It was right at the moment when the pre-revolutionary colonists
and the British Empire came to a diplomatic impasse and the only
option left was a bloody civil war that I realized, in my
chain-smoke-and-red-wine-driven pre-final all-night marathon
cramming session, that I’m graduating after this.

Rapidly closing in on the Tijuana border, having plowed over the
200-mile stretch of sacred Indian burial ground called Highway 5
from Los Angeles, the knuckles of the passengers whitened with fear
and trembling.

Hey, did you hear the one about the Republican shill suspected
of being a gay prostitute who snuck into the White House every day
for two years pretending to be a journalist?

Who the hell is Howard Dean? Since many of us young liberals
prostrated our bodies into a human drawbridge to the White House
for him in the primaries, perhaps we should re-examine the man who,
as the newly crowned head of the Democratic National Committee,
would be king of our hopes and dreams.

Check the label on your Nikes, your Apple computers, your UCLA
sweaters. Made in China, assembled in Korea, hecho en Mexico. It
may seem like just one pair of shoes, one computer and one sweater,
until you multiply it by every one you’ve ever bought.

Being homeless has got to suck, especially if you’re
struggling to get off the street. I’ve never been homeless,
and I pray to the gods I’ll never be.

WASHINGTON “”mdash; Plunging into tear gas-soaked chaos, police
armored with riot gear and clashing with clench-fisted protesters
““ that’s how I imagined Bush’s inauguration while
flying into D.C.

In this bastion of higher learning and high-minded
intellectualism, there exists among the future generation of this
country a wide, hilarious streak of anti-intellectualism. It creeps
its way to the surface with the preface of “um, like, you
know” in the sentences of our after-class socializing, which
are usually finished evermore with the post-Gen X trademark
21st-century watchwords “or, whatever.”
This unspoken phenomenon can be witnessed in its full documented
glory within the safe confines of that campus social underworld of
the UCLA online forums.

Listen up, people, especially you freshmen, and most especially
you little overachieving fresh meat straight out of high school. I
want to share a little chunk of wisdom my brain decided to drop on
me belatedly.

How drunk do you get on the average? Are you a recreational
drinker or a binge drinker? Are you drunk right now? If these
questions sound familiar to you, then you are one of the lucky
1,000 undergrads who received a UCLA student drunkenness survey in
the mail recently.