I've gotten some complaints that my last column just plain wasn't funny, so I thought I'd start this one off with a joke.
A man moves from his New Jersey home to Hawaii. After a couple of weeks, he's just feeling absolutely miserable -- headaches, stomach aches, depression. He goes to the doctor and asks what could be wrong with him. "I know exactly what's wrong with you," the doctor says. "Just go to the rankest smelling outhouse you can find and put your head over the hole for 10 minutes. Come back tomorrow."
The man goes and does this and is back at the doctor's the next day. "This is amazing, doc," he says. "I feel a million times better! What was wrong with me?"
The doctor takes one look at him and says, "You were homesick."
The point of this joke, of course, is that New Jersey sucks.
Also, New York City, and everyone from it, sucks, with the exception of my friends Marc and Jess, my Dad and everyone on Street staff.
Also, Mets suck, Yankees suck, Giants suck, Jets suck, Knicks suck. The Nets will suck as soon as they move. No one cares about hockey.
But I digress: my real point is that there's a lot of regional loyalty and animosity here at Penn, and I feel my fair share of it. Quite a few of my friends are from California -- maybe it's something in my personality that attracts me to surfer bums from LA and daughters of Black Panthers from Berkeley, I don't know, but I've ended up with these people somehow. For a long time I was really sick of hearing how great California was compared to the East Coast. I wanted to punch anyone who talked about how no one could make a burger as well as In-N-Out or a juice like Jamba Juice; wanted to hurt everyone who complained about East Coast weather and talked about how great it was that you could go from skiing to snowboarding in an hour, when you weren't stuck in smog-filled traffic.
But damn if it isn't cold this winter. And as my testicles shrivel ever further into the nether regions of my esophagus and my heating bill grows to equal the GNP of a small country, I'm starting to think about what it might have been like to go to a school in California instead of trudging through this dreary winter.
I can see it now -- instead of going to class, I'd sit on the beach and buxom blondes would serve me drinks. I'd be a movie star, getting Punk'd by Ashton and marrying Britney every so often. And best of all, I wouldn't ever have to hear people from California complain about Philly.
I'm going, going, back, back to Cali, Cali,
