Author Archives: Dana Cass

Writer, retired amateur ballerina, reluctantly fluent in corporate jargon, often confused for a twelve-year-old.

like so much cattle

I’ve gotten really into the idea of branding myself lately. No, not like the creepy albino monk in the Da Vinci Code. Like… hashtag Dana Cass problems, only on a grand global scale where I become a household name for witty posthip twentysomethings like myself. My life is an exercise in narcissism, so obviously that’s part of it, but I think I’ve gone into overdrive lately because of the Great Job Search of 2012.

The Great Job Search of 2012 is, to put it bluntly, a demoralizing experience with no apparent purpose but to make me feel like maybe my self-esteem, wallet, and resume would have been better off had I just stuck to the whole musical theatre audition thing. Like… when it comes to singing, dancing, acting, and working low-paying jobs at an hourly wage, I rock. I’m WILDLY competent. But when it comes to finding a full-time, salaried position where I’m taken mildly seriously, I am lost like a Goldfish cracker on a tiger-skin rug.

FRIENDS, NOBODY WILL HIRE ME. I’ve got a degree from a prestigious college and I’ve been working since I was fifteen, but I have no experience. Never mind that I have three times the sales of anyone else working in my store or that I can write better than the majority of the professional world; I’m useless because I have not yet learned how to operate such-and-such program that will take me, a child of the digital age who learned to play Solitaire the same year I learned to read, about five minutes to master.

I could continue in the vein of talking about how awesome I am for approximately the rest of my earthly life, but I should probably return to the point at hand, which is to say that hashtag Dana Cass problems is my tragic attempt to reestablish myself in my personal snowglobe that I just knocked off the shelf of stability into the realm of, you know, people reading my resume and throwing it into the shredder because I can’t operate QuickBooks in Korean while peeing out Dr. Pepper onto my commercial driver’s license.

I just gave up the professional identity I’d been clinging to for two and a half years and I’m trying to find a new one. I then find myself facing a new question: if the identity of “dancer” or “performer” was so toxic to me that I have to entirely relinquish it to become a healthy person, do I really WANT to adopt a new identity that could leave me the same way? Or more succinctly… do I have to BE my career?

I have long prided myself on being a diverse human being. This is another way of saying that I go out of my way not to fit into a mold. I think I’m trying to turn myself into a unique, tractable, almost commodifiable entity so that I can constantly show the world that I AM DANA CASS AND THAT IS SOMETHING THAT NOBODY ELSE IS. There are a million dancers, a million retail salespeople, a million writers, etc. etc., but there is only one Dana Cass and even if I can’t get a job because I’m not a trilingual dental hygienist, at least I can cling to some kind of meaningful identity.

Even if I’m clinging to that meaningful identity in a cardboard box somewhere because I thought that entering the working world meant I was going to be, like, successful and entirely ignored the fact that it’s 2012 and there are about six jobs left in the world and they’re all going to Newt Gingrich’s ex-wives.

“how would you apply to be a professional cover letter writer?”

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Dana Cass and I am writing to submit my resume for consideration for the cover letter writer position. I graduated from Vassar College in May and am eager to break into the cover letter writing industry. My educational background and six years’ experience in the workforce have prepared me well for the competitive world of professional cover letter writing.

As a student at Vassar, I received extensive training in the fine arts of bullshitting and bragging about myself. My professors taught me to use unnecessarily multisyllabic linguistic vessels to disguise the shallow nature of my analytical writing, a tactic I feel comfortable applying when attempting similarly to disguise the shallow nature of myself. I pride myself on my ability to excrete fifteen pages of crap in record amounts of time, a talent I cultivated every semester at finals time when I realized that I hadn’t read a single reading in full since the second week of classes! Now, as a postgraduate attempting to make my way in the professional world, I draw on those experiences to inspire me in the wee hours as I send in minutely different versions of the same three-paragraph joke of a personal summary to jobs that I’m totally underqualified for, thanks to the fact that I spent four years in a ballerina bubble ignoring the Career Development Office.

