When Lips the dance major received her room assignment over the summer, she was more than a little surprised to find that her roommate for her first year at Bard College would be Aphelia, a girl from her high school with whom she had a more-than-slightly tarnished history.

While the set-up could have been like a great soon-to-be-vintage Lindsay Lohan film, where high school nemeses gone off to college have a series of mishaps and explorations while a Ben Folds song plays and either become lesbians, best friends or discover that they're actually long lost twin sisters (or all three), Lips the dance major was not optimistic. Her own relationship with Aphelion was not the thing she worried most about. Rather, it was the relationship Aphelion had with another classmate of theirs, who was also going to Bard, Semen. (This is not our pseudonym; this guy chooses to use the nickname Semen).

Semen and Aphelia had been dating since spring of high school senior year—they got together less than a week after Aphelia had broken up with her long-time boyfriend, a guitar-playing Russian with a penchant for wearing hats that look like the intestines of that animal thing that opens up in "Star Wars" when it gets cold.

I told Lips that I gave the Semen and Aphelia two weeks, tops, before they broke up. She disagreed.

When the semester began, we, the people that knew Aphelia and Semen from high school (in their apparently mediocre pre-Bard life, in which taking nude pictures of each other on Photobooth qualified as art), were instructed, by the couple themselves, that they weren't going public with their relationship quite yet and wanted to keep it on the down-low so as to not appear to be "that couple."

The second week of school, it seemed that they changed their minds. This happened when Aphelia (perhaps agitated at the suspicion that her beloved had relapsed back into his porn addiction) decided to smoke pot for the first time ever at noon, while trying to be included in the preparations for the first annual Fucked-Up Friday toga party.

After eating with the boys at Applebee's, going on a journey to the nearby Dollar Store and purchasing a lot of vodka and plenty of 99-cent Pterodactyl-Fruit Juice Substitute to go with it, the innocent Aphelia (who was known in high school as the girl who accidentally dated a cross-dresser, and at Bard as being the girl who made friends by instructing others how best to avoid the freshman fifteen) was struck with the symptoms of being absolutely shit-faced.

And early in the morning to come, Lips decided to go to sleep. But when she arrived in her room, Aphelia, green as a waxed apple, was lying in her bed, spooning a nearly-nude Semen. Without opening his eyes, he instructed Lips to "go sleep in my room."

Luckily for her, Lips had already become good friends with Semen's roommate, GG Trance, who was more than sympathetic to her cause, and even reassured her that he was almost positive Semen's sheets were clean.

When she returned to her room the next morning, she was confronted with a terrible strong odor that, she realized, must have been what inspired Semen's name.

She then knew what it was like to be a sexile.

Sexiles, who come in all forms, genders, orientations and moods, go through several stages of sexilization. At that moment, Lips was in the very first stages, in which one displays rationality and even sympathy. She told me that Aphelia's weak stomach, and Semen's withdrawal from his beloved porn, more than justified the hostage-holding of both her room and her well-being that night.

When Semen, who had made his beloved promise him that she would never smoke pot, discovered that she had betrayed him and toked up, they wept together in the middle of the quad and played guitar, he without a shirt on, she with her glasses slightly askew. Of course that is sympathy-inducing.

Then when Aphelia and Semen decided to cure their disintegrating relationship with a regimen of sleepovers and fake orgasms, Lips entered the second stage of sexilization: Novelty.

That is a creative phase. Several Facebook albums, entitled "What I Do When I'm Sexiled," ensued.

But when Aphelia's lavender oil diffuser failed to mask the manly odor that could probably qualify as low-grade biological warfare, Lips entered the third phase of the sexile: Shopping. The purchasing of several bottles of Oust, Febreeze, Lysol and hydrogen peroxide, as well as several Bad Air Sponges, followed.

She even considered purchasing a hospital curtain, or perhaps an Aero Bed, so that she could sleep wherever she wanted.

