Let me describe to you what undergraduate "life" (and I use the term loosely) was like in the Great White North.

One thing that MTV does not show is the snow. Great, big, fucking piles of it. "Summer" in Buffalo is the nicest two weeks of the year, and none of it takes place during the semester. "Winter," however, lasts roughly from October through May. It was so cold that the shuttle buses often wouldn't run and the school had to supply tauntauns so we could get from the dorms to the main campus. Thankfully, the campus architecture (which may be accurately described as "Legoland Modern") included tunnels between the buildings so that students could go from class to class without being eaten by the Wampa ice creatures.

Snowed in like Nanook of the North, there was one thing we could do to defrost ourselves: Underage drinking. The two favored venues for this were Mickey Rat's and PJ Bottom's, either of which accepted crudely chalked licenses. From what I heard (and I know this only by repute, since I preferred basement parties with live bands, ample amperage, and the company of my fellow campus freaks), what went on in there made Bob Guccione's Caligula pale in comparison as nice Jewish boys from Long Island perfected their Roofie-slipping technique and sorority girls learned the meaning of "sisterhood" by holding each others' hair back as they vomited up the $2 beer special. The master race was perpetuated when one of the aforesaid girls would go back to the dorm room of one of the aforementioned guys and pass out in a "come hither" position.

The sorority babes, I have to admit, I don't know anything about, partially because I didn't go to the mating grounds with a chalked license. The Sigma Alpha Tau ones amused me, though, because the Greek letters look like the word EAT, and the one thing you can't do in SUNY Buffalo is eat the food. I mean it: I lost the freshman 15. I then reasoned that perhaps the letters meant "eat me," but then, I thought, why would anyone want to? You could go down there and come up with some grotty souvenier from their last lover/rapist—like upchucked cheap beer mixed with chunks of recycled dining hall food, or perhaps a baseball cap. Alas, due to my refusal to chalk up the ol' license and go skank-hunting, I never "hooked up" with anyone at UB, and so was forced to lose my virginity to a fat chick in a chainmail bikini.

Another amusing thing about fraternity ecology was how, every March, the weight room at the gym would be swamped by a crowd of skinny white guys in backwards baseball caps and "Coed Naked Lacrosse" T-shirts. "I'm gonna get totally pumped for Spring Break! Spot me!" they would cry before throwing themselves down to slam out a few dozen "reps" which consisted of rapidly moving a 120-pound bar halfway down while staring at their fraternity brother's crotch. Those of us who actually attempted to lift weights with some degree of seriousness were alternately amused by their antics and annoyed because they hogged all the equipment. Today, these physical marvels push desks like the rest of us, with their manly pectoral muscles turned to breasts larger even than those of the sorority chicks they pursued with such drunken ardor.

Believe it or not, I did, at one time, consider rushing a fraternity. My first semester at UB, more out of curiosity than for any other reason, I investigated Sigma Alpha Mu, the reported "bad boys" of the frat scene. Their dilapidated frat house down in the student slum was legend. Walking by on a Saturday night was a dangerous venture, as they would often have contests where one member tossed a quarter onto the lawn, and the brother who came closest to pissing on it from the second story of the house got to keep it. The sculptures of flash-frozen urine on the sidewalk were one of Buffalo's natural marvels, surpassing even Niagara Falls. Alas, I decided not to try to become a Sammy (as they were known) when I found out the initiation ritual involved doing "anal shots" of beer and taking part in a conga line where one placed your thumb in the butt of the fraternity member ahead of you and the other in your mouth—and then switched thumbs. True brotherhood involves sharing e. coli.

Speaking of nasty microorganisms, MTV must have fixed up the ol' frat house something major. In Buffalo, the majority of people who lived off-campus, including the fraternity types, resided in disgusting, vermin-infested holes that were barely warmer than the snowbanks outside.The fact that a stray spark from someone's bong never burned down the entire neighborhood never ceases to amaze me. The swank pad MTV's fraternity lives in is utterly unlike the piss-scented firetraps I'm familiar with—something you'd expect those lilly-white Skull and Bones bitches from Yale to live in, not gangsta ghetto boyz from state university.

Come to think of it, there's only one thing at all accurate about MTV's depiction of college life: You never see anyone study.