Jess Murray

This week saw Cambridge being ranked at 2nd place in the list of the worlds best universities. Like fingering your ass-hole when no ones looking, that feels fucking good. We’re precocious little wankers, and it only takes one glance at this weeks Varsitys’ CUCA Vs. CULC debate to emphasize this point. How can we so insincerely pretend we “don’t give a shit” when at 6.15pm we find ourselves debating marxist theory over a turgid looking beef wellington with a side portion of peas.

We like to think we’re above being clever.  Heck, we all dress up like the Sith at Vader’s  post-Return of the Jedi funeral for “Formal”, and partake in our lame ass glee pennying games; followed by Cindies, where we drink our £1.50 VKs;  then end the night by shagging unintentionally date raped freshers  – at the end of the day we’re all goons who at one point either got, or at least deserved to get, our heads flushed down the shitter by some beefy bastard who got a level 5 in year 9 SATs.

We’re the fodder of every Daily Mail comment section when theres an article only briefly mentioning Oxbridge. We’re the gold-dust butt of Dave from Stoke’s jokes. But you don’t care, you know you’re smarter than them. Really, you do. In terms of brain capacity, you do feel superior to most of the nation.

But somehow, everywhere we go we’re bombarded by students who enjoy downplaying this inherent geek inside of them in favor of a. Rugby Jock, b. Bohemian, or C. Wannabe Chav. And that wannabe is not the kind of wannabe thats only about 10% away from fully fledged – but about on the same level as David Cameron wants to be down with it.

Being somewhat sympathetic to Structuralist concerns, I really do see Cambridge students feeling the need to place themselves on what I like to call the “Lamescale”. Its as  pervasive as the scum you get your floating in your PG tips, put perhaps even more disillusioning than the fact that murky bits of white molecules are more immediately distressing than Asian slave labor.

Every Cambridge student really does like to see themselves as being less of a weeping, flaccid academic than others around them. At least, those who read the Cambridge Tab, unless you somehow found your way to this site looking for the Cambridge resource on tabular data. It’s a weird reversal of the good old “Keeping up with the Jones’’ analogy, in which everyone justifies themselves – both to themselves and others around them – why they aren’t as eggheaded as other people they know.

However, lets just take a breather. Imagine the Jones’ family simultaneously gassed themselves in their large stainless steel Smeg oven. And I mean, all of them, at once, in a coincidence that would leave the whole of the philosophy department jerking off in their offices till Christmas. You’re now the weirdest, nerdiest of all the UK. Dressing up in togas and downing shot after shot of jagermeister isn’t so cool now is it? The nerdier than thou are needed for self esteem, no matter where you are on the scale you are, so for once I think we should just damn right thank our A* souls they’re here too. Go on, give them a hug next time you see them at the New Museum Site.

On top of that, you’re only about 1% cooler than the fat girl who drinks soya milk. Fuck, if you’re lucky, maybe even 0.5%. And I’m using stDEV to come to that conclusion, so don’t bother with a shit comment below. So give those guys some slack. Sure, they like God, sure, they like 9pm bedtimes, and sure, they fucking love shortbread. But we all have to use the word ‘Michaelmas’, all of us. And if I look to where I began this article, and know that you probably all got that Sith joke, I think I probably just proved my point.

So lighten up for once. At the end of the day, in the eyes of 99% of the population, you’re all bloody geeks. So stop blowing up that Polish guys eggs in the microwave just because it happened to you when you were 13. There’s a reason we’re number 2 in the world, and you’re part of that reason.

So, for want of a better conclusion, it’s getting late, so I’m going to go have a wank to redtube, and then probably finish my essay on taphonomic processes.