Aphelia responded to Lips' growing bitterness and anger over the situation (fueled by several incidents where Lips, sometimes accompanied by myself, other times alone, walked in on a private moment, as well as a time when Aphelia neglected to tell Lips when Semen was coming over, causing her to be so fearful that she might accidentally find herself in a threesome that she wore the same outfit for two days and one night) by detailing to her the complications of her sex life, including such winning statements as "I'm sorry we kicked you out, but, just so you know, it wasn't good for me either" and "I can't control when he wants to have sex."

Lips entered the next stage: Violence.

With myself and GG Trance as her accomplices, we are nothing but a trio of a dance major, a fruity major in the bullshit "Written Arts", and a music major that "doesn't believe that books are important" and thinks "John Cage probably never even heard of 'West Side Story.'" Which is to say, we don't make for a very intimidating group.

So instead of breaking things or people, we chose a sort of passive-aggressive retribution. I did my part, asking Semen how he felt about the way Aphelia flirted with the juniors from Italy, and questioning how he felt about "not being allowed to receive blow-jobs."

Lips chose a more direct approach, handing Aphelia her schedule and telling her she could do whatever she wanted while Lips was in class, and that Semen had to be "out of the room" (the used condom with him) by the time she got home.

GG Trance tried reason and undermining: Such as "she would really look better if she shaved her head."

On Halloween, in the middle of this stage, Lips entered her room cautiously. Aphelia and Semen were seated on the bed, awkwardly facing each other. Aphelia looked up at her roommate.

"Could you give us the room for a second?"

"Why," Lips asked.

"We're breaking up," Aphelia said, a tiny tear forming in her left eye.

Previously: Bard College: The Only Good Place Left On Earth

The Friday after Thanksgiving, the day that America shops. Students that hail from small liberal arts colleges like Bard have little need for purchasing marked-down trinkets and gym memberships. Instead, the majority of Bard students gather in New York, and observe one another in their natural habitats.

At a party hosted by a friend (we'll call her Saint Dee) at her penthouse apartment, there was Adrian. She leaned against a large silver sculpture and, manifesting a somewhat accidental Southern accent, asked me if "this was what private school parties were like."

I said that I thought so. Adrian and I went to the same public high school, recently compared (in light of the various scandals associated with the report cards given out by the city to public high schools) by none-other-than Bard president Leon Botstein himself, to a vegetarian restaurant that doesn't serve the meat the Department of Education is looking for. Keep yours eyes on the New York Times for new and improved metaphors from He-Who-Shall-Be-Named-Repeatedly-As-Often-As-Possible.

Anyway, the apartment, by no means anything less than gorgeous, was packed with kids from, as Saint Dee put it, "around the world." They were all equipped with brand new wine glasses, the labels of which Saint Dee's mother was graciously removing from the glasses as she wandered about.

The mother, who said of herself that she was "supposed to be locked in my room, not talking to anyone," also told us that she had "dreamed of going to Bard" and so she was "overjoyed" that her daughter was able to attend such a wonderful college where we would be "meeting the most amazing people you'll meet in your entire lives."

She then inspected a nearby kid's joint-rolling skills, gave him a few pointers, and said goodnight.

Paul, decidedly lost on the East Coast, exclaimed that he wanted "a mother just like that" which prompted many people around us to agree vehemently.

Praising Bard College was a theme for the night, I realized, while outside talking to a sophomore I had never seen before (a rare occurrence in such a small community, probably caused by the fact that she was barely tall enough to reach the counter). She told me that Bard was "paradise" and "the only good place left on earth, or at least in America."

"New York," she said, "is a wasteland. New York is dead. It's over, New York is over, and all that's left is Bard."

"Can I write about you in my column?" I asked, thirsting for material. "I write a column for Gawk—"

She held up her hand to my face. Her wineglass shivered a little in her other hand. She closed her eyes and exhaled. Then she opened them again, stepped back and shoved my shoulder.

"NARC!" she screamed. "It's you! You're the NARC! I've been looking for you!"

