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	Welcome To My Home... September 3, 2002 The College Experience Part 1: Moving In I am at college (CSUF, in case you didn't know). Actually, I've been here for about a week and a half, so I've got a bit of catching up to do. (Hence this special, super long, two-part post. If for some reason you're still on an 800x600 resolution, you've got a bit of scrolling ahead of you.) It was hard for me at first. Not college, but the transition to college life. I've spent the last seven years of my life getting to know a group of people well enough to call my friends, and I'm forced to just abandon that all in a weekend and throw myself into a strange place where I need to start the whole deal over again. I signed up for a bunch of orientation get-to-know-people activities that took place the week before school started. The activities were moderately entertaining, and they gave us tons of food, but I felt completely alone the whole time. Sure I talked to people and participated in games and whatnot, and everyone was really nice. But really - I was just hanging out with a bunch of strangers, most of whom already had friends in the group. We went to the beach. I had driven myself up, and I decided to leave a bit earlier than everybody else. Instinctively, I turned around to say "Hey, I'm going to take off now," before realizing that most of the group probably didn't even realize I was there in the first place and walking away. That kind of thing can be a bit depressing. I felt like I could die right then and nobody would even realize for another week. I really had nobody to talk to or hang out with. I barely saw my suitemates at all, and when I did every once in a while run into Bryan, our longest sustained conversation went to the effect of: Me: "Hey." Him: "W'sup dude." Nobody ever called me Reige (which is understandable, considering it's just about the weirdest nickname you could derive from Raymond. Nevertheless I hadn't realized how natural it had become). But heck, let's not be picky here, most people didn't even call me Raymond. Nobody asked me where I'd been or cared where I was going. And my computer, which acts as a friend in such times of social deprivation, had not yet arrived. But you can put your little bitty violin and box of tissues away now, because that was last week. Now I have my computer. Things have been getting better over the last week. Once everyone had gotten checked into the dorms (er.. excuse me..) residence halls, I had a chance to get to know my suitemates a bit better, and we started watching TV together and just hanging out in our residence hall. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, the residence halls are set up in little apartment configurations (suites). Each suite has three bedrooms (two people to a bedroom), two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. My direct roommate is Jared, who is now thinking about either a theater or psychology major. He loves Disney and works at Disneyland (usually at the Haunted Mansion). Next to our room is Ricky and Bryan. And Justin and Ixca (Pronounced ISH-kuh) are in the room down the hall. You'll probably hear more about all of them later, but right now, I'm still just getting to know them. We all get along relatively well (partially because we hardly ever see each other), and they all seem pretty cool. Of course, even if I didn't like them you wouldn't read about it here, since I like to believe that everybody in the world reads what I write (an illusion further sustained by the removal of the counter which seemed to serve no purpose other than to track how often Victor checked the site.) Living in the residence halls is certainly an experience in itself. Just the randomness of everything is wonderful. I never know what's going to happen. We get cable TV, although we're not supposed to. We just plugged the TV in and presto: cable. The next two days we just sat around watching TV asking each other if any of us had ordered cable. I think we still have it, even though some guy said he'd come in and "fix" it. Of course having cable also means that most of the other residents are often over here. In fact, people who don't even live here are over. Ricky's got two friends from Cal Poly who are over here more than any of my suitemates. People just go in and out of our suite like they live here. It's interesting. And nobody sleeps over here. The first few nights, we wanted to wait up until all of our suitemates came home so we could all talk to each other, but we always gave up eventually. Then school started, and people still didn't sleep. I used to try to stay up and hang out with the multitudes of people congrugating in our cable-ready living room, but I gave that up pretty quickly. I'm sure some of those people are there all night. I go to sleep while everyone's having some sort of gathering requiring large amounts of noise to be generated outside my room. I wake up and everyone's gone. It's like everyone's perpetually pepped-up on caffiene. I wouldn't be surprised. Our entire fridge is stocked with nothing but sodas. We might be able to buy a car or something with the can recycling money. Right now, my room is awesome. I have a desk for homework and my computer set up on an extra desk that I brought with me. I've got some of my artwork hanging already, and I'm working on matting my charcoal drawings. Directly behind my computer hangs a Warcraft III poster bordered by my four limited edition Warcraft III lithograph prints. I considered hanging a big "I'm a geek" poster there instead, but I thought this would be much more effective. When I first came up, however, I brought close to nothing. Clothes, dishes, my portable CD player, and the Lord of the Rings books. Yeah. That's about it. Since I had brought nothing to do, I had nothing to eat, and I didn't know anybody to talk to, I spent most of my time sleeping. I did eventually get stuff to eat. That seems to be a necessity after a day or so. So then after waking up, I could go into the kitchen, fix a peanut butter sandwich (peanut butter sandwiches comprised the entirety of my diet for the last week), and go back to sleep. I wish I had done some exciting things I could write about, but, as you can see, things were pretty slow over here. Probably the most excitement for the week came when we tried to do the dishes. Of six people, none of us had ever used a dishwasher before. Apparently, there are two types of dish soap. One type is meant to be poured in the dishwasher. The other type is meant only to be put in water when you wash dishes by hand, and it creates an astounding amount of bubbly foam when put into a dishwasher. Jared started the thing up, and we both went into the other room to watch TV. About ten minutes later, Jared went back to the kitchen. "Hey cool, who put a rug in here?" I hear the lightswitch being flipped. "Holy <censored>!" The whole kitchen was flooded with about an inch of water and eight inches of foam on top of that. And guess how many of us had brought a mop. It took us about forty minutes of soaking and wringing towels before the floor was visible again. We opened the dishwasher to further assess the situation and closed it back up really fast after seeing a solid white block of soap bubbles inside. We all needed to go to a mandatory floor meeting the first week in order to learn the rules and stuff. They told us we needed to clean up after ourselves and that we'd actually need to sweep and mop the floors (Go figure). One person, at this point, stood up and announced that his suite had mopped the kitchen floor just that morning. "I just wanted to let you all know that we're ahead of the game there," he said, "even if it's just because our dishwasher kind of exploded." At least we're not alone. Continue to Part 2: Campus Life Comments There are no comments for this topic.		Quick Links - Fun 'n Folly - Juggling Club - RF Haunt - RF Gallery News/Updates HOME - Latest Post ARCHIVE - Full Archive <- PREV | NEXT -> 9/3 - The College Experience: Pt 2 9/3 - The College Experience: Pt 1 8/20 - Not Just a Walk in the Park 8/12 - Getting Reoriented 8/9 - Things Come Together 8/6 - Brand Spanking New! Previous 10 shown Read More... 8/6/02 - First Post HOME - Latest Post ARCHIVE - Full Archive
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