As my roommate and I made our way home from a disturbing evening in midtown, Gainesville, I thought about life. No epiphanies here, just questions. Following a win against the Seminoles at home, we wondered if what we had just witnessed were the midlife crises of about 1,000 alumni. They flooded our bars and hangouts, inflating the usual Saturday special at Gator City from $1 wells to $4 wells. And $6 pitchers of Natty Light? We're used to paying $2! None of these were the greatest problems of the evening. If we had wanted to, we could have made any one of the creepy alumni buy us drink after drink after drink. The night would have been free of charge, and we'd have been livin' the high life as you might say. I found it too repulsive, however, that grown men still appear to be under the impression that intoxicated breast-grabbing and line-dropping techniques are the best ways to pick up women. Even the older ladies - the wives and mothers - were dancing on poles and drunkenly stumbling into my friends and me on the dance floor. And you had better believe that when "YMCA" came on, I held onto my beer for dear life, because there was no way anyone was lasting longer than 10 seconds without either spilling a beer or being spilt on. I felt more snobby that night than I have ever felt in my life. Is THIS what I have to look forward to? Are these really supposed to be the best four years of my life? The thought that I will be looking forward to every spare moment I can spend in this teeny-tiny town after graduation, is, quite frankly, depressing. Sure, these are the good ol' days, but I look forward to someday experiencing the better ones. Or maybe that is an unrealistic goal. So, as a mildly tipsy me crawled into bed that night, I thought about college life versus reality. I decided to do a bit of research the next day. According to collegeboard.com, the average University of Florida student needs about $150 a week for expenses and transportation. That does not include rent, tuition, or books. We're talking the bare necessities: food, water, clothing, gas, cell phone bills, tanning bed memberships, manicures, haircuts, Coach bags, and of course, booze. Okay, maybe the latter portion of that list is a little over the top, but welcome to Gainesville. A friend of mine recently told me that her boyfriend's weekly allowance from his parents was $200. That is $10,400 a year just for spending money! In the real world, the average Joe probably pays close to $8,000/year for rent and bills, and has close to $3,000 in insurance and miscellaneous expenses. That's a whole lotta spending money. If Joe had my friend's boyfriend's college-spending stipend, he'd be making over $21,000/ year. And according to the College Foundation of North Carolina, the average college graduate makes between $21,000 and $35,000 starting out; so his allowance is a pretty nice little number. A college student is being given the same amount of money that an alumnus is earning. Frightening. Of course, he is just one example, but I know entirely too many students who use daddy's credit card to pay for extravagant meals, bar tabs and expensive jeans. No wonder the drunken alumni who invaded my town were so excited to relive their days here: This place represents a sick fantasy world. College life is not reality. We go from being under mom and dad's watchful eye in high school to being completely free of them but still receiving their financial cushion. Will the strongest survive? If you're like me, you don't get that lovely $200/wk allowance. You don't even get half of it. You earn most of it and your parents make up what you can't quite muster. You're having fun, but you can't help your jealousy of those kids who buy shots for the whole bar and wear Prada to work out in. It would be nice if karma had our backs, but these same kids are going to school to be accountants (the most popular degree at UF is business/marketing), where they'll start out making about $45, 000 a year. Is this what they mean when they say the rich get richer? I may be green with envy, but I'm still optimistic. I am not in debt, aside from a couple hundred bucks I owe the 'rents. The average University of Florida student's indebtedness when they graduate is $13,744. I won't have to worry about that. And, if it so happens that something tragic occurs and we all have to live off of next-to-nothing, I will finally have something important that my credit-card toting peers do not: the ability to survive on *gasp* less than $100 a week. And maybe, just maybe, those of us who have been forced to learn the value of things will reach that light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe for us, the road ahead is full of blissful satisfaction in knowing that we made our own way. Maybe we won't be the creepy alumni that come back to traumatize the unsuspecting students and haunt the dance floors of their familiar bars, because we'll actually be enjoying our new lives outside of the twisted sphere that is college-living. Maybe this isn't it. Is it possible that what I witnessed Saturday night is not what I have to look forward to? I sure hope so. Read More