I laughed.

"You're the one who's been reporting on us! Why—Why would you do that?"

"Wait," I interrupted her. "You're kidding, right? You read Gawker?"

"Of course I read Gawker, I'm from the city, what the fuck else would I read?" she responded and then whipped out her phone.

She insisted on taking my number, telling me that she wanted to "remember me" and that we would "discuss this later." The event prompted some discussion between me and my friend, CC Mellows, who had seen the whole thing.

"What would my pseudonym be?" she asked.

"I don't know, what do you want it to be?"

"CC Mellows! Oh, but don't be mean if you write about me!" she said.

"No, no, never, of course not... What would I say, that you don't smoke pot, that you're British, that you smoke Capri's...."

"Well, that's fine," she said. "But you know those people on Gawker, not matter what you say, they'll be like 'CC MELLOWS IS A CUNT!'"

Another girl I spoke to about being depicted in the column, an Australian (Saint Dee clearly wasn't kidding when she said "kids from all around the world") told me I could put her in the column, but added: "Don't be too harsh."

"I wouldn't dream of it!" I tried to reassure her.

"Oh, but don't worry," she said. "You can be a little mean, just not too much, I mean, I used to write for 'Vice Australia,' so I know how to spell cynicism!"

And so it seems that Bard students are little bit more on edge when they arrive back in the city. The next night a group of us partied at the apartment of a friend. The girl lived in New Jersey, but the apartment, in Battery Park City, was a place her parents owned for weekend trips into the city.

It didn't take long for one of us to discover a cabinet with buckets of porn, the majority of which featured a character named "Big Omar."

After someone let the gerbil they had found in a parking lot with half a tail out of its portable cage, and we wandered over to Bowling Green to find a cell phone-less friend, we began to discuss the return trips plans for Sunday.

"If you guys come to Jersey with me in the afternoon, I'll drive you home," GG Trance offered to me and Lips.

"What are we going to do in Jersey?"

"Go to an All-You-Can-Eat Mongolian Grill and then drive really fast over speed bumps near the L'Oreal factory."

There was silence. Adrian twirled her hair with one hand and fixed her tights with the other. She looked around, giggled a little, and then smiled.

"I miss Bard," she said.

Previously: The Day David Bowie Died

The writer of this column has referred to himself from the beginning as Stephan K. While would-be Kakutanis and Sontags may have believed this name to be a weakly disguised Kafka reference, the pseudonym has a darker derivation.

Instead, the name Stephan K. is derived from a small trailer on the North Side of the Bard College campus, which, although its official title is "Stephen's", was rechristened Stephan's by its occupants this year. There is a lot to be said about Stephan's, and even more to be seen within.

Should you be, at some low, low point in your life, be taking a tour of Bard College, or simply passing by, and you are inspired, by this column or by some kind of intoxicant, to look up the trailer, you will find it to appear extremely boring. It's the kind of building you see on the back of trucks driving down highways, the kind of house you could probably order off of Amazon. It features 11 rooms and a kitchen/common room space. It has three entrances, two bathrooms, and aluminum siding that has deteriorated over time like the faces on Faces of Meth.

Because of the lack of housing at Bard, 20 students were initially packed into the trailer, which was designed to hold 10. Since then, several people have moved out, but the dorm remains overcrowded. On Friday, August 31st, when the occupants of Stephan's arrived with their parents and their luggage, we were shocked and appalled. We examined the lone hallways, the tiny rooms, and the two single bathrooms, each with one toilet and one shower. In one bathroom, there was a large hole in the wall near the floor, which the maintenance crew had stuffed a washcloth into in order to prevent leakage. The other bathroom's door didn't lock, and the toilet had to be persuaded to flush. There was an initial bout of trauma, but it subsided, as the Stephan's crew bonded. We stablished rituals of both the week and weekend, even, attempted, once or twice, to hold community pot lucks, which mainly consisted of couscous.

