Lemondrop

Things to Do When You're Bored in Community College:

1. Try to find a student more stoned than your poetry professor.
2. Yell at a vending machine, see if anyone notices/cares/Baker Acts you.
3. Pretend to give birth on the lawn in front of the cafeteria while screaming, "SHOULDN'T THE SCHOOL PROVIDE SOME SORT OF ROOM FOR THIS?"
4. See how many other students join your rally.
5. Put down your hair, plug in your headphones, and use the school's Wifi to Hulu NBC's new tragicomedy, "Community."

Star and snarky "Soup" host Joel McHale is reason enough to watch "Community" on Thursday nights, but there's extra incentive for me, as an genuine community college student.

Does it live up to the actual experience? Well, in terms of realism, "Community" is really the only show on TV that can get away with having actors over the age of 30 playing college students. Really, the average local campus has the same cast of characters.

In any given class, you may find yourself between a once-promising jock who dislocated both shoulders (losing his shot at the big leagues) and the young woman who dropped out of high school to pursue her Adderall dependence and then found Jesus. The front row usually has some mix of attentive cougars vying for the professor's, uh, approval. Behind them sits the balding, convertible-driving, mid-life crisis from which they're actually likely to get it.

The Setting
For whatever reason you find yourself at this institution of higher learning, it's important to appreciate the small things. For instance, if you look across the street at the big, beautiful university filled with all those glorious amenities like a gym, a food court, advanced classroom technology and students who have a much better chance at getting the job you want, just keep in mind that you're paying less.

I know. It's a thought that comforts me in moments of facepalm, too.

It's times like these that we have to look to "Community" to remember that it's a privilege to get a second chance, and that in some small way we're all connected by some poor choice we made. Whether it was trying to make a radical statement against the school system by never doing your homework, or thinking that if you're smart enough people won't care that you don't have a bachelor's degree.

The Theme
Community college is about connecting on a really intimate level. It's about getting to know who we really are. (Then IMMEDIATELY leaving as soon as the professor dismisses us, because this is a commuter campus.)

I mean, if you think about it, it's OK to be in community college. It's OK to have made mistakes in the past that you're trying to atone for. Because past humiliations don't haunt you.

And Joel McHale wouldn't judge you. He just doesn't seem the type.

The Central Conflict
For me, algebra was my big mistake. Algebra II to be exact. See, I tried the whole algebra thing my freshman year of high school. I didn't like algebra.

What I didn't know was that Algebra II was a requirement for most schools. I found this out in my senior year. It was around the time I was taking eight classes, vying for three major scholarships and masterminding the debut issue of my school's first literary magazine. I also had debilitating mono at the time, but what's a little extra drama?

I paid for my woeful lack of qualifications on rejection-letter day. I felt ripped off. I wept on my kitchen floor and regretted not taking algebra's horrible abuse for about an hour, wiped my nose, and started filling out the community college application.

I kept thinking, Why did this happen? Because of one silly class? I'm still a good student! I stewed in my own disappointment, but in the end CC turned out to be a blessing.

The Ensemble Cast
The more people I met, the easier it was to see that this was the best place for them, too. I met one woman who had just moved here with her husband from Korea. She was frantically taking notes; she explained to me that if she didn't get straight A's her husband wouldn't pay for her tuition and she'd have to move back.

I think the message in NBC's "Community" is that people end up where they do for a reason. If anything we can connect on that level while drowning in surly monologues maligning the administration.

You can still withdraw from classes for another few weeks and you can catch the very funny "Community" on Thursdays. Little things, remember? Little things.