If you're reading this near the GCPA, head towards the violin practice room and continue reading as somber music passes through your soul. If you're the violin player, ignore the people crying on the other side of the door.
Before heading to New York, I spent a week with my beautiful girlfriend (look who just got some boyfriend points) in Mexico.
Upon returning at midnight on Jan. 2, I had five hours to clean my clothes, stare dramatically at the empty walls of my room and catch a plane to New York. When I finally got there, I had several stereotypical visions of New Yorkers floating around in my head.
They all seemed to come true before my eyes. Everyone seemed to be wearing a Giants sweat suit and scowling. Taxi drivers were either insane or naturally scared of tall (handsome) Norwegian men. When I tried to get out of the wrong side of the cab, one immediately yelled something along the lines of, "GET OUT RAWR ON OTHER SIDE ROARRRR!"
You see, cab drivers are actually domesticated werewolves living amongst us. As the day grows dark, they become increasingly worried and honk their horns as a way of coping.
Naturally, when I arrived at my room, there was no heat. I unpacked my bags to find that the glass for the picture frame of my parents had shattered and I had forgotten to bring any bed sheets. In the shower, I turned the wrong knob, and the water became so hot that it actually burned my head. I basically laid in my bed, using a sweater as a pillow, shivering everywhere but the top of my head.
At this point, the violinist should be accompanied by a piano player and perhaps a quiet operatic solo from DePauw's own Blake Lampton. If needed, begin watching the scene from "Big" where Tom Hanks rents out a room in a shady motel.
The next day, I started my internship at "The Colbert Report."
Please take out your iPods and begin playing "You Make My Dreams." Feel free to start dancing outside in an organized fashion.
After meeting Drew Barrymore, joking with the guy who wrote "Eye of the Tiger," buying snails in Chinatown for the Republican "race" and being hugged by Stephen Colbert (and enjoying it way too much), everything seemed very different.
I discovered the heat in my room is controlled by a box hidden behind my bed, the shower no longer makes me bald faster, I bought a new picture frame and bed sheets and I don't take cabs during the full moon. The Giants sweat suit thing was totally true though, and further emphasized by the Super Bowl.
To repeat every teacher and coach ever, attitude (and our perspective) is everything. When my girlfriend visited — and made a friend on the plane, and at the first place we went to, and with a homeless man — it was only further confirmation that our own attitude will determine how we live our adult lives, if yours has truly started. And that I've got an amazing girlfriend. Happy anniversary, Liz (commence the sappy music).
— Jorgenson is a junior from Shawnee, Kan., majoring in English writing and film studies. He is off-campus interning at "The Colbert Report" in New York City this semester. opinion@thedepauw.com