The tuition at Bard College (according to the "America's Best Colleges 2008" section of the U.S. News & World Report website, as of Tuesday, September 25th, 2007) is $36,534, and $10,346 for room and board.

One of the ways the citizens of Stephan's learned to cope was through public art. The first insistence of this was when Baby Jane, inspired by a long lecture on the dangers of Ketamine, decided to paint "K-Land" on the front door. This spiraled a little bit out of control a week or so later, when, on a whim, the hallways and the walls in the kitchen were also painted, creating what was first described as a "mural" but what has since been deemed by the administration as "vandalism."

The degree to which the Stephan's population disrespected their $10,000 digs was quickly reciprocated by the college itself, when the washcloth that was, apparently, holding the building together was discovered to be subpar. In an effort to prevent the dorm from sinking into the ground both morally and physically, a team of construction workers began to attempt to prevent a bad situation from getting worse.

I myself awoke one morning to find an entire team of workers, armed with drills, outside my window, digging out the foundation of the building and observing loudly that they would be surprised if the building lasted through the year.

To calm our nerves and to help us struggle through the hardship of being shocked awake every morning by the sound of cinderblocks being nailed to the bottom of our home, the people of Stephan's turned, not only to their usual strict regime of weekend partying but also, to donuts.

The donuts are provided, on a nearly daily basis, by a Special Forces team within Stephan's, consisting of Lips the Dance Major, GG Trance, and myself, the designated Stephan's driver. It was perhaps GG Trance who first had the idea of going to the nearby Red Hook Dunkin Donuts just before closing time and relieving them of the baked goods they would otherwise have to throw away. Since then, our relationships, both with trans fat, and with the Dunkin Donuts Night Managers, have evolved.

Brianna, who greets us nearly every night with a not-entirely sarcastic "What did you guys take tonight?" literally prepares multiple bags of everything from Coffee Cake Muffins to Frosted Chocolate Rods ("I know you like those big Chocolate Rods") for us.

We bring them back to Stephan's, along with smoothies, tea, coffee, and even, on one occasion, an entire 2-Liter bottle of "Pure Liquid Cane Sugar", stuff them in the freezer (which is actually being used less as a freezer and more as a public art installation featuring a menorah, an old pumpkin, a picture frame, some drawings, and several wreathes) and await the weekend, when we divide them up. The Munchkins are to be used as golf balls by the less-violent of our crowd, and the rest are to be tossed at unsuspecting neighbors and the walls of a large, imposing dorm nearby.

Briana and the other night manager, Roland, it has turned out, have been dating for several years. They live together, and work together (during the same shifts no less), pooling the tips we leave them and using them as laundry money. They met on X-Box Live, playing Halo no less, and immediately rushed to meet each other in person (she flew all the way to Michigan).

It is an interesting thing, living in Stephan's. It is an interesting thing living at Bard, period, let alone in its dingy leftovers. For a couple of weeks, during construction, there was only one working bathroom in the dorm. For the duration of a few now-extinct relationships, it was hard to tell whether you were hearing the pounding of nails on stone, or the couple next door. At one point, as they raised the floors of the building, but neglected to realize what that would do to the doors, several students were locked in their rooms awaiting the arrival of a man with a crowbar.

I've had some bad experiences with living conditions in the past. My parents have a fondness for bed and breakfasts, which I do not share. My family and I once arrived at a bed and breakfast at 10 AM on a Sunday morning to find the owner and his wife sharing a bottle of Jack Daniels. Later that night we were forced to flee the house when the husband decided he didn't want his wife screaming anymore. It was a bad experience, not unlike a domestic violence-themed Disney world, and yet, as I look back on it, I realize it wasn't all too bad; at least we weren't sharing a bathroom with 18 other people.

I once went to a Holiday Inn, where, after I was issued a room key, I discovered a family of eight sleeping in my room. They looked more comfortable, screaming and running around the room, still half-asleep, thinking that I was there to rob them, than many of my dorm-mates do today.

