It was the best of times, it was...

My first two years at Rice can be summed up as follows: take a diverse group of top-tier high school grads, throw them in a two-by-two box with a bunch of booze and a few digital cameras, and watch as they try to kill each other in the most roundabout, socially passive-aggressive ways possible. I mean, fuck, it's college. As such, Rice offers students many, many opportunities to see their peers at their worst. I don't necessarily mean that you get to watch them spewing vomit upwards like a geyser in the middle of your common room at 5AM on a Tuesday, though you do get to see plenty of that, too.

I'm talking about the shouting matches. The 3AM-and-I-must-be-lonely blues. The crying and the heartbreak and the depression. The idle punches at brick walls and the soccer balls kicked high into the sun-scorched branches of the trees, just to ruin some poor squirrel's day. The "you don't give a shit about anything but your fucking flag football game and your XBox," and the ensuing make-up sex that shakes the entire building. I've seen it all.

Except I haven't, and that's the point. I used to think that the real hipsters on campus were the ones that had their moments of brooding and heartache and even a tinge of anger. The ones that weren't happy all the time. Those were the kids everyone wanted to connect to, or so I thought. Not the real emo kids or the ones with the Invader Zim lunchboxes, but the ones with the pinstripe vintage suits and an ironic T-shirts.

But then I up and found out that it's all a lie. As time went on, the real harbingers of the social scene were the ones that never took a stand. It's easy to be liked when you don't show anything but your drunk face. The ones that never got depressed or never made a girl cry-- they are the real champions.

The startling conclusion I reached on this otherwise stupid train of thought was that I actually have friends who never get angry. Ever. Or at least they never show it. I have friends who never seem to be sad or depressed or upset or anything besides jovial. It's creepy, I know, but what's creepier is that I never actually considered them to be shallow people. Just happy people. I envied them from afar, not only because everyone thought they were cool but because they honestly seemed content.

And not a hateful envy, like when your neighbor gets an iPhone and you've still got a RAZR and all you want to do is pin Steve Jobs' corpse to their mantle with a nailgun. Nothing like that. I'm talking about the envy you feel when you see two brothers at Target playing cowboy in the toy aisle with plastic guns still wrapped in cardboard and you just wish you could have that simplicity in your life. You wish you could go back.

Of course, everyone at Rice gets mad. That was just a gross generalization from my twisted perspective. The ones who keep it together are the ones who reap the social harvest.

And from all this, we can learn. Or I can learn, and you can play along by reading my blog. Thinking about how people seemed content, whether they actually are or not, I realized that a good deal of my own self-inflicted agony torment depression problem-stuff stems from refusing to be content. You know-- always thinking that there's something better around the corner, and all I have to do is completely change my life-plan in order to make it work.

But I'm working on it. Feeling content, not changing my life-plan.