All I’ve been hearing since I returned to Campustown is a whole lot of complaining. Maybe the thought of being indoors all fall is spreading Seasonal Affective Disorder through the population like an airborne virus on “24,” or perhaps we’re all just uppity because of McCain or the economy or being physically inferior to our golden god Michael Phelps. It’s time to cheer up, kids! None of your nagging is as worthwhile as you think:

Urban Outfitters: As someone who subscribes to Nylon magazine and obsesses over tchotchke, I naturally welcome the faux-vintage mecca’s arrival with open arms. But, every girl I’ve discussed it with has expressed an identical complaint: “Oh, great. Now, we’re all going to dress the same.”

We’re all going to dress the same? Since when were we, the student inhabitants of this small central Illinois town, such individualists? Our college has the largest Greek community in the entire world, which practically churns out T-shirts that each member and her closest hundred friends proudly wear. And, as far as I’m concerned, we already have a uniform: PINK sweatpants by day, and miniscule shirt-dresses with unnecessarily high heels by night.

If we all started listening to good music and wearing high-waisted jeans, cute boots and tiny blazers, we wouldn’t be festering some sort of tragedy. We’d be Brooklyn. And ladies, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Classes: All right, I’ll give you this one – school, for the most part, sucks. But, while some of you spent the summer enjoying yourselves atop a lifeguard stand or babysitting or getting tan or fit or whatever it is attractive people do, a lot of us were working as tiny office slaves. We were interns: underpaid, overtired, baking under florescent light fixtures and basking in the glow of computer monitors all week long.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my jobs and learned an invaluable amount, but I’m ready to hop, skip and jump my way back into lectures. A 40-hour work week is replaced by 12 hours of classes, consequences for surfing the Internet are downsized from a reprimand to a professorial complaint, and deadlines for my introduction to floral design class are assumably simpler than that of a national magazine. While you’re playing sudoku in pajama pants and ignoring the bellowing groan of a dry, dull lecture this week, make sure to ask yourself if you actually miss the suits and stress of the real world.

Freshmen: They loiter in the streets on Saturday nights without a bar to visit. They wake up on their extra-large twin mattresses with a Keystone Light-induced hangover. And they vomit. A lot. But, beer and bile aside, I love freshmen. They’re like tiny, awkward plants, blooming in front of our very eyes. At times they’re weeds, irritating and as far as the eye can see, and at others, they’re flowers, soaking up every bit of lecture announcements and concession stand-resembling cafeteria food they can find in the soil of C-U.

Most importantly, unlike the rest of our peers, they listen to your elderly wisdom, and (kind of) care about what you have to say. And, as a girl who spent her childhood getting whooped at N64, running bases, Mancala and WWE-style wrestling by a genetically-blessed older brother, I don’t mind living out my triumphant big sister fantasy with the young’uns … so long as they don’t try to beat me at Risk.

Panhellenic Recruitment: I’ll never understand why dudes roll their eyes at this. Two words: babe watching. When it comes down to it, girls only act stylish to impress other girls. (Case in point: Men aren’t captivated by gladiator sandals.) When you add together ladies literally dressing to impress and the pressure to join the “right” chapter, you get a midday, campuswide fashion show during all three invites. The bars may be a bit emptier, but hey, at least you get to ogle gals in the daylight.

Carlye is a senior in journalism, who can also be a complainer. And, by default, a hypocrite.