Once, on a trip to Paris when I was younger, my grandmother and I saw a very happy couple walk right onto the subway tracks and disappear into a lovely decorated little hovel they had established there. Although both of them had large gashes in their skin and rats crawling in and out of the pockets of their coats, they seemed less disturbed by their home then the occupants of Stephan's.

On September 10th, 2001, I performed, as a member of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, at a Michael Jackson tribute concert, where, standing backstage, I came within a few feet of Michael Jackson's private box. The box contained not only the King of Pop himself, but also Macaulay Culkin, Elizabeth Taylor, and OJ Simpson's kids. Ms. Taylor got up out of her seat, got into her wheelchair, and was escorted by her bodyguards to the ladies room every six minutes. Despite the trauma of that experience of celebrity magical realism, I now envy Ms. Taylor, and dream of the day when I might be able to board a bathroom-bound wheelchair from my dorm room.

Needless to say, nineteen people sharing one bathroom is gross. And I'm paying money for it. A lot of money. Money whose non-presence will plague me for decades to come, regardless of whether or not I keep my ridiculous pattern of money spending. Unless i win the the lottery, I will be paying for this overcrowded, unsanitary, fly-infested, sinking dorm with hostile doorways for what could be half my life.
Hopefully, I will keep the friends I have made here for longer than then. But for now, it seems ridiculous to assume that you would find it reasonable for me and my fellow dorm-mates to have to live under these conditions at these prices.

College, is, I've been told, and I'm finding out, supposed to be the best time of a person's life. That always depressed me, when adults said that college was the best time of their life, because I hoped to God I would get a little more than four years of the best times of my life. Especially if the first year is spent smelling other people's fecal matter.

Previously: The Day David Bowie Died

Shakespeer, the popular file sharing software used by the majority of students at Bard, features hours of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and way more than 2000 gigabytes of music. Every day, hundreds of Bard students log on and download anything from Lamb of God to Mr. Lif.

Imagine that aliens were attempting to tap into the Shakespeer Bard Music hub in order to gain access to human music. They would be able to download all of the Beastie Boys albums (Bard alums themselves), plenty of Beirut, a hell of a lot of Cat Power, some Kate Bush, all of OOIOO (the band that belongs to Yoshimi, of The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," which you can also definitely download), and enough Rod Stewart to last you several extra semesters of working on your novella so that you can finally finish that creative writing major.

That's odd!

The live music scene at Bard revolves mainly around SMOG, which is described on its Myspace page as "a student-run converted autogarage on the campus of Bard College... open for students to book shows and band practices." The self-anointed, "awesome... obviously" joint has a monopoly on the weekend party scene, even with its particular brand of noise-rock and its passion for bands featuring lead singers that at least pretend to be Japanese.

Dr. Hurs, a Political-Studies major currently flirting with the idea of switching to Music, described the SMOG brand of entertainment as "baby-killing music." It is "less about creating music... more about creating music to be dissonant, or to be dark. At times it can be tasteful, but only when it's genuine."

"It's very cool to be disillusioned by whatever you listen to," he said. "There's constant, just like, I don't know.... They can't just let their guard down. It's always about what's wrong with what they did and how could someone else do it better. It makes concerts really fucking lame."

The weekend partying routine is a general wander around campus from party to party punctuated by several stops at SMOG, where half the crowd smokes and drinks outside and talks about leaving. (Leaving becomes more and more appealing as the temperature drops.) Those actually inside stand statue-still, facing the stage, absorbing whatever faux-sophisticated bit of masturbation is currently being performed.

The scene is so uptight that one friend refused to give me his opinion on local music when I asked him about it.

"People here," he said. "Judge you so much based on what your music taste is, I just don't talk to people about it."

The other afternoon, I sat outside the dorm with Baby Jane. A nearby building contained a musician practicing; it emitted a loud, monotone, fog-horn type music. She said she "liked all kinds of music," but that she "absolutely can't listen to classical music."

