Whenever I look back on my four years at this University, with the friendships, tests, laughter, hardships and endless assortment of new experiences, I always end up thinking about a maturing, life-changing incident that occurred during my first year: My friend dropped a gallon of milk off the third floor of our Alderman dorm, while another friend stood on the ground in an attempt to catch it gracefully. As anyone with a basic understanding of gravity will imagine, the gallon hit my friend very hard, exploding instantaneously on his chest.
After the laughs subside, I then always recall other such memories from first year, most of them involving packaged dairy products and various dormitory heights. Most of these memories revolve around my dorm, and I feel that in my penultimate article I should devote a little time to these wonderful buildings.
In general, most students are forced by their school to reside in a dorm at some point. Our school requires first-years to live in dorms, but after that, like doves, they are free to fly away and work with magicians. Duke University, on the other hand, houses students in dorms for all four years , which is why Duke students have problems understanding housing issues after college. For instance, I have a Duke graduate friend who still thinks "mortgage" is a type of German sausage.
Even worse than Duke is Indiana University , which requires students to stay in dorms for their entire lives, so the complexes have built-in nursing homes, cemeteries and marriage chapels available for free. Sure, this may seem a little ridiculous -- dare I say immoral -- but you have to understand how many benefits there are to living in a dorm. For example, it's very easy to get athlete's foot from communal showers.
I lived in an Alderman dorm and I loved it. While it wasn't the classic hall-style, I enjoyed the communal room, which housed a TV, a foosball table, and our servant Edward the IV, who was in reality just a homeless guy in a suit. Nobody had the heart to ask him to leave, and anyway, we always had clean underwear.
The great benefit of being so close to 120 people is that if you want to party, you have no problem finding other people who want to (although not necessarily with you). Nowadays, being in a house with a lot fewer people, it can be difficult locating a drinking buddy. Sometimes I get so desperate that I call Edward to see what he's doing. Unfortunately for me, though, his phone is just a crumbled-up Whopper wrapper, so it has terrible reception.
Having a random roommate is also an interesting facet of the dorm experience. I really loved the questions U.Va. asked before we were assigned our dorms -- the ones that attempted to summarize 18 years of our personalities and living habits into a few yes-or-no questions. Unless my diary is incorrect, these are the questions I was asked:
Are you a neat person? For instance, how often do you urinate into your clothes hamper?
Do you snore? Answer honestly. If you don't know, film yourself sleeping.
Have you ever been sentenced to capital punishment or received an A on a paper? Answer yes or no.
Name the 50 states in reverse alphabetical order. Can you close your eyes and do it?
What would your ideal roommate look like? Would you prefer a roommate who is deaf or who has acne? But not just, like, acne, but the bad kind with boils?
These questions clearly do not provide the school with adequate information on which to base its selections. What they should ask is:
1. Which "The Odd Couple" character is most like you?
Then the school should match each Oscar response with a Felix one. If there's anything I learned from that show, it's that opposites always become best friends and that these relationships are constantly fraught with wacky adventures that, on average, last a half hour.
But I should stop reminiscing about dorms. I can do it for only so long before I am once again drawn back to the image of a gallon of milk exploding on my friend's chest, which leads to such lethal laughing attacks that I now have shell shock whenever I see a cow. I will say that I am very envious of the incoming first-years and, if I ever meet them, I will offer the advice that I myself received before coming off to college: Never, never, if you dislike gremlins, feed Edward after midnight.
Chris's column runs Mondays. He can be reached at shuptrine@cavalierdaily.com.
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