of what love was.
We are the products of traditional relationships and marriages. We were raised on Disney films in which lions and dalmatians found better luck in love than most humans ever could and Nicholas Sparks novels that fed the insatiable, hopeless romantic that quietly manifested within us. The intent of these movies and books was to leave us satisfied, having learned a lesson, but instead, we are left with unrealistic expectations.
After years of dipping our toes in the water and trying to mimic the relationships we had grown up surrounded by, we learned that these expectations didn't suit us. So we pushed them aside and created our own.
As Millenials, we have established our own method of developing relationships. More often than not, we hook up and are subsequently given two options when it comes to this potential love interest: dismiss or pursue. With anywhere between 60
and 80 percent of college students having experienced a random hook-up, according to the American Psychological Association, it's far from orthodox. But it's the route we have chosen, and sometimes, depending on the path taken, it works.
Our parents have labeled us as a generation of hook-ups and flings. They shame us for placing the foundations of our future relationships in something as intangible as a “thing”—something so obscure and meaningless that it remains just that, ready to unravel at the drop of a pin. It's neither solid nor concrete.
But can they blame us?
This course of action isn't necessarily wrong. It's just different.
We're a generation driven by the pursuit of new types of success and a fear of failure, and when thrown into the ever-present competitive atmosphere of a college campus, these ideals are intensified. At this age,
commitment to anything is difficult enough due to the underlying fear that something better might come along and that an opportunity for optimal success will be lost. Therefore, prematurely slapping a label on any sort of relationship can be panic-inducing.
With a hesitancy toward investing too much of ourselves into one person combined with the curiosity and drive to experience a relationship, we form "things," or mini-relationships, and bask in the fluidity and lack of commitment they require, in case something better does come along.
We've become paralyzed when faced with the concept of love as a result of several self-fulfilling prophecies. Slowly but surely, we have trained ourselves to believe that everyone is only after "one thing," and that college is only meant for fun. For some, these beliefs hold true, but for others, by forcibly implementing these
ideas into our lives, we are creating our own missed connections — potential relationships that died because we told ourselves they weren't supposed to survive and that it wasn't the time.
College is crucial for a plethora of reasons beyond getting into a relationship, such as laying down a pathway to a successful and fulfilling job and finding out who you are at your core. Love is, more often than not, the last thing on our minds, as it should be as we continue to discover ourselves, but if the opportunity presents itself to us, maybe we shouldn't brush it off because we're told to do so. Maybe we should stop trying to fit the mold cast by our generation and the one before it, and instead allow our relationships to manifest in ways that seem right for us — ways that we deem tangible.
- Edited by Samantha Harms
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