I watched the first few painful moments of Mtv’s College Life series, a set of pseudo-documentaries of freshman life at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Often recognized as a party school, the UW is a frequent subject for discussions of collegian debauchery, and that is clearly what MTV wanted.

They picked the usual suspects for “reality” shows—party animals, evangelicals who want everyone to know about their abstinence, and so on. I freely recognize that if they’d depicted normal students, it’d be too dull to bear—laundry, libraries, money woes, and inane late night conversations.

As a 33-year old returning grad student, I feel entirely other than these kids. When I was 25 I felt old. No longer. I watch them trudging around campus, ear buds, rubber boots and all, and feel sorry for them. Freshmen simply cannot understand all their feelings, much less adequately interpret them.

MTV’s cringe-inducing headline (“This isn’t reality; this is real”) tells us that, as a society, we are bored to tears. The remedy, of course, is to watch freshmen, as an in-town reviewer put it, wallow in banality.

But the question remains: can freshmen even understand freshman life, let alone college life?