Freshman Twelve...

It happens every year around this time, a group of young students enters a university or college to begin the long journey to a degree. Could be a bachelor, associate, masters or the great PHD but it all starts with being a freshman. Gaining those 10 pounds, realizing you are supposed to be a responsible adult, and learning that no one is there to cook you dinner. This last point has always been a crack in my heart, I yearn for, no long for, someone who will cook me dinner. But since you have read previous posts about my cooking skills you can understand why this is a dream and not a reality.
Today I had lunch with my roommates from my freshman year in college and it brought me back to those days when we were all looking forward in life. My first year of college was at a school called Southern Utah University. I will admit to you that is was not the most academically challenging schools but it was wicked fun. I lived in the dorm room on the basement floor in an apartment with five other girls. The apartment next too us had six girls and the twelve of us became friends. I would like to tell you that there were no fights but we are girls.. are you kidding? I would also like to falsify to you that I was not the cause of some of those fights, but some day I have to meet my maker and I cannot tell that big of a lie.
What I want to share with you is some of the stories of my freshman year in college. This was before caller ID and smart phones, before everyone had a computer to start school with, and when tanning beds were not considered dangerous to your health.
There was a tanning bed that we went to regularly in the town.  The top part of the tanning bed did not have plexiglass anymore it only had wire to hold the lights in.  This could not have been a good tanning bed by any stretch of the imagination. But we went there because was cheap and we were stupid. One of my roommates was driving up to tan when the car she was driving decided to start on fire. This car was the thirteenth roommate.
It was a Hyundai Excel, red, hatchback. We drove up to Salt Lake and down to Cedar city in this car and it was a tank. I sat in the back seat on our journeys and remember waking up one time to a car that was swerving in and out of the lane. My roommates up front had decided it would be funny to wipe boogers on each other. You would think this would scare me but I just went back to sleep. (This was back in the day when I could sleep through anything) On one trip we decided to make a sign saying "Learn how to drive Dumb@#$" and flashed it to people who we considered slow or bad drivers. Yep the same girls who swerved around because of booger wars were judging other drivers. The irony is not lost on me.
For some reason we thought it was funny to prank phone call people. I am not sure how it got started but it took on a life of its own. This became a nightly ritual.  One of the favorite things to say was "I have a yeast infection" and then hang up.  We would laugh until you would have thought we had lost our minds. We borrowed clothes, we wore undergarments on top of clothes, we stole bra's and hid them, we put ice in people's beds, and we played every imaginable trick on each other. If you have not noticed already, that would be every imaginable trick... the idea of holding back did not exist at that moment in time.  This even included putting maxi pads on every car during a Christmas dance. To add insult to injury we added ketchup to our prank... I will let you figure the rest out.
One time a roommate brought home a huge bag of bubble gum and we decided we should make a bubble gum castle. So we stayed awake until 3 AM chewing mounds of bubble gum to make our castle. It was gross, it did not stay up and it consisted of bubble gum and spit. We were convinced, however, that if we let it "set" it would turn into a great castle. My jaw hurt for a week. I am not sure what happened to the castle.
My favorite prank was when I hid blue cheese under the bed of one of my roommates for a pay back. (I still think this is funny) Only I did not really get away with it because I hid the blue cheese in my own sock. Note to self, when playing a prank on someone do not use your own clothing.  Plus I was not very sly when I went to hide the blue cheese, I am going to say I have gotten better but we all know that truth.
Now you are saying to yourself, who does stuff like that. I will say it is and always will be the fresh crop of college students who are on their own for the first time in their lives. Yep, they are going to steal the christmas lights from the frat house and then let everyone blame the sorority. Yep, the are going to move around orange cones on the road. Yep, they are going to moon people and karaoke into the wee hours of the morning. And yes, they are going to date boys who rename themselves Ceasar Snobie, I wish I were making this one up.  It is the price you have to pay to transition over to adulthood. These women who I respect and love to this day brought me some of the weirdest moments of my life (which is saying something) and I will always owe them because it was with them that I began to understand who I was and the potential of what I could become.  Now it is just a matter of time to achieve that potential and stop having the sense of humor of a twelve year old. That time is coming, any day now.... possibly... maybe... well, probably not.