I'll all for dropping acid, but this dude dosed you at 12 years old? That's kinda fucked up, man.

oh no! I was like 16 then, coming up from Portland.

Oh yeah.. I also meant the apartment complex's swimming pool was where there'd be dead bodies. Happened at least 3 times a year.

Everything about that sounds like it came out of a Ted Bundy victim's bio.

Oh, I'll also note that this is not the actual campus. Evergreens Campus is actually really nice, mostly undeveloped land surrounded by forest. You know, for the hippies to live in.

An old friend of mine went there and she's doing pretty well as a documentary filmmaker last I heard.

I didn't know Lynda Barry went there.

Do they still offer a full-credit course in silence?

Every joke, like the one about how you know Santa Claus is an Evergreen graduate because he wears the same clothes all the time, has a long beard and only works one day a year.

I studied there for a year, what Aelric says is true, but I left because I absolutely could not stand my fellow students. Literally 90% of them were just wanna-be hippies with very little interest in getting an education. Most of the professors were completely burnt-out on them, too. Don't blame them, but it made things rather hostile for people who actually tried.

Lots and lots of good drugs though. Everywhere.

My pattern with Evergreen was that I went for two years, hated every moment of it, quit for two years, hated the labor market even more and returned back to Evergreen with knowing it's flaws and problems and finished my last two years having a much more enjoyable time and getting much more out of it. Parts still sucked, such as my part time photo classes being full of the most egotistical hippie wannabe artists ever (which always sucked even more when I actually liked the work of one of those pricks) and Hugh Lentz, one of the teachers that decided I didn't belong in the photography world and actually asked me to drop out just because he found my lack of buying into his bullshit annoying.

The other students are absolutely the worst part of Evergreen, but that gets easier in the upper grades, but because you get used to it and because a lot of the seniors greow out of their freshman bullshit by then.

I graduated from Evergreen and regret it.
But that's mostly my fault, like everything else.
Still, I want to get a master's, which will make up for the time I lost channeling my zen consciousness into minority platitudes.

I grew up in Olympia. So, of course, I went to CWU and got a self-directed degree directly equivalent to an Evergreen degree, so at the end of the day I'm just a non-matriculated Greener by default.

I know what you mean. I was accepted to Oberlin, Evergreen, Reed, Yale, Columbia, and UW Madison. I chose UW because I thought it was the straightest shot to a "jobby job.." even though I majored in music, comparative literature and philosophy. Now I am a door person and write grant proposals for non profits, not a lawyer or journalist, but a happy man who works with doors, moves speakers, and has lunch with certain retired Portland Trailblazers and Ursula LeGuin's husband from time to time. Wouldn't change it for all the coke in Los Angeles.

I also went to UW for financial reasons. You're grandfathered into in-state tuition if your parents went there, which mine did (my uncle also taught at UW LaCrosse and Harvard) my older brother went to Yale and I always wondered as a kid why a Papa Aldo's pizza had to last a week and why we didn't have things like cable or video games.

I could see how greeners would be appealing people, in fact, some of my best friends, and myself, are greeners, but you really can't make the call that they are all cool until you visit the heart of darkness and spend time in a class with one of these guys. Take a chemistry course and watch it somehow convert into gender studies of ancient china because that is the only thing the loudest students are willing to talk about. Try eating any form of meat withing a 50 mile radius of the campus and enjoy the flock of accusatory screamers jump on your ass. Try going against the flow, even if it's just another shade of liberalism, and watch yourself get ostracized by student and professor alike, even having credits taken away from you for your differing opinion. Evergreen may churn out a lot of cool people, but for every cool guy you meet, there is 10 angry hippie assholes that want to rape their views into you. the funny thing is, a lot of times, you'll already share their view, just not to their satisfaction, thus you are their surragate enemy because they don't know where else to put their anger yet. also, a lot of them are rich kids, and fuck rich kids.