My professional experience has also prepared me well for a career as a cover letter writer. As a retail salesperson, I’m a championship fabricator of facts that will convince you to buy a product that you probably don’t need! I successfully convince every customer that passes through my store that I’m the preeminent expert on, well, everything. Additionally, I am constantly complimented on my reliability and superior performance by my supervisors, who entrust me with increasing responsibility that bears no positive  influence on my tragic, tragic rate of pay.

If you select me as your cover letter writer, you, too, can reap the benefits of my ability to make everything about myself and my product seem like the eighth wonder of the world. You’ll get an unsurpassed amount of work product, thanks to the insomnia that I’ve been saddled with thanks to the job hunt and my unstable life circumstances! My creativity, enthusiasm, and talent for making an eminently employable silk purse out of a useless liberal arts college grad of a sow’s ear make me an excellent fit for the position. I would greatly appreciate the chance to further discuss the opportunity in person. Please contact me at your convenience to schedule an interview. Thank you for your consideration.

Best,

Dana Cass

you’d be smarter, too…

…if you grew up navigating the clusterfuck that is the New York subway system. (Actually, I’m only pretending that it’s a clusterfuck. I think it’s actually a work of genius and it blows my mind that it not only functions but functions like 93% of the time and gets you anywhere except for the Lower East Side, which is probably an act of revenge for that particular neighborhood begetting “Rent.”)

Every day I spend here, the small children of New York City BLOW MY MIND with how obscenely smart they are. Like, compared to Manhattan babies, Las Vegas kids are drooling idiots. (Manhattan babies don’t drool. They contribute their enlightened spittle to the universal spittoon.) It’s not just that they grow up as fluent in subway etiquette as they are in English. And French. And Swahili. And they can understand the guy on the subway platform who is telling them to avoid watching out for that ginormous rat without asking him eight hundred times “What? Huh? Sorry, what?” because, unlike me, they grew up around people who have accents besides White Southwestern American.

I was at work the other day fitting an almost-two-year-old girl who was telling me, in full sentences, what she thought of the fit of her shoes. NOT EVEN TWO YEARS OLD. In  Vegas, I had ten-year-olds who couldn’t string together enough words to answer me when I asked if their shoes were too tight or too loose, and this freakish little gremlin genius is telling me that she thinks she needs to go up a half size. I looked at her mother and said, “Your daughter is RIDICULOUSLY articulate.” She nodded, with a mixture of pride and sheer terror of the havoc that a kid that smart is doubtlessly going to wreak in her future.

Maybe it comes from the extreme pressure associated with getting into the world’s greatest preschool. I wouldn’t know, because when I was in preschool, I was parading around in public wearing only my bathing suit while living in fear that I was going to be forced to take a bath at my preschool, La Casa de Cristo (I fully attribute my raging agnosticism to this early fear of baths). Maybe it’s because you grow up riding the subway with volatile drunk finance bros punching the metal subway pole intermittently on the N train on Saturday evenings. We suburban desert dwellers just rolled around in the backseat eating old French fries and reading the same Ramona and Beezus that had been shoved between the seats for the past seven years.

The children of New York City would take over the world, if it weren’t for the fact that in their pubescent years, the pressure causes them to crack and they all end up at Vassar doing molly after they finish their art history papers on the weekends.

I H8 NY

It’s been 18 days since I put on my brown suede boots and boarded a plane, and I have come to a depressing conclusion: the city where I thought I’d see all my wildest dreams come true is, in fact, an overcrowded happiness vacuum where Southwestern kindness goes to die.

Since it’s only been 18 days out of the 365 that I plan to spend here, I realize I’m probably putting the cart before the poor unfortunate blinded Central Park horse, but… guys, my instinct is to hate this city with every fiber of my being. It’s like everybody gets out of bed every morning, puts their cranky pants on, and proceeds to spend the rest of the day shutting doors in other people’s faces and avoiding eye contact on the R train.

I came to New York with a vague sense of nausea that I was making a terrible, terrible decision. I don’t think I made a terrible, terrible decision by moving here; I could never have known that I would feel such a visceral hatred of this urban nightmare where you forget that there’s a sky until you make it to the outer boroughs. And as I always say, I’ll do anything for a good story, and I’m sure that at the end of a year, I’ll have enough stories about my fabulously miserable time in New York to fill a book of short stories.

