College Days

I have been in and out of school for the last 24 years. In fact, all but four of those years have been spent in one academic setting or another. This has given me a perspective of the world frozen in time. I have had little experience with the world outside the walls of academia, having only spent four of them there, three of which were spent as a junior high teacher. Slowly, though, I have been catching up with the rest of my age group: realizing what it would take to buy a car, apply for a home loan, considering the burden of children and so on. Granted, most of my friends have babies, and several have started cultivating veritable broods.

Then I moved in Pentra Jane Morgan, House 100 D. Suddenly, I was taken for the world of adult academics and thrust, head first and unknowingly, back 11 years to when I was a first year. All my housemates, save one, are second semester first year students. None, then, can be much older than 19. Consequently, they are given to 19 year old urges: staying up at all hours of the night talking, dirty jokes spoken in the company of strangers, loud music, and general shenanigans. I know that this paints me in an curmudgeonly light, but I am painfully aware of how annoying I must have been at that age.

Last night, the house went quiet at about 10:00 pm, which I thought was nice. The weekend had bought some loud annoyance deep into the wee hours, and I was beginning to think that I could not get the work I needed done in this environment. But, Monday brought what I assumed was the calm of studying to the house. Until 11:45, when the housemates all seemed to run into each other in the communal kitchen located directly below my bedroom.

There they talked and joked and laughed into the morning, and then, inexplicably, it sounded like they were throwing crockery at each other. My God, I thought, was I like this?

And then I remembered that I was. My freshman year a couple friends of mine jumped me in the hallway of our dorm, dousing me with water guns. I had thought this might happen, so I booked it to my room where my two gallon Super Soaker Canon lay waiting. The two and a half foot barrel could launch a water spray up to 100 feet. We soaked that entire floor of the dorm, ruining people's door decorations and flooding some people's rooms.

Later, when I had joined a fraternity, we would constantly get into fights with the neighbors across the street. At one point they had called and asked, probably very much within their own right, that we turn the music down. I remember dragging the lounge speakers, huge cabinets with a two 15" woofers and a bunch of tweeters, into all the rooms that pointed his house and blasting Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name of..." The refrain goes as follows:

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
and so on.

We shot potato canons at passing cars, ran through campus in our underwear (several times), stole toilet paper from the dorms and library, and, when it was warm out, moved our furniture out onto the lawn, taking the party with us. One brother in the fraternity stole an entire collection of poles from a golf course (all 18 holes). He then had 18 huge poles in his room, and wasn't quite sure what he was going to do with them.

That's what college is for: being annoying. These kids are learning what it is to live with other people. I never would have blasted my music at my mother if she asked me to turn it down. I might not turn it down happily, but I wouldn't retaliate so passive aggressively. Right now, they are just figuring out that they can stay up and talk as loudly as they want to. They need that experience, so I need to find a way to cope with it. That, and I don't want to give them a force to band against.

So, I rolled over, grabbed my book, and continued reading about the birth of Superman and American superhero comic books. I wondered, as I started to fall asleep, if I could send an apology letter to those neighbors.