A lot can happen to a person in 30 years.

Thirty years ago, as a student at New York's Queens College, humor writer Jeffrey Cohen honed his craft while subverting the expectations of readers of the school's various publications.

Cohen wrote about attending a commuter college, the professors and university personnel, his fellow students, and what life was like for people coming of age in the mid-1980s.

While doing some housecleaning this summer, Cohen stumbled onto his college scrapbooks and rediscovered these early works. Not surprisingly, most contained multiple dated references (fax machines, President Reagan, Hill Street Blues). But many pieces were as amusing as originally intended.

Cohen decided to dust off the best of these articles and share them with a new generation of readers, as well as with his friends who occasionally quoted lines that had stuck with them.