And who knows? A year from now, I might be eating my words. I might fall in love with this city; I might forget my passion for small talk and relinquish the joy I feel from long conversations with strangers at the grocery store. I might… I might not. I can’t see myself feeling content here. I will keep myself busy, I will appreciate the time I get to spend with the people I love who live here, I will take advantage of all the things that can be free in spite of the dirty looks from the Yoga to the People teacher and the Met ticket-taker.

But for today, I hate New York. And that’s okay. Because seriously, there are way too many damn people in this city anyway and we could use a few more representatives out in the desert.

Also, after a year I’m totally going to be able to be like, “Oh, yeah, I lived in New York for awhile. What a shithole. I’m so worldly.”

an update from the couch

I’ve spent the majority of the past two days in my apartment on my couch waiting for various deliveries… the vast majority of which didn’t come, so fuck that noise. I left this morning to go to the Bed Bath and Beyond/Marshalls/TJ Maxx on 18th and 6th and had to powerwalk back because the Fed Ex guy arrived with my mattress six hours earlier than he arrived with my bed yesterday. However, he waited for me AND carried it up all four flights of stairs, so he is my new best friend. I wish I could have taken a picture of him as my photo of the day.

Today in New York, I learned that if you wear your Vassar sweatshirt with your jeans and boots instead of your down jacket, you get a lot more catcalls. Also, if you powerwalk, a deliveryman will tell you that he doesn’t like that run.

I’m starting to think that I could convert this entire blog into “Dana Gets an OkCupid Profile” and parlay that into the book deal/talk show/lifelong fame of which I’ve always dreamed. If I had more time on my hands and a great deal more balls than I’ve been blessed with, I would start a blog in which I met every single person who messaged me and detailed the adventures that ensued… but instead I think I’ll just post screenshots of all my favorites, because that way I don’t have to meet this guy:

if I can make it there

When I plugged in my MacBook just now and it said “Not Charging” even though it totally is supposed to be and it was just being lazy like it always is, I said to it, “Stop slacking. You can Not Charge in Vegas. You can’t Not Charge in New York.”

cleaning out my closet

Mark my words — if I don’t stop myself while I’m ahead, I will end up on Hoarders in 30 years’ time. The contents of my closet include the following:

  • a tap costume wrapped in three plastic bags to prevent it from vomiting glitter all over my closet (all of Nevada Ballet was covered in glitter for weeks after three of us wore this costume for recital one year. I hate to think what would have happened if they had dressed the entire Youth Company in glittery tutus for Giselle… we would have had to convert the building into a new branch of the Liberace Museum)
  • every note I ever received between the ages of 12-15, a period during which we passed a veritable crapton of notes. I can probably toss the vast majority of these because I don’t think there’s any reason to remember the kinds of horrible fights we used to carry out and resolve through notes when we were 13… but my sentiment won’t let me throw out all the notes the boy from freshman year Geometry wrote me. Hello, I need proof that I once seduced someone ENTIRELY THROUGH THE POWER OF MY HANDWRITING.
  • all of the plastic flowers I got backstage during four years of dance concerts at my high school. Which was a lot, because obviously I was really popular. Actually, no, my parents just always got them for me and there were three shows a year.
  • the kicker: the movie ticket from my first date. In an envelope marked “This is the movie ticket from my first date.”

I’ll save a lot of what I found in my closet. Most importantly, I’ll save the years and years’ worth of diaries and journals that I’ve kept somewhat consistently since seventh or eighth grade. Looking back through my older journals is a TRIP. First off, I have long suspected that I was a certifiable nutball when I was younger and to read what I wrote back then… yes. I was cray. I feel really bad for all those poor preteen boys I had TERRIFYINGLY INTENSE CRUSHES on because they probably had to shell out for some serious protection after all the fear-for-their-lives I instilled in them. Really, in retrospect, my drunk-texting habit doesn’t seem so bad. Judging by the path I was on in those days, I’m kind of surprised I haven’t turned into that lady who wore diapers so she could drive to her stalk her ex without having to stop to pee.

