I'm Only Here for the WiFi by Chelsea Fagan Read Free Book Online Page A

(something you do for enjoyment in your spare time), but throughout much of our early lives, the concepts of both enjoyment and spare time were rather vague. We knew that there were fun things we could be doing, and we might have had an idea of which things interested us more than others, but we didn’t have a whole lot of control over things like transportation, finances, and extracurricular education. For everything from breakdance lessons to showing everyone up at the middle school Spring Fling to the errant trip to Chuck E. Cheese, we were at the whim of our guardians.
    Think about it: You’re a kid, and you’re hardly capable of making a decision as important and influential on the trajectory of the rest of your life as “What am I going to do with all this spare time that I, as a six-year-old, am faced with?” So your parents will usually fill in those blanks for you: Enjoy your five-ish years of ballet, soccer, karate, or gymnastics. Maybe Little League, if your family is more old-school. The point is, the activity is going to be pretty straightforward, it will be planned with the precision of a Swiss timepiece, and you aren’t going to have a whole lot of say in the matter. (If you happen to have often-written-about-when-analyzing-the-downfall-of-our-generation Helicopter Parents, enjoy doing all these activities at once, on an incredibly strict schedule,while your twitchy, forceful elders live vicariously through your tiny successes in hopes that you will prove to be “gifted.”)
    And then, as if by magic, you’re in high school, where your extracurricular activities start flying fast and free. (Or maybe even middle school, if you’ve actually started caring about college applications at age twelve, but chances are that period of your life doesn’t get into full swing until around sophomore year.) Now is the time to pick activities that, in addition to potentially being enjoyable on their own merits, are guaranteed to make you look like a “well-rounded teenager” whose activities include things outside of scowling at people at the mall and drinking Red Bulls, like the majority of your teenage peers. And while well-rounded is certainly a term that sounds positive in theory, in practice, it can end up even more insufferable than the aforementioned scowling mall-hangers. It’s a tough balance to strike, being productive and still having a normal childhood, and not everyone manages it.
    If you were an admissions officer at a prestigious university with a good balance between party life and rigorous academics, imagine what you would want to see on an application. Things like student government, sports, drama—and anything in which you can exaggerate a position of take-charge leadership. Nothing says, “I made the most out of my three-week stint in debate club” like treasurer. Engaging in hobbies in high school (without becoming an insane, Tracy Flick-esque, type A personalitywhom everyone avoids like the plague) is a direct step toward a better future, with a relatively high return on investment. You’re not just participating in these tedious student association meetings for yourself, you’re participating in them for your grandchildren, and for the future they deserve from your getting into a highly ranked state school.
    In college, hobbies are so very many things. Never in your life do you have such a potent combination of free time, youth, access to social events, and tingling loins that long to meet other, similar-minded sexy young people in various activities. This is the time to get involved politically for about ten minutes, to try out for a play (even though you’ve never been in the same room as a stage) simply because the person you’re trying to bang is a huge drama nerd. There is nothing you can’t do when faced with such a lascivious Roman orgy of potential social groups and time-consuming activities. And, better still,