I'm sitting in a pub back home in the United Kingdom. When my friends hear that I'm studying on exchange at Dartmouth for the summer, they begin to get very excited.
"Isn't that an Ivy League university?" asks one.
"Yeah, doesn't Natalie Portman go to an Ivy League?" chips in another.
"And Katie Holmes. Wow. It'll be just like 'Dawson's Creek.'" Then comes the biggie: "Do they have sororities?"
I resisted pointing that out as a strategy when applying for the exchange program -- suggesting that I intended to return with a seraglio of sisters was unlikely to prove fruitful.
However, I was fulfilling my compatriots' ultimate 14-year-old boy, or even 20-year-old male, fantasy. I was going to study in the Land of the Sorority.
Now, thanks to the global prevalence of MTV culture, my friends will no doubt be able to experience the vicarious thrills of being a fly on the wall of the new reality television series "Sorority Life."
My only prior knowledge of the Greek system comes from watching a BBC series called "Under the Sun." This series of anthropological documentaries examined the mating habits of the Masai Tribesmen, the courtship rituals of the inhabitants of the Amazon region and finally, it turned its eye toward the pick-up techniques of frat boys.
Suffice it to say, the program left the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the differences between less-developed countries and the first world.
Indeed, the whole idea of sororities and fraternities can leave British people somewhat bemused. Therefore, what a godsend "Sorority Life" is. I might at last be able to understand the whole damn malarkey.
Unfortunately, my only jaunt into a sorority house ended abruptly when I cursed my own inadequacies in not being able to participate in a conversation about how I too wanted those shoes, but in blue.
"Sorority Life" follows the trials and tribulations of six girls from rush through to communal living in their inconceivably plush pledge house (interior design by the best MTV could afford).
It would be churlish to complain that the TV execs had a large say in which girls were chosen to get into Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi, because the drama that has ensued has been thoroughly entertaining.
The intellectual heavyweights of the house, Candace (who despite the sorority's predominantly Jewish membership didn't know that in Judaism, Jesus is not the son of God) and Jordan (who gets through a bottle of hairspray a week) have decided to ostracize Jessica, the big-boned Native American.
It comes as quite a revelation that girls living together can act bitchy (although the rivalries in frat houses are probably just as bad). Still, we should have known -- in the first the girls frolic in the Californian sunshine to the sounds of Radiohead's "Knives Out," portending the inevitable "Lord of the Flies"-style implosion that is to come.
Additional highlights thus far have included the big sisters forcing their pledges to rearrange a set of stones in the middle of the night to spell out the letters of their house, an event reminiscent of the episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer joins the quasi-Masonic "Stone cutters."
In other memorable scenes, Jordan dumped her boyfriend for cheating ("I should have known. He is a Pisces") and the girls came to terms with house rules that have some stern things to say about alcohol and boys.
However, my understanding of a world in which pong playing ability is all and a group of seemingly arbitrary Greek letters can mean so much has not been furthered. In "Sorority Life," nothing much happens apart from a lot of hairspray.