All that aside, I’ve always loved diving back into my old journals to see what psychological meltdowns I’ve gotten over since any given day. It’s one of my favorite activities, and I unearthed some long-lost GEMS in my older journals. (Most notable: the list of “Reasons Why I Should Not Like T_____,” circa 2002. Best reason: “He called me ‘spawn of evil.’”) Before I box up my journals, I want to make a list of the best journal entries of the past 15 or so years, because there are some doozies in there.

But after that? I’m boxing them up. I’m packing them away, sending them to Spokane to the new house, and not looking at them until I get older. They lose their magic when you’ve read them too many times, which is what’s happened with my college journals. I know them cover to cover and I want to forget them again so I can continue to live my life with the clueless, unjaded abandon that has led me on so many adventures. I don’t need to remind myself what it was like to be 18 and miserable, 19 and crazy, 20 and floundering, 21 and sick. I’m 22 and happy and healthy (well, getting there) and fabulous and going confidently in the direction of my dreams. I lived through all that shit already and I don’t need to do it again.

But before then… stay tuned, for you, too, may learn the reasons why I should not like T_____, circa 2002.

only nerds like assigned seating

Today is the first day of classes at Vassar. I do feel a little strange and sentimental about it, but if we’re being honest, has the first day of school ever really been fun? Personally, I spent my first days of school every year in a constant state of anxiety and, um, having absolutely no idea where anything was even at schools I had attended for three years. (Fact: my senior year of high school, I had to ask the counselor where the lockers were. She asked if I was a freshman. When I told her no, I was a senior, she looked at me like she was confused that I hadn’t just gotten off the short bus.)

When I was in middle school, the big anxiety was What Team You Were On (I can’t remember if we said “on” or “in.” Hmm). No, we weren’t debating the finer points of tops and bottoms just yet; each grade at my middle school was divided into four “teams” with whom you shared all of your “core classes.” So woe betide you if you weren’t on the cool team, or the team with all of your friends, or if you just ended up on a team with all the weirdos who still wore jean jackets and light-up shoes. You were on 7-3? Oooh, all the bitchy dance team girls are on that team. Have fun! Or worse — you’re on 7-2? Umm, NOBODY is on 7-2. You’re gonna be so bored. You’re on 8-1 and your best friend is on 8-3, but your crush is on 8-3 and if you get in a fight with your best friend, she can totally talk smack about you to your crush during science and you can’t do anything about it because you’re stuck in the 8-1 hall with that weird guy with frosted tips poking you in the back for the entire 50 minutes of algebra.

Middle school: shit was rough, and never rougher than the days when you learned who you were doomed to spend your year with.

High school was a little better, at least in the rainbow unicorn puppy bubble that was my performing arts high school where we all loved each other and only got bitchy when casting for shows went up or dance class placements for the next year were assigned. But the first day of school was invariably a sweaty, awful day where you tramped around our ginormous campus in the 110-degree Las Vegas heat from one class to another, cursing the gods who put seemingly the entire sophomore theatre class in sixth period chem with you because you were surely going to have to spend the entire freakin’ year listening to a bunch of idiots singing showtunes. I breathed a sigh of relief when the first day passed, block scheduling happened and we only had to go to four classes a day and the teachers all realized that they had to separate the theatre majors before all hell broke loose, never to be contained again.

Then came college. Not just one but TWO first-days-of-classes every year, and so many buildings whose abbreviations on your course schedule make no sense, and you’re STILL sweaty and running around and discovering your third year in that “OB” does not, in fact, stand for “Olmsted Building” (if only I had taken that as a sign NOT to take the Faulkner seminar).

So once you’ve located the classroom in question, you now have the unenviable pleasure of finding out Who Is In Your Class. And the further you get into college, the more fraught with disaster a class list can be. Will you be forced into a ten-person seminar in a dimly lit room with hipsters whose reluctance to speak in class will force you into a semester-long talking binge because you can’t handle silence in an academic setting? Or will that guy who had an academically-induced crush on last semester join you for another four months to learn even more about Walt Whitman’s weird sexual metaphors? And… wait… if he’s there, can you sit next to him? Is that socially acceptable? Should you even sit directly next to someone in a class that isn’t full, anyway? Should you leave a space? Is this like the urinal? What if you don’t leave a space and then EVERYONE ELSE DOES? Do you move? GODDAMMIT, PROFESSORS, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST ASSIGN US SEATS?!

