Réflexions sur Collège Daze

Left with a gaping hole in my already empty day, my mind started to wander outside of regular three-dimensional space and stumbled on the memory of College Daze. So I watched it, and "lawl'd." I subsequently remembered that sometime in the past 2 years I had started drafting some sort of character study of College Daze. Obviously never finished. I figured that my academically inclined project could now be considered "vaporware" and had entered its post-mortem stage, so I am releasing it into the interwebs.

Here it is:

SHEP FOSTER

His perception of time

Though he manages to roughly situate events in the past and recognize routine processions (e.g. “Every day we go to class…”), time for him inevitably becomes a sort of blur, and the lapse of three months becomes indistinguishable from the span of a lifetime. (“Eddie, we’ve known each other for a long time…”)

He lives almost exclusively in the present, allowing himself to be whisked away to parties with friends, lets mysterious drugs be placed in his mouth and masturbating basically whenever he feels sufficiently horny. He seems to have no plans whatsoever for the future, and in the rare case when he does they are puzzlingly vague (“… we are gonna rock this world like its never been rocked…”) His shallow perception of time affects his relations with others, for example when he ruins all of Eddie’s work and forgetting about it completely as soon as Ralph walks in, having been fired.

He likes things with instant consequence, like pizza that arrives “Prompto” [sic].

His perception of space

He seems to have a very good grasp of the concept of space and orientation, being able to walk out of his dorm and proceed to party hard even with a box on his head.

His relations with other people

With Eddie

Shep wants to attach himself to his roommate of 3 months, despite Eddie’s reluctance to show any signs of affection and his aggression towards Shep’s eccentric behaviour. For example he “accompanies” Eddie to “classes” every day.

Shep shows an amazing amount of ignorance and incomprehension towards Eddie’s desire to complete his courses and presumably graduate from college. Shep lives entirely within himself, either judging that everyone else is in the same position as himself, or trying to get them to share his frame of thought.

Shep wants to develop a certain complicity, and maintain a close friendship. He recognizes that Eddie wishes to ignore him and shut him down, and tries to mend the relationship on the brink of eruption by talking to him, then resorting to drastic methods in unplugging Eddie’s computer. Thus we see some paradoxal behaviour in Shep’s character: he lives entirely within himself, but shows himself concerned in his relationship with others, which he will relentlessly attempt to maintain.

Nevertheless, he and Eddie have a very distant relationship, sharing basically no common interests outside of drinking. (aside: I guess that’s pretty normal in the highly specialized world of higher education.) Eddie keeps Shep completely in the dark of his own activities and aspirations (e.g. “Why do we have so many dildos anyway?” “None of your fucking business.”)

Shep’s interest in friendship is probably completely superficial.

Shep seems to have some kind of control over Eddie: Eddie continues to walk with Shep to school, and he allows himself to resign after Shep unplugs his computer. I suppose this can only be seen as weakness of the will.

Voila. GDSHP 4EVA.