Anyone who’s lived here long enough has surely seen plenty of head scratchers. When some ten thousand college kids live in a square-mile box, there’s inevitably going to be a strong contingent of stupid people. These stupid people, naturally, do stupid things. I’ve heard people ask where Tecate was from. I once heard a house bumping Simple Plan on DP. Hell, even I once threw half a gallon of spoiled milk at a skunk one night in a drunken fury. And let’s not even divulge the literal sense of the term, “doing stupid things.” We’ve all had to slay some dragons in our day.

But in my four years here, perhaps the most asinine of things to do occurred at our house this quarter. Twice.

Our house woke up to the whitening sight of toilet paper hanging from our trees. Fine, that’s cool – TP-ing was the thing to do at one point in our lives. The thing is, that stage of our lives was also around the first time we younglings were watching “Saved by the Bell” everyday and discovering how to rub one out. But for fuck’s sake, nothing is more contrite than peppering one’s lawn with Costco TP in college.

Aside from the obvious implications of stupidity that go with toilet papering, there are additional practical reasons that make it downright silly. First of all: wiping one’s ass. Toilet paper isn’t only expensive, it’s fucking white gold. Obviously, whoever the perpetrators are, they have not experienced the proverbial rat race that incurs when the supply of TP at a house full of eight dudes dwindles down to a mere roll or two. At least if you’re going to toilet paper us, leave the toilet paper in a usable fashion, or do it when it’s not going to rain and spoil our precious paper. Apparently, the violators have never tried to wipe their asses with this very paper that you’re reading right now. Try it: It brings new meaning the word “chafe.”

My next qualm with the jobs done on our house is that they were half-ass jobs. Fuck, if you’re going to do something as childish as TP-ing, at least try to do it like an adult. Use your whole ass. See, we would still be irate over cleaning up the mess, but at least we might have some respect for them if it looked like it snowed on Fortuna Lane. Instead, I look outside at the piss-poor job done on our house and laugh, knowing that they wasted 10 bucks for nothing – except for drawing the ire of this columnist in the Nexus.

Lastly, be bold. Pulling pranks can be fulfilling, if one pulls it off correctly. TP-ing is ho-hum. It’s the virtual Ja Rule of the hip-hop world. In short, no one gives a shit. If you really want to turn some heads, take a dump in a paper bag, use the toilet paper that you’re saving by not TP-ing me, and go Billy Madison on someone’s ass. Maybe that shit flies at, say, BYU, but around these parts, we go hard or we go home.

The bottom line is, if you toilet paper past the ages of pre-pubescence by defacing the front yard of the object of your high-school affection and think that shit still flies, you suck at life. You need to discover that there are better things to do at night than waste money and ass-cleaning materials on rolling people: Read a book, get laid, get drunk, poop on my lawn.

Just do yourself a favor: Don’t roll – you’re just embarrassing yourself.

Thanks for the laughs, though.

In his final weeks at UCSB, Daily Nexus Sports Editor Sean Swaby plans to avenge the TP-ers by reading a book, getting laid, getting drunk and pooping on any lawn that he so chooses, but maybe not exactly in that order.