Walter Retlaw spends so many nights crying himself to sleep. A sufferer of depression, he’s tried just about every related drug any pharmaceutical company has concocted.
But his depression has nothing to do with a chemical imbalance. A family member wasn’t suddenly and unexpectedly killed in an automobile accident. He didn’t even break up with a long-time girlfriend.
What’s behind the depression is the fact that he’s a 25 year-old college senior and he knows just how uncool that is.
“I’ve heard all those statistics about how the average U student is 27 years old or something, so people tell me I shouldn’t worry about it, but that’s bull,” Retlaw said. “I mean, first off, those statistics are skewed, ‘cuz ‘average age’ means there’s a ton of 40-year-old housewives around trying to get a few college credits. And then, among most of those older 20 somethings, they’re all returned missionaries or married anyway, so they don’t have to worry about being cool. Me? I’m just a dork, plain and simple.”
Retlaw is not alone. After a thorough demographics oriented search through university records, officials from the U’s Registrar’s Office found the existence of another 28 unmarried mid-20s undergraduate dorks just like Retlaw.
Not surprisingly, when you throw these over-age students into a college population filled with young, hot people in the prime of their lives, who still have the ability to throw caution to the wind and sow their wild oats without having to consider such adult themes as consequences or responsibility, these “older” individuals are bound to feel as though they’re suffering a mid life crisis, said University Counseling Center employee Celexa Zanoff.
“These students are rising in number, and many of them simply have to delay college for awhile, so they still crave the reckless abandon it’s supposed to provide young people with, but they have a difficult time reconciling those themes with their relatively advanced age,” she said. “They feel like some prime opportunity has passed them by, and they can’t help but feel completely unhip as a result.”
Another of those near-30 squares, Katrina Gable, said that trying to live out those fantasies of a college life while surrounded by younger peers more likely to actually pull them off just creates an awkward tension.
“I had to work full-time as a secretary in an office for two years before I could afford to come to college, and then, after my freshman year, I thought I’d try moving into the dorms, because I’d always heard that was so cool,” Gable said. “But I just couldn’t relate to these younger girls. While they were getting a thrill off of sneaking a bottle of peach schnapps into their rooms, I could never get over what a rathole mess those communal bathrooms were.”
Nevertheless, Zanoff says the desperation of trying to assimilate their college realities with their pent-up, unfulfilled fantasies can cause these mid-20 students to act out in futilely immature fashions, such as temporarily abandoning their Bon Jovi and Def Leppard CDs for contemporary R&B acts like Outkast and Ja Rule, dressing in a “hip-hop” fashion, or getting a tattoo of the Chinese yin-yang symbol.
“I have to deal with these poor things all the time, and it just breaks my heart to see them act out like this,” Zanoff said. “If you run across one of them on campus, please don’t laugh too much. That only exacerbates their insecurities.”
Meanwhile, after parading around the U all day under a forced veneer of pseudo coolness, at the end of the day, Retlaw goes home to his downtown apartment once more to cry his eyes out and pine away for something that was never meant to be.
“All I ever wanted was to go to some raging party that was on the verge of being, like, some out-of-control orgy, get really wasted, hit on a few chicks and get laid by some hot girl I don’t even know,” he said. “But c’mon? You ever seen a 25-year-old guy trying to pick up some sultry little 20-year old? It’s just painful to watch. It’s even more painful when she giggles and walks away.”
Disclaimer: The Comical is pure satire and appears at the beginning of every week on The Chronicle’s Web site. Please take the stories as jokes and don’t call your lawyer. Thanks.