For anyone who may come across me sometime in their life, I'll give fair warning: I'm a people watcher.
I don't mean the creepy, stalker kind. But any time I'm in public, I always catch myself making observations about the people around me.
So it shouldn't be surprising that when I decided to go to my apartment complex's pool the other day I couldn't help but survey the area.
What was surprising was realizing that people overshare in public so much that I thought I was looking at my Facebook feed.
It gave me a chance to evaluate the college environment and I came to a simple conclusion:
College kids are dumb.
My first, "Oh good Lord," moment came when I saw a guy (who had to have either been an older graduate student or had been out of college for a while) chatting up two girls in the pool.
It's safe to say it was painful to watch.
I'll give the guy credit for trying, but he clearly wasn't picking up on basic social cues.
The body language was off - the girls weren't facing him and gave one-word answers to his questions. Dead giveaways they weren't interested.
Ten minutes in, I could hear him making small talk by asking about their majors, which, let's face it, if talked about should be within the first three.
It's not unusual to see people strike out when hitting on others, but usually I see it in bars and in some ways, it's more dignified that way, which is a whole other tangent on the college spectrum that I won't get in to.
But just like there are degrees of oversharing on Facebook (I don't care you're at Walmart, but I REALLY don't need to know the details of you catching your boyfriend cheating last night), there are degrees of oversharing in public.
I overheard one guy talking about how one night in the Village, a guy started heckling him, so he told the loudmouth to meet him behind one of the buildings.
A fight ensued, and pool guy racked up $25,000 in hospital bills (but he let everyone know that the other guy got a worse beating).
But it got me thinking - how smart are we if we spend more money on a fight than we do in tuition?
I remember one of my professors my freshman year asking the class, "What do employers assume if you have a college degree?"
His answer: They falsely assume you're educated.
My day of relaxation showed me a lot of people our age lack common sense and common courtesy.
I won't sit here and say I'm "little miss perfect" - I've done some stupid stuff during my time at Ball State. And I'm not saying college students are total morons.
But we do moronic things, like oversharing.
We've grown up in an era where people are sometimes rewarded for doing idiotic things and we display our lives to the entire world.
We often switch our hats when it's time to work hard in school or get a job, but at that point it may be too late.
I don't want to read on Facebook after graduation that my peers owe $80,000 in student loans, $25,000 in hospital bills and no jobs to pay off the debts.
So I challenge you all to wise up.
I rather read about your successes online. But if that doesn't happen, I guess I can relish in the absurdity of it all.
-á
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