I don’t miss the first day of school, kids. I don’t miss the aimless wandering around campuses that I should have long known by heart, burdened by my tragically poor sense of direction. I don’t miss worrying that my best friend is going to use her yearlong position on team 8-3 with my supercrush to steal him away from me. I don’t miss waiting anxiously to find out whether the professor will sign me into an overfull class or angsting about the fact that I’m sitting across from someone whose roommate I totally hooked up with last year and he absolutely thinks I’m a crazy skank. (That actually never happened, believe it or not, but it totally could have.)

All this said, be it known that I did have to wander the UNLV campus tonight trying to find the building where we were learning music for Sweeney. I guess I’m not out of the lost-on-campus woods just yet.

a very potter history

We recent graduates of the Class of 2011 are the Potter generation: the series bookended our young adulthood and after growing up with it for ten years, we took it to college with us, throwing Potter-themed parties, reading the books for comfort when we were angsty over collegey things, and decorating our houses with cardboard cutouts of the characters. (Okay, that last one might just have been SoCo 3, but we are obviously trendsetters.) Though I hate the movies like any good Potter fan should, I’ll be dragging my tired-grandma butt to the midnight premiere on Thursday, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to analyze where exactly we were in the course of our young lives when each book was released. And I guess the movies too. Even though they’re stupid.

1997: First book released. I read a review in Newsweek that compared JKR to Roald Dahl and immediately dismissed it as a ripoff. (Yes, I read Newsweek when I was eight. Why do you think I didn’t have any friends?)

1999: I’m gonna say this is when I started reading them. I caved in and ordered Sorcerer’s Stone from the Scholastic book order — remember book orders? Highlight of elementary school. Second only to that most glorious of events, the book fair — and read the whole thing in one sitting. Then I made my mom buy me Chamber of Secrets, which I also read in one sitting.

Christmas 1999: Prisoner of Azkaban is in my Christmas stocking. SANTA WIN. I am ten years old and have a couple friends. I make my grandma, who used to work in publishing, read Harry Potter. She likes it. (For real. Patrice Witherspoon Cass was not the type of woman to lie about her opinion on a book to make her grandchild feel better. This is the woman who had strict rules for playing Scrabble with her grandkids — when we got to high school age, we lost “dictionary privileges.” Casses are hardcore when it comes to the literary world.)

July 8, 2000: Goblet of Fire is released. The night before, my fifth grade class had stayed overnight at school for “Midnight Madness,” an event that I still can’t quite believe a teacher would willingly commit themselves to hosting, but it was SUPAFUN. We all stayed up all night and ran around the school and dipped our hands in tempera paint and made T-shirts with the whole class’s handprints and signatures. (I still have mine.) I got home at about seven in the morning and slept for two hours, then when I woke up, the book was in a box on my doorstep. I read the whole thing that day, much of it at my dad’s office, where I used to go on weekends. I would bring a book and read or draw on my dad’s boxes and boxes of green scratch paper, and he would buy me a Dr. Pepper out of the vending machine. I imagine I had a satisfying night’s sleep after that.

2001: I have a vague memory of reading Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in the fitting room of Macy’s while my mom tried on bras. Later this year, the first movie is released. Little do I know that some years later, an embarrassing number of LVA students will go through the Quidditch scene frame by frame trying to find our new classmate Julianne Hough clapping when Harry scores. (True story. And yes, I totally did it too.)

