Colgate University, I have had plenty of problems with you over the last two years. Only one of them pisses me off enough to take 30 minutes out of my day, which I could have spent watching The Fresh Prince keep it real, to write this: I am sick and tired of Campus Safety messing with my car.

Campo, stop giving me tickets when I park my car up the hill before my classes. Stop ticketing me when I park in the Cutten lot instead of the freshman lot, which makes no freaking sense because I live in Cutten and am not a freshman. Stop ticketing me when I park behind Drake, under Lawrence, etc., etc.

Let’s break down why I drive my car 750 miles from Chicago to Colgate in the first place. Colgate, as you may know, is located almost five hours from any urban area. I don’t count Syracuse or Utica as urban areas because they remind me of the post-apocalypse war scene in The Terminator. So I spend a ton of money on gas and tolls just so I have the option of driving 50 minutes to New Hartford if I want to get eccentricities that Hamilton doesn’t have, like an IPod charger or cell-phone service. And how does Colgate repay my willingness to go to school here despite these hours and hours of driving? By making me park in Munnsville and walk from there to my dorm every night.

It comes down to Colgate milking us, in 25-dollar increments, for every last dollar we have. Think about it: they force you to buy meal plans that cost much more than if you paid in cash, they eliminated weekly Sophomore cleaning that probably led to every one of us contracting a host of non-Jug related diseases, and they even charged me 126 dollars and put a hold on my record because I was overdue in returning a pair of scissors (truth). This is the same institution that charges us 50 G’s a year and decided that having ketchup and napkins on the tables at Frank was too much of a hassle. But that’s not what matters to me; what matters is that Campus Safety should stop touching my vehicle.

But while I’m talking about the dining hall, let me say this: I never complain about having to eat the crippling food that Sodexho delivers once a month on its way to Sherbourne Correctional Facility. Nor do I whine about the only alternatives being the Coop, which got old sometime around the fourth day of Orientation, and the Edge, which is the weirdest dining facility on Earth. Seriously, you bus one-third of your own meal, it supposedly costs 25 bucks, and the interior looks like the result of a prom-planning committee on Meth (“Let’s have bricks here, and sparkly glitter on the tables, and paint the pipes yellow and purple and blue and then huff whatever’s left in the cans!”)

It’s not about having dining halls that rarely serve meals that require knives. That’s fine, I can survive on four years of Easy Mac, Caprisun and Cool Ranch Doritos. It’s about Campus Safety lifting up the windshield on my car and putting that Dollar General-receipt-looking ticket underneath.

And so I don’t even need to bring up the fact that Colgate has three big events a year, a big speaker and two big bands, and manages to somehow ruin them all. Actually, that statement should be amended to one band, as last year for SPW we got Ok Go, a group that even 15 year old girls are sick of. This band is famous for the gimmick of singing while riding a treadmill, which they couldn’t even do for us because we only have four working treadmills at any given time. I’ll give props for getting Girl Talk and Lupe Fiasco, but they turned the former into a catastrophe, and I won’t even go into what I’ll do if they ruin Lupe, as I don’t want to get George So’d.

But once again, I digress. The point isn’t that Colgate sucks. The point is that the Colgate administration acts like the Kremlin, and for no reason. You guys need to chill. If someone returns a book an hour late, you don’t have to put them on academic probation.

If The Maroon-News tries to interview you, you don’t have to say “no comment” on every question like a Senator whose secret Thailand pictures just surfaced. And you can tell Campo to stick to the only thing they’re good for: breaking up freshman dorm parties.