When I was in the fourth grade, I knew exactly what college spring break was like. After all, it was all over MTV, which I used as an informative mechanism on how to be cool every single day after school.

Spring break took place in Miami or Cancun. The only kind of swimwear that was allowed to be worn barely existed, six-packs and belly button rings abounded and everybody loved everybody else there — that’s why they were all groping each other and dancing like that, right?

This is my third college spring break and I have to say, I have yet to live the MTV fantasy.

I’m getting my wisdom teeth out come March 29. Pretty sexy, right? The fourth grader inside of me feels lied to by the gallant pop culture steed that calls itself MTV, but this shouldn’t be too shocking — the channel also claimed that Britney Spears was a wholesome role model. Note to the fourth-grade self practicing dance moves in my bedroom to “Baby One More Time” in a training bra: Do not demonstrate these moves to all your peers at recess. Also, a training bra is not akin to a belly shirt.

I’ve let go of (most) of the pop culture illusions that clouded my head for most of my teenybopper years. Every time a fantasy bubble gets burst by reality’s version of what MTV and magazines have to offer, I’m not disenchanted, but rather confused. For instance, the lyrics to “As Long as You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys suggest that the boys “Don’t care who you are/Where you’re from/What you did/As long as you love me.”

Cut to college, when love doesn’t always erase a criminal record — or, mind you, any sort of record other than a clean, healthy, faithful one.

High school was full of burst bubbles as well. “She’s All That” assured me that because I enjoyed odd interpretative performances I would be shunned from the cool table, but the hot football captain who was Dartmouth-bound would still fall for me. My odd interpretative performances definitely kept me far from the cool table, but the hot football captain was not interested in me; moreover, he was definitely not Dartmouth-bound.

Fortunately, when I was 14, while watching digital cable at a friend’s house, I saw “Degrassi” for the first time. Everything finally clicked. Yes, I thought, something realistic! But when everyone was either gay/pregnant/doing drugs/anorexic/emotionally unstable/insert problem here, I knew that even my little suburban town didn’t have that many problems.

Even with “Degrassi,” my bubble was burst. Why, I wondered, can’t the media portray anything accurately?

Things are either too pure or unrealistically sexualized — everything is some sort of heightened fantasy. Our lives are inherently boring to what writers, or the film editors of MTV’s spring break specials from back in the day, can come up with. So we look to the entertainment industry to fill in the void of what our ho-hum suburban, unsexy lives are missing. There’s nothing wrong with that; that’s what pop culture does. If it was the culture of reality, we probably wouldn’t be too interested, and it wouldn’t be too popular.

The fantasy bubbles begin building when a fourth grader gazes longingly at the television screen after school every day, awaiting her super sexy spring break. There’s a fourth grader somewhere dancing to Lady Gaga in her bedroom wearing a pleather bodysuit, anxious, not for a future spring break, but for her opportunity to make out with a vampire!

While she does that, I’ll be on my couch watching “The View” and taking some sort of pain pill, subsisting on yogurt and applesauce. My fourth-grade self definitely didn’t imagine that this was how I would spend the spring of 2010, but my fourth-grade self was also way too busy honing her dance moves — which, by the way, made me feel not quite so foreign the first time I went out freshman year.

MTV, you got something right!