I am 26 years old, and for the first time in my life I am living in a dorm. During move-in day, groups of students jovially congregate around the fountains, participating in heartfelt get-to-know-yous, eating snacks, and singing songs. Parents help their children move boxes, organize rooms, and eagerly give out final hugs to their little birdies who have now officially left the nest.
As for me, I scoot past all of the archetypical move-in-day insanity, cigarette in mouth, hauling a stained Tempur-Pedic mattress that my doctor has recommended for my bad back. With the help of a couple of old-time drinking buddies, we drop the 1,000 lbs. mattress in my room, which, to the dismay of my 19-year-old roommate, takes up roughly half of space of our quarters. I throw on some dusty black sheets, plop down, stare at cracked paint in the cinderblock walls, and begin to wonder if I will ever be able to masturbate in peace ever again.
To be clear, I don’t think that I am too good for dorm life. Hell, if anything I am jealous of those who get to live here during the prime of their undergraduate careers. To live in close quarters with your classmates and peers is an exciting step in life, and can be an integral part of self-actualization and college assimilation. I, on the other hand, have spent six years of my life slowly cracking away at college in a budget apartment that I shared with a significant other, who eventually left me for somebody already degreed and much better looking.
So now, as a stipulation of my scholarship, I am required to live in student housing, which if you ask me, is a just horrid ploy by the administration to get me to pay top dollar for subpar housing under the guise of free tuition. (If you are reading this, thank you for the tremendous opportunity for free education. I am super excited about my shiny new pair of shower flops. And who needs a kitchen stove anyways?)
To an outsider, it might seem like my life will be that of Van Wilder’s. (I realize this reference might be lost on those who spent their life in the early 2000’s in diapers, but basically he is a late 20’s party boy, played by Ryan Reynolds, who, because of his age, lived as king of the dorms.) However, I have already lived a full life as an alcoholic, pot-smoking deviant, and now am ready to focus solely on my education. Fortunately, my roommate doesn’t drink or smoke, so I have at the very least dodged the bullet of being labeled as the square who refuses to buy booze for the underage.
So now, it is day one, and I am lying in my bed reassuring myself that this is only temporary. Due to the tremendous cost of this place, I am baffled that there is no air conditioning. I am sweating bullets, and am depressed that it is not socially acceptable to hang out in my bedroom naked. I can hear muffled noises of an acoustic guitar from across the hall—some guy is playing with his door open, obviously to try to impress female passersbys with his thorough knowledge of the G chord. I scratch in the number one onto my bedframe, marking the days in my sweltered 14×18 cell, close my laptop, and try to sleep, so that I at least dream of having a existent sex life, or at the very least, a full-size refrigerator.