It makes her "feel guilty."

But should it? On our second night at Bard, we remembered, we had been witness to a crowd of freshmen chanting the lyrics to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" at 4 a.m.

And not all bad music is confined to SMOG or to 4 a.m. Over the weekend, several of us attended the Bard Musical Theater Club's "Number Seventeen: The Spread Eagle" in the Old Gym. Despite its racy title, the show consisted of several girls (and a few boys) performing their favorite numbers from their favorite musicals. The opening number, "It's Too Darn Hot," from "Kiss Me Kate," was performed by a guy in a suit. He shuffled around the stage awkwardly while two girls in corsets made eyes at him. My date for the evening, Lips the Dance major, spent most of that routine glaring at me; each of us blamed the other for this mistake.

Although it did get very funny when the male performers, doing "The Goods" from "The Full Monty," stripped to reveal nipple rings. And backne.

Earlier in the year, during a weekend where several kids were up for more than 24 hours tripping on acid, a group of kids from South Campus were at first mistaken for the notorious campus bogeyman "Tivoli Bad Guy," who is a mysterious and apparently angry Townie vigilante often mentioned in emails from the Head of Security. (The Tivoli Bad Guy is known for breaking into the dorms, and even, on some occasions, being vulgar to members of the student body, God forbid.)

One of the trippers descended upon us with a megaphone and announced to the entire quad that David Bowie had died.

Several students were woken up by this. Some leaned out the window to yell denials in return; some just sat there in silence.

And several of the kids tripping described the experience as mind-bending. They found the idea of a world where David Bowie had died as both moving and also incredibly scary.

Previously: The Republican Of Bard College

There aren't a lot of people coming out of the closet at Bard College. Coming out, as anyone who has attended a liberal arts college will remember, is a laborious process involving several stages—not just a split and run revolution of hair-dying and nail-painting (or the lack thereof in some of the more lesbian cases).

The early part of the coming-out process is often awkward and lonely and internet-based; it progresses into a stage made acceptable by the rise of metrosexuality, wherein the subject clings to the new nonconformist effeminate straight male image, carrying purses and wearing ballet flats in the name of "individuality."

Needless to say early Autumn is not the season to be having your moment upstate.

But the other day, while seated in a large circle and huddled in thick jackets, as we drank from bright red plastic cups, my friends and I were witness to a neighbor's beautiful decision to admit to himself, and to the world, who he really was.

We'll call him Mr. Swiss. A tall kid from the Upper West Side, we knew him for his favorite things: Cheeseburgers, Red Bull and vodka, and pot. He was funny, he was smart, but he was keeping something inside.

"Guys," he said. "I have something to tell you...."

We listened.

"I'm a Republican."

There was a short silence.

"We know, we know," someone said.

"Well," he said, "actually, I'm more like a conservative Democrat, or a Centralist, or, I don't know.... Well, I guess, I'm a Republican."

Bard is a place where people regularly recite the funny facts and candid observations found on Michael Moore Box Calendars. I've heard kids call themselves Liberals, Democrats, Independents, and, naturally, Libertarians. I've met Anarchists, I've met Communists—but the Republican population of the school was lacking.

The first day my friends and I arrived at our dorm, we discovered in the ramshackle kitchen: A menorah; a nearly empty bottle of gin (in the freezer); and a well-used copy of "The Official 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Reader." Halloween festivities last week at Bard included a Democratic Presidential Debate Watch Party, which advertised itself as having pizza, cookies, and a Dennis Kucinich look-a-like contest.

The top Facebook group among Bard students is "1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert."

More often, I've heard students say they just don't care.

Bard is far from a political place. Josefine Kühl, a German student and a friend of mine, had a lot to say about the hypocrisy amongst the Bard liberal set. She cooks all her food in her dorm's kitchen, storing ingredients and leftovers in the common refrigerator. One day, however—even though she'd labeled all her food—she found that she'd been raided.

