GAVE’S SOAPBOX

There is nothing as wonderful as Spring Break.

Bikini-clad babes from UCLA drunkenly prancing along the coastline of Panama Beach, frat boys vomiting marvelously into Mexican limousines at 3 a.m. and me — chilling alone at home with a loose pair of pants on and a remote control in my left hand.

No, nothing is so intoxicating as the sweet smell of MTV’s annual coverage of the average, run-of-the-mill college student with his white “Cocks” hat, his deformed can of Bud Lite, his pot belly, and his rod-thin, breast implant-laden female plaything.

I tried to go down to Cancun one year, but they told me that my pecs weren’t big enough.

“Send this one to Can-ton,” the flight attendant said.

“What’s there?” I asked.

“Baseball Hall of Fame, son,” she said. “You’re gonna finally get to see that bust of Hank Greenberg.”

But, dammit, I could taste those topless twenty-somethings with BadGirlz.com cameras elegantly peering up their skirts. I though about the many new friends I would make as I dropped my quesadilla lunch into a toilet in San Juan.

I’ve been doomed to Spring Breaks in the Midwest, or worse, New England where the women are pale as the inside of a Klondike bar and the temperature can only properly be measured in Kelvin.

I formulate devious plans to “get a lot of work done,” but instead found myself sitting lifelessly in front of the altar of Music Television as my counterparts in Jamaica yell, “Show your [beep]” and stuff their censored-out butts and breasts in my face.

Then, I get misty-eyed and wonder what would have been if only I was stupid and happy. If I owned a Hawaiian T-shirt, binge drank on Tuesdays and shaved in places other than my face. As is, I’m an Easterner with gray sweaters, stuffy glasses, and bad teeth. So I’m left to ogle the nonsense in San Pedro while guys with low SAT scores who still think that wrestling is real get to scuba dive and sleep with promiscuous women.

And though some may say that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, that the nerds of today will become the babe magnets of tomorrow, I don’t buy it. That’s just propaganda meant to placate the nerds. We know that we’ll be happy later in life. We’ll have money, a good woman and a brain that appreciates it all while still always searching to improve the human condition.

But, we also know that all of our intellectual pursuits and humanitarian gestures won’t be as enjoyable as just one night of MTV-style Spring Break. And I, for one, would gladly trade it all in-the understanding of Kant, the good financial sense, the loving family-for a trip down to Tijuana complete with a tongue piercing, a drunken knife fight with a guy from Missoula, a cameo appearance in E!’s coverage of “The Other Latin America: Mexico’s Seediest Transvestite Bars,” and a “sleepover experiment” with two girls named Mindy.