2002: The second movie is released, but we probably shouldn’t talk about it because it’s an insult not only to JKR but to the entire filmmaking industry in general. Actually, probably the whole storytelling industry. And children. 2002 is about prime-time for my active Harry Potter fangirling on the Internet. Like, I posted on message boards. I was SUPER INTO IT. In my defense, I never participated in role-playing games. I had SOME standards. But like, at this point in my life, I was kind of more comfortable with my “Internet friends” than my real friends. I continue to maintain that middle school should take place in isolation because NOBODY IS NICE WHEN THEY’RE TWELVE. I never really made that connection before… we now pause while I psychoanalyze the possibility that I spent all my spare time online in middle school because strangers from Australia who also thought Harry should totally get with Ginny were preferable to the real-life company of, you know, bitches. (Not that I wasn’t one. I totally was.)

2003: Order of the Phoenix is released! This was the first midnight release party I attended. I want to say I was at the Borders on Charleston with Lauren — does that sound right? I remember waiting in line around the stationery area and reading all the greeting cards. I didn’t go straight home and read the book; I slept instead and read it all the next day. This is probably my least favorite book and I can explain it in the terms that we Harry Potter Internet freaks used to use: it was the book of Angsty!Harry. Like, I get it, life’s rough when errybody in the club thinks you’re full of shit, but can we please move on? I just got frustrated all the time. Although, in its defense, the “Mistletoe.” “It’s probably full of Nargles” exchange is probably the greatest intro to a first kiss in all of literature.

2004: Prisoner of Azkaban movie. I liked this one because it was confusing for all the fake fans who had never read the books.

2005: Half-Blood Prince! This was the summer that we were slowly starting to get our driver’s licenses. I had my first job working at Tropical Smoothie with Taylor, where I would often see the very kids that made fun of me in middle school, and it made me feel great to watch them process the fact that the bespectacled midget had “swanned.” I went to the release party with Vinny and Jessica, who had just gotten her driver’s license and freaked out because she ran into the gate on her way into the neighborhood. We saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and went to the Barnes and Noble across the street from where I work now and spent the whole waiting period making fun of all the freaks in their costumes. It’s funny to think that this was the second-to-last book and 2007 seemed so distant at that point. The only college I imagined myself at was NYU and I rarely thought past the next day.

2005 was the year that I started to feel like the things I wanted were within my reach. I went on my first date, I was in an LVA show with all the theatre majors, I got moved up to 2B, I got my first job, I got my driver’s license, I got called back for a lead in the next musical, I went to Sun Youth Forum and, for the first time, had someone pay attention to me because I was a smart panda. It was all in the present but I was starting to feel like a force of nature.

The Goblet of Fire movie also came out in 2005. I don’t remember seeing this one. I know I saw it in theatres… maybe on Christmas with the fam or something?

2007: Order of the Phoenix movie comes out. I go to the midnight showing with Lexie and Jessica and maybe Gwen, I don’t quite remember, and I get a stomachache and am thoroughly disillusioned with the whole film franchise.

I graduate from high school and star in a musical and then the seventh book comes out. It is obviously awesome and I am one of the six people on the planet who love the cheesy epilogue, because I’m a sucker for cheesy epilogues and I like to imagine that my own life will turn out that way. A couple months later, I go to college and discover that contrary to popular belief, we have NOT put away childish things.

2010: Michaela and Amanda throw a Harry Potter party for their birthdays and my house prepares by dressing up and taking pictures with our Harry Potter cardboard cutout. Because we have that. We are 21 years old. Harry Potter has given us the gift of eternal youth.

Conclusion: I’ve grown a good eight inches since this book came out. My bangs haven’t changed much, though. Oh, yeah, and I have a degree in English and am fully qualified to analyze this book series through whatever critical lens I so desire. I won’t, though.

But believe you me, I will still hate this last movie. Even if Neville got hot. (Google him. Seriously.)

vassar boys (a heteronormative guide for lovers)

tl;dr version: if you’re looking for your MRS degree, you’ve chosen the wrong school. Vandy takes transfers, I’m sure!

When I started at Vassar, my knowledge of college dating was based entirely on my sister’s experience at Georgetown. Britt started dating her boyfriend approximately five seconds into her freshman year in 2003. In March of this year, she and Matt celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

Fun fact: This did not happen to me at Vassar. Funner fact: This does not happen to ANYBODY IN THE CLUB at Vassar (Devon and Sabrina, may you be the exception). Vassar, on the whole, is no breeding ground for lasting relationships. It’s more a breeding ground for angst. And probably the herp.

