Jason, you ignorant slut. While the Southeast dorms are, undoubtedly, filled with men dumber than SEC athletes and women looser than JNCO jeans, they have nothing on the mouth-breathers over on Lakeshore. Think about this: When Lakeshore took down the Southeast in the Battle of Bascom Wednesday, they experienced something that, up to that point, was completely foreign to them. No, not incidental contact with a member of the opposite sex — there’s a lot of arm grabbing involved in LARPing — but, for once in their lives, they were winners.
Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last long. After all, it’s difficult to feel anything when it takes you 45 minutes to walk back to your 1920s housing unit. And that’s problem number one. If property value is all about location (location, location), then I see no reason why people would live out between the cattle buildings (insert joke about Cole) and the hospital. If State Street is the heart of Madison, the Lakeshore dormitories are the kidney stone the city passed around 40 years ago. It’s like an internment camp for nerds and virgins — obviously, not exclusive terms — and, just to make sure you recognized it, they built it like Buffalo Bill’s basement. “Hostel” had more amenities.
Not like the spineless ninnies who made the mistake of listing prisons like Tripp or Kronshage high on their housing forms are going to complain anyway. It takes a special breed of human being to survive on the Lakeshore: pale, timid and asthmatic, the Lakeshorer spends most of his time studying engineering in Steenbock Library and hunting down Cecropia moths for their 4-H award-winning bug collections. Ever try to impress someone with your knowledge of moths? No, because the last two people who tried that ended up either alone or in Jeffery Dahmer’s refrigerator.
Of course, not every student out on the lake is a muscle-less hodge-podge of fallopian tubes and horn-rimmed glasses; the short-course kids live out there, too. Short-course students, for those of you who’ve never encountered one, wear John Deere hats, drive rusted-out Fords and are solely responsible for the purchase of all seven copies of “Delta Farce.” They come into the big city for a couple months during harvest season to learn about soil and how to properly court a family member, but they spend most of their time playing volleyball and listening to Nickelback. They don’t read Dante; they live it.
Sure, the lake is pretty and the open space sure beats the Borg-inspired design behind Lucky, but it can’t make up for the indisputable fact that, in the end, Lakeshore is nothing more than a bucolic hell. You know what else was pretty? Princess Diana. And she’s dead.
I’m sure the Lakeshore dormitories were a great idea when they were built, but back then, so was buying on margins and lobotomies. The only thing great about that era was the depression, and Obama’s working hard to best that one as we speak.
Besides, have you ever been in Smith? That place is tits.
Sean Kittridge ([email protected]) spent one year in the Lakeshore dormitories, presumably on a dare. He has since seen the error in his ways, yet continues to hate Swenson.
