Welcome to Yale, where everyone is accepted for a specifically impressive reason — a special power, if you will. It’s like going to college with a bunch of X-Men… only the mutations aren’t so much fun. Some kid scored off the charts on the S.A.T.’s, some loser won the Canadian junior fencing crown, the a**hole in your English section invented a cure for cancer. Whatever you’ve done to put yourself into this elite institution, you’ll soon find out, is worth exactly two Vietnamese nickels when held up against the starlight of the Saudi prince who gets his own single in Lanman-Wright and wears suits everywhere he goes, simply to visually reinforce the fact that he is a prince, and you never will be.

Have you met the kid whose family had enough money to send him to Costa Rica for the summer, so that he could have the absolutely life-changing experience of building mud huts for constantly-pregnant women? Have you spoken to the girl who went to private school in Switzerland? How about that guy from No-Cal who has his pilot’s license? Yeah, I know that dude. He’s OK.

But did you know he’s also, like really good family friends with the fat dude in Blues Traveler?

No WAY. I LOVE Blues Traveler! AND I love fat dudes!

Just about everyone at Yale has a unique tale of exactly what it was that brought them here: that Student Council presidency, that land-speed record, that internship their father set up for them at Time-Warner.

Your job now, as a newly-baptized swimmer in this pool of literati and glitterati, is to shut it all out. Because just as every one of your new classmates has a fantastic story, they are all using their fantastic story for the same reason: to sleep with you.

Yale and its diversity in excellence is the perennial breeding ground for the type I like to call “the experience whore” — the man or woman who will tell you his or her life story – the unlikely fame, the unthinkable opportunities, the unbelievable adventures — they’ll spend hours ripping a sensational yarn, just for you — but do not doubt that when it is over, they will expect sex. Your sex.

Experience whores are those who think so highly of themselves and their deeds, that they can only assume that you will too — and reward them for their life story with sex. To them, everyone is a little St. Peter. All they have to do is recount their deeds and the grace with which they were executed and you’ll open the gates and let them right in — as if they simply deserve sex for all they’ve been through.

The tactic of the experience whore is a tried-and-true one. The more impressive the story, the less impressive the teller must make it seem. It can be calculated by measuring the height of the shrug that follows the story, subdividing by the number of times the teller interjects the term “Yeah, it was pretty cool,” and then multiplying that by total radicalness. It’s this contrast between how incredible the story is, and how disaffected its teller comes off, that acts as a catalyst for the chemical reaction that sprays into the air the experience whore’s secret weapon: that noxious gas known as mystery.

Experience whores think it a strong policy to keep a few things about themselves mysterious, a few dirty little secrets, a few things they won’t tell just anyone in a party atmosphere. You want to get inside the head of that ex-jock turned folk singer? You want to “figure out” that German chick? You want to know what the son of the Prime Minister of Nigeria REALLY thinks about America?

You’re supposed to. They are planning on just that, on you playing right into their hands, on you pumping quarters repeatedly into the arcade game that is their glorious presence — until you’re out of change, and inebriated enough to want nothing more than for them to tell you, in the post-coital spoon position, about the time they met Eddie Vedder. He seemed like a pretty regular kind of guy, really.

The greatest tragedy of the experience whore is that he or she raises the bar for all the rest of us just looking for a good time, not an audience. With all the unbelievable stories circulating around campus, it can be hard for an honest man to get some honest action. Unless you have an angle, or at least some designer sunglasses, you may get lost in the shuffle. You may not know it yet, but the fact that there’s some kid in your class who once boxed Henry Kissinger for charity, completely blows the curve. It shoots your chances of making a night of it into the stratosphere, where they can hang in the airless limbo right next to the probability that you won’t get the butt-last number in your sophomore year housing draw.

My advice to the Yalie, then, is simple. You can’t beat these people. You’ve got to join up. Play the game. Whore yourself out. Tell everybody everything you ever did. Go public.

Don’t have stories? Steal some. Dress up in a sharkskin suit and tell the next good looking girl that walks by that you’re the heir to the throne of Monaco. Seriously, he won’t mind. I know the guy. Actually, it’s a funny story how we met. On Safari. In, uh… Brazil. Yeah, I speak Portuguese. I had to learn, when I was down there, you know. Shooting the movie.

Oh, you haven’t seen the movie I’m in?

Yeah, it was pretty cool.

Greg Yolen ’04 is not funny to talk to.