CSotD: We hold this truth to be self-evident
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Arlo & Janis touches upon one of the great truths of American education.
It took me a little over a week, my freshman year, to realize, not that sophomores were all idiots, but that the biggest idiots on campus were all sophomores.
I'd have tumbled to it a little sooner, but we had a week of orientation before the upperclassmen returned. There's a reason they have juniors do orientation: Juniors are cool. If you give incoming freshmen the idea that college is going to be four years of being like a junior, they won't drop out on you.There's no way to avoid having them meet any sophomores before the drop date, but you can at least let them get their dorm rooms set up before the Grand Disillusionment.
About 80 percent of the cool things that happened to me in college happened junior year. The rest happened freshman year. I can't think of anything cool I did sophomore year except get off academic probation, and that wasn't because I was studying very hard. It was because (A) I got into my major and it was interesting and (B) my social life was so non-existent that I had plenty of time to do the reading, even without making a conscious effort.
I mean, I lived in a rented room in the seminary, and it didn't slow my social life down in the least. That pretty much tells the story.
The first thing that happened junior year was that I went down to campus, ran into a stewardess (they weren't "flight attendants" in those days) who was visiting her sister and we ended up having breakfast together. Not that kind of "having breakfast together" but it was a start.
Come to think of it, after breakfast, she gave me a ride back to my summer place and helped me haul a brass-bound steamer trunk down the stairs to her car and then up into my new apartment. I never saw James Bond persuade a pretty girl to do that.
Still, let's not overstate the transformation. It's not necessarily that juniors are actually cool so much as it may be that, having just spent an entire year as sophomores, they've run out of new and inventive ways to screw up. Perhaps, like Mark Twain's cat, they've learned not to sit on hot stove lids, but have also stopped sitting on the cold ones, too.
But only the life-long hopeless cases have failed by then to figure out that taking a shower with someone requires that you both have a reason to want a shower and that you will never, ever get to that point if you walk around wearing a shirt announcing your interest.
Arlo & Janis has a reputation for being naughty, but JImmy Johnson has said that he doesn't feel that way about them. They are a happily married couple, he says, and so it's reasonable for them to have a normal, healthy sex life.
If you watch a lot of TV, however, you may begin to wonder just what comprises "normal" in our society. There appear to be a lot of college sophomores lurking just below the surface of apparent adulthood, telling fart jokes and unable to be at all subtle about their needs.
But, even if they aren't normal, I think of Arlo and Janis as healthy, if sometimes a little prone to some very funny oversharing.
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