Thursday, August 28, 2003
I am at college. Man oh man, am I ever at college.
People say that college is an excellent time. I suppose that I am waiting for the excellent times to begin, because moving in was one of the most evil things, if not the single most evil thing, I have ever had to take part in.
I awoke in Southfield, painfully aware that this was the last time I was going to be in a non-communal bathroom for a very long time. That, my friends, is a sad, sad thought.
We got to Ann Arbor fairly early and actually managed to get a decent parking space. Then we began dragging my copious belongings into the room. We made a fun discovery.
See, my room number is 197. So I thought (assumed) that I was on the first floor. Alas, the ground level floor is actually the second floor. I am in the basement. The. Basement.
Plus side! I am conveniently located on the same floor as the dining hall and the laundry room. Down side! I am in the basement. It is exceedingly hot down here. We have two fans going and one window open (the other one doesn't open) and still I am shvitzing.
The dorm is really old, and it looks really nice and sort of gothic on the outside. I'll take some pictures with the digital camera later and upload them... hopefully they'll be ready for the next blog. So yes, nice dorm outside, really nice sort of old-fashioned lounges on the ground floor. The basement is just old. Not old and nice, just old.
My dormroom is heinous. The walls are the exact shade of off-white that the basement of good ol' SHS is painted, which ushers forth all sorts of wonderous mental associations for me. All of the furniture is old and falling to pieces.
We do have shelves, but you can't put anything much heavier than a roll of paper towels on them, because they're so unstable. The desks have these little top shelf things, but they're not properly connected to the regular desk, so they wobble dangerously. Everything is scuffed, and most of it is dirty. Was dirty, rather. My mother, lawd bless 'er, went over most everything with paper towels and cleaning solution, so that the room is now survivable.
The closets do not lock. My laptop comes with a lock, but what am I supposed to lock it to? The bed? The radiator?
Speaking of the radiator! It's one of those massive water radiators... you know what I mean. The metal ones. The ones that always prompt your parents to tell you not to jump on the bed, because you could crack your head open on it. It's right next to my bed. As in, if I roll over in the night, I could crack my head open on it. Thank cats it's the summer right now, because if that thing were on, my bed would probably catch fire.
Hopefully I'll get the bed lofted before long, so that the radiator will cease to be a fire hazard. Oh yes, I nearly forgot. See, I want (need, because the room is so small) a lofted bed. There are people who build the lofts, but they. ran. out. of. lofts.
So we had to set up the entire room without the loft in it, which means that when they finally do get around to building my loft (I'm on a waiting list), we're going to have to rearrange the furniture, with all of our stuff already in it. And sawdust is probably going to get all over everything.
To make things even merrier, my check card/ATM card wasn't working... some problem or other with the PIN, I don't know. So now I can't use it until Tuesday.
Obviously, I got my computer today. I went up to North Campus to pick it up. There was this whole vast process we had to go through to get the computer and all it's accoutrements. Then they made us sit in this class thing so that we could all set up our computers the same way, so we wouldn't have trouble later. It wasn't too bad, the building was air conditioned.
The computer is very nice, although I'm having trouble adjusting to the keyboard. Every time I go to hit the 'a' button I accidentally hit 'caps lock', and it's rather annoying. I'm also still a little rough with the touch pad.
We got a ton of software with this thing... the entire Adobe package was already loaded on. And they gave us Final Cut Pro, which is a professional video editing program. The box it came in was really big and really heavy, which confused me, because it's just software, so I assumed it would just be a couple of CDs. All of the weight, it turns out, comes from the manuals you need in order to use the software. There are four manuals of mostly equal size. I picked one up, it was 630 pages. Four of those. No wonder the box was so heavy. I despair of ever being able to use the program.
And to make things almost infinitely better, I'm sick. Not like, feeling a little off because I'm very uprooted. Like, sick sick. Like, I get spent the last hour or so in the bathroom kind of sick. Now I'm sitting on my bed feeling very very tired and very very nauseous and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. And, despite my extreme fatigue, I can't go to sleep because a) the entire hall, including my roommate, is still awake and b) I feel so nauseous that I wouldn't be able to fall asleep.
I haven't a clue what it is, at first it wasn't anything much and I thought it was just nerves, maybe. But then I got really exceedingly sick very quickly. So now I don't know, maybe I picked up a bug or something, or maybe it's something I ate. All's I know is that I feel worse than the dead spiders in my dormroom light fixture. And I say that in all seriousness.
My roommate comes from a high school that's smaller than mine, and there are 15 kids from her school here. There's two from my school. Half of that 15 are in my room right now, and I really, really, really do not need this right now. I think they're leaving for a frat party or something, and I hope to all that's feline and holy that they go soon.
I know this is the first day and we're supposed to be all social and whatnot, but not only am I utterly uninterested in frat parties, I am also most ill. Urrrrgh. I can't even believe how sick I am. This is ri-freaking-diculous. I go to college and I get sick.
Die, fate, die!
I am having an almost unbelievably fun move-in day, let me tell you. Disaster compounded by disaster, and then I get violently, viscerally ill. I probably won't get to sleep at all tonight, I'll probably have to keep going in and out of the bathroom all night long. And that's after maybe 3 hours of sleep before a 12 hour drive yesterday, during which I barely nodded off, and not as much sleep as I should have had last night. I haven't been sick like this all year, it just has to happen now. Today.
Life hates me.
I'm going to go do some concentrated breathing and try very hard to not have to go back into the bathroom. Probably won't work, but one can hope.
6:59