Arm yourselves with these tidbits of knowledge of the Vassar dating scene:

1. Vassar Freshman Boy Syndrome: VFBS is a catch-all term for the propensity of Vassar freshman boys to want to sleep with anything on two legs and then never talk to them again. VFBS is neither limited solely to freshman boys, nor is it typical of all of them; I just had a limited scope when I was an angsty lovesick freshie and that’s what I termed it. VFBS is pretty standard practice in the real world, but what makes it kind of hilarious and tragic at Vassar is that in the real world, you can actually hit it and quit it without too much drama. But Vassar is kind of a tiny little place. You are bound to run into your hittee at one point or another, whether you’re in the same English seminar a couple years down the line or you always get Pesto Chicken Ciabattas at the same time on Tuesdays at the Retreat and HELLO IT’S SO AWKWARD DO YOU SAY HI OR DO YOU JUST LOOK REALLY BUSY WITH YOUR IPOD?!

Just be forewarned: the Vassar Freshman Boy (whether or not he is a Freshman Boy. Or even a he) does not want to be your boyf. He may or may not want your phone number. Do not drunk-text the Vassar Freshman Boy. (This is a very important piece of advice. Take it to heart. I’m serious. You’ll remember this when you drunk-text — drext — the Vassar Freshman Boy and he acts like you’re cray cray. I know, it sucks to be beholden to such a cruel social construct. Deal with it.)

You might even find yourself coming down with a nasty case of VFBS. (Ask me about the first three-quarters of senior year.) What do you do? Well, I personally suggest joining an a cappella group that does concerts with groups visiting from other colleges. Or just renounce awkward and say hi REALLY CHEERFULLY to all of your hittees every time you see them. And if one of them turns out to be a stage five clinger? Be kind. Let ‘em down gently. DON’T MAKE FUN OF THEM FOR DREXTING YOU OR KARMA WILL GET YOU.

2. The Retreat is Not a Date: Still looking for The One? After wading through a slew of Vassar Freshman Boys, you might think you’ve come across him! One major indicator of a Nice Boy at Vassar — or a boy who might ask for your phone number, or at least say hello to you when you’re both ordering Pesto Chicken Ciabattas for the umpteenth time during the Tuesday lunch rush — is that they might do the unthinkable and ask you out ON A DATE. Dates are a thing of significance at Vassar. But don’t be fooled! Lunch at the Retreat is NOT A DATE. It may be an indicator that the gentleman in question is interested in getting to know you better… but it’s not a date unless you are OFF CAMPUS. (Unless you’re like, having a picnic in the Shakespeare Garden or something. In which case, gag me with a shovel and stop being so cute. This is an ironic college.)

Note: This does not mean the boy has to pay for you. Ladies split the bill! This has been a Dana Cass public service announcement on dating in the modern age.

3. The Pantless Psychiatrists: You will run into a number of boys at Vassar who want to explain you to you. You think you know yourself? Hell no, girl, the gentleman in the tighty-whities knows all your secrets. Even if you don’t know his last name. He has seen the cereal boxes on your bedroom floor and he will tell you why you do what you do and HE IS RIGHT. This, if you ask me, is the downside of the oft-sought Sensitive Boy. You find a guy who thinks he is super-attuned to your feelings and he decides that he knows them better than you do and that you need to hear about yourself from him. I always want to be like, “Okay, hello, I know I seem like a megaspaz and a hot mess and can barely form a coherent sentence unless I have the powers of spell check, but I actually am fairly self-aware and would really prefer if you would save this for your English composition class.” Be secure in your knowledge of yourself. Nobody knows you better than you know yourself, except maybe your housemates, whose opinions you should probably trust.

I may add more to this series, but I’m still a little concerned that my mom is reading this and I don’t want to send her to an early grave. Stay tuned for my memoirs in a few decades.

P.S. Yes, I know this is grossly heteronormative. Unfortunately, I am the straightest straight that ever straighted and vanilla heteronormativity is the only subject in which I have any expertise whatsoever.