If you live in Boston, bitching about the return of the college students is like complaining about the weather.  It may provide some solace but it doesn't do you a bit of good. 

There are definitely pluses and minuses to living in a college town, and one of the minuses is that the easy summers give way to a constant clusterfuck every fall.  Just when you think you've got your fellow Bostonians about trained, a whole new wave of ipod zombies crashes onto our shores and all hell breaks loose again.

It really would not be such a problem if they weren't here bodily.  In fact, that's the whole problem in a nutshell.  It's their bodies that are in the way.  And for the meme generation that's never in less than three places at once, none of them here and now, I don't see why they ever need to leave the house in the first place.  Dominoes delivers, bitches.  Why is it still necessary for them to go places and do things?  When they're never where they are, doing what they're doing, but always somewhere else doing something else anyway? 

Oh, by the way, I'm starting a couple of office pools, and you're all welcome to jump in.  Just send your predictions about the following:

When will the first newbie get hit by a car/trolley/bus (or any combination of said)? 

And

When will the first college student fall off a roof of a rowhouse, plunging to the sidewalk below?

So far:

Me: 9/8, 9/22
John P.: 9/18, 10/12
Jon R.: 9/12, 9/12
Gina.: 10/1, 9/24
Augustino: 10/4, 9/26
Brit: 9/5, 9/11
Lisa M.: 9/15, 9/19

It happens every year, people.  Five bucks to PayPal and you're in. 

The pluses of the student invasion are few, but fairly obvious.  Fresh faces are nice.  With the weather as marvelous as it's been I've been hardcore in my Fenway garden. And out of the corner of my eye I've noticed a marked increase in the number, and a corresponding decrease in the age of people stumbling out of the reeds in the Fens. 

I'm assuming some newbies found our little Enchanted Swamp listed as a gay playground on some website or other, and have yet to discover it's teaming with greedy trolls.  For every cute kid that's come skipping down the garden path the last couple of days, ten trolls have been hot on his tail. 

And when I say "troll" I mean troll.  I'm not talking about charming older gentleman here.  I'm not being ageist (I can hardly afford it at my age, now, can I?).  I'm talking about actual trolls.  Yes, creatures who've apparently been in the irradiated Muddy River so long they've  transmorgrified into actual trolls.  Was Gollum a troll?  Because I saw him lunge at the groin of a passing fratboy yesterday and drag him back into the sludge kicking and screaming.  In broad daylight no less. 

Obviously to some freshmen are just fresh meat.  Try to remember, they are thinking, feeling, human beings! 

I was waiting at an intersection near Harvard on my way home, and overheard two female freshman talking (in a modified valley-girl twang) about a paper they'd had to write and turn in (already!).

"Was yours... heartfelt?" One asked the other.

"Um, not really," the other replied.  "I just wrote about how it was hard to be a woman leader and blabadee-bla, whatever."

OK, if not thinking exactly, feeling at the very least.  Which means it hurts when you hit them with your car as they zombie-march into traffic utterly absorbed in the latest iphone app., or when after one two many beer bongs they fall off the fire escape.  They're human, they bleed.

Which reminds me: the office pool is closing Friday, so hurry and get in on it.