"All these kids talk about is how they are so sad about people starving in Whatchumacallit or wherever, and then, they go and just take other people's food from the refrigerator!" she said, and shook her fists with anger.

So the little liberals are also the disenchanted. They see voting as a waste of their time, and, with Election day coming up, the Bard Democrats group and representatives from the Democratic party of Duchess County were in the main cafeteria for weeks attempting to register the "too cool." Probably that did not go well.

The vegans as well have their hypocritical tendencies. While some lust after Theory jackets with rabbit-fur collars, and will surely soon enough falter from the path, others go too far—such as the vegans who hate the bees.

And the vegans who are addicted to Vicodin.

All of this puts Bard's lone Republican in a very good light. He's the only one who will actually say something about anything. When I asked him his battle plan for trying to maintain a social life, he told me he had gone through three phases.

First he had tried as hard as possible to be different. (I had noticed: Khakis and monogrammed Oxford shirts.) Then he had tried to assimilate. And then he stopped caring. In the pit of self-victimized mirror-junkies, that seems like the right choice.

Previously: Hipsters Can't Love

The other day on Facebook, I discovered that my friend Baby Jane— she lives down the hall—had made some dramatic changes to her Facebook.

She had changed her address to "123 hipsters, Can't Love, Scotland They Can't." She changed her residence to "they can't LOVE," and her website to "http://hipsterscantlove.com." Her high school had changed to "Hipsters can't love '06" and, her Work Info was as follows:

Employer: Hipsters can't love
Position: Hipsters
Location: Love, Bulgaria
Description: Can't

So far Adrian has found Paul.

The first day I met Paul, I mentioned to him the dominating presence of over-sized sweaters on campus as the weather got colder. Some of them are reminiscent of "The Cosby Show." To this he replied, while balancing his bowl in one hand and his lighter in the other and all the while staring into the sky with listless eyes, "When I got here, I was like, 'This is my home.'"

He repeated it for me a second time: "This is my home."

I couldn't disagree. Paul is from Los Angeles, which, along with New York, dominates the student body as far as place of origin goes. And while I hadn't really thought of Los Angeles as being particularly lacking in hipsters before, he seemed to feel that Bard, along with other small liberal arts colleges, mainly in the East Coast, were havens where the next generation of cool could and should perfect itself.

Perhaps Baby Jane and myself are cynical from having spent our years before Bard in New York. Maybe we don't realize the privilege of being able to wear trash, literally, and get away with it. (That being said, trash costs a lot of money these days.) And as far as Baby Jane is concerned, it isn't really the fashion that is the problem. The way she sees it, the hipster has some serious psychological problems in addition to the tendency towards obnoxious garments.

"They're either nymphomaniacs," she said. "Deeply insecure, or drug addicts, alcoholics, or all the above.... The second they step outside their defenses are automatically up, and they're like 'Cigarettes!'"

Meanwhile, Adrian and Paul pursued each other vehemently, in the classic college style: Flirting at parties, hooking up while roommates are out, and text messaging, and Facebook messaging, all with the skill, precision and frequency of professionals. Faced with the question of whether or not Paul was capable of reaching beyond the average level of human interaction, Adrian began divulging to me the details of their various interactions.

She told me that he had serenaded her with a Gnarls Barkley song on his guitar one night.

"He doesn't seem like a hipster, at least not personality wise," she said.

One of the key mantras of hipsterdom is to vehemently deny that you are a hipster. Therefore, it seemed to me, Paul's assertion that he had found his home at Bard was contrary to the general hipster attitude.

And then she found some proof that contradicted Baby Jane's recent bad love experience.

The other night, she and Paul hooked up a second time. After, Adrian came running into my room, a big smile on her face.

"Hipsters. Can love," she said.

I asked for a further explanation. She led me into her room. There, on her pillow, was a tiny plastic bag. It was half-filled with the most prized possession in the hipster world: Marijuana.

"He left his pot," she said.