Let’s be honest – Dartmouth kids are a creative bunch, but when it comes to snarkiness, there are a set of guaranteed crowd-pleasers that are successful time and time again. Here are some of my personal favorites.

The hookup culture

’16s, if you haven’t heard about this already, consider yourselves lucky. You have not yet joined the bitter legions of boys and girls who beer tear about the lack of meaningful relationships at this school and how hard it is to forge connections in the basement. First of all, this is not even true. I have just as many single friends as ones that are currently in relationships or dating. Maybe the ones in relationships are just better adjusted than the rest of Dartmouth, but I doubt it. We’re all nuts. Second of all, too bad, so sad — ever read Thought Catalog? I don’t think this is a Big Green thing. This is a generation of angsty singlehood. Hello, Ryan O’Connell.

The weather

So I wrote an entire column about the winter. Oops, my bad. Apparently the three-foot-long icicles that hang over Silsby Hall like so many death traps and the tons of snow that fall off of the Baker Library roof and jolt me out of my mid-Sunday afternoon stupor are not revelatory/terrifying to anybody but me. I guess they shouldn’t be; it’s not like I thought Hanover was Cabo 2.0.

Facebook album titles

Okay. This annoys me to no end. I’d just like to point out that “12Xylophone” is a stupid name for an album title and has nothing to do with sophomore summer. “12Xenia” would have been more topical, at least to the 150 kids taking Classics 4. Good times, guys! Miss y’all.

Black North Faces

Dartmouth is an ever-changing mosaic of human emotion and tails themes that allow us to wear neon, but there will always remain one constant. People are going to get drunk, people are going to get cold, people are going to want to beat the rush out of Heorot Highlighter before  it begins to resemble the steerage section of a very crowded ship coming into Ellis Island, and people are going to steal your coats. Sadly, the last lost North Face blitz I got was on January 21, 2011, so I guess this isn’t such a thing anymore. Maybe we’ve all just graduated to Barbours or something (or in my case, a really grim burgundy fleece pullover bought for three dollars at the West Leb Salvation Army).

“10” Surveys

I swear if one more person blitzes out promising a prize for a random respondent to their ANONYMOUS SURVEY, I am going to lose it. Everyone knows people only fill those things out for good karma anyway. Your cute subject line reading “You’ve been tapped!” is not going to tip the scales one way or another. Except for that one time I got a blitz about another “BORING GOV SURVEY!!!!” Government 10 student, I appreciated your honesty. I still don’t think I took the survey, though.