The New York Times' Mark Leibovich has a piece concerning letters Sen. Hillary Clinton wrote during her college years to a high school friend when she was at Wellesley College and he was attending Princeton University.

Obviously, most of us would probably be embarrassed if what we thought or wrote when we were college kids was published 20, 30, or 40 years later.

That said, some of the published excerpts from these letters remind me of a divide (at least when I was in school in the late 70s and early 80s) between kids like Sen. Clinton who took themselves and their thoughts very seriously, and kids like me and my friends who didn't so much, or at least pretended we didn't.

We took things like beer and girls seriously. And Euchre. We took Euchre very seriously ... precisely because it wasn't a serious game.

And yeah, we talked politics and philosophy, and had bull sessions that went into the wee hours of the morning. But when I read some of the excerpts from Sen. Clinton's letters, I'm not reminded of myself or of very many people that I knew, or wanted to know:

“Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially,” Ms. Rodham reported in a letter postmarked Oct. 3, 1967. ... Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” Ms. Rodham wrote in an April 1967 letter. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”

Now I realize that this is an excerpt from a private letter written by a 19-year-old kid, but how seriously did she take herself, for God's sake?

If someone ever said something like that in one of our late night bull sessions -- where just about anything was fair game -- it would have been answered with something like, 'Okay, put the bong down. Seriously ... just put it down. You're starting to sound like an asshole.'

Followed by something like, 'Yeah ... you been readin' too much Sartre, or somethin'. Maybe you should stop takin' that stuff so seriously. Who wants to eat a pizza?'

I mean, we were 19-, or 20-, or 21-years-old kids, but we weren't so inexperienced that we didn't see it when someone else was too full of themselves.

Who had the time in college to put up with someone who disliked and pitied 'most people'? And spoke of being a 'compassionate misanthrope'?

Jesus Christ, what a waste of time.

Perhaps it's the difference in the expectations between a student like Hillary going to an 'elite' private school in Massachusetts -- where maybe she thought she was supposed to think of herself as being 'elite' and above it all -- and a student like me going to a public university in Ohio, I don't know.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago not too far away from where Sen. Clinton grew up, a nice, middle- and upper-middle class suburban 'bedroom community' much like Park Ridge. And, yeah, I'm sure some people I grew up with made fun of that middle class existence when they went away to school too.

When encountering kids who bemoaned their middle class existence, I laughed:

“God, I feel so divorced from Park Ridge, parents, home, the entire unreality of middle class America,” she says. “This all sounds so predictable, but it’s true.”

I laughed at their pretentiousness, because ... well, they were quite pretentious in that '19-year-old-wisdom' kind of way.

Still, I could put up with them, thinking they were probably just going through one of those depressive college phases that were so familiar.

But I had a rule: if someone started using any form of the word "bourgeois" in order to describe something, well, that's where I drew the line; I just laughed at them all the harder -- and thereafter avoided them like the plague I thought they were.

Writes Clinton:

“I have been enjoying myself too much, and spring and letter-writing are — to the bourgeois mind — no excuses!”

I mean, come on, even if you were just a kid, you knew when someone was a complete pill, didn't you?

The Times' Leibovich writes that Sen. Clinton's letters "[were] written in a tight, flowing script with near-impeccable spelling and punctuation ... [containing] no possibly damaging revelations of the proverbial 'youthful indiscretions,' and mention nothing glaringly outlandish or irresponsible."

There may indeed be nothing revelatory in the letters. But that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of reinforcement for preconceived notions of Sen. Clinton's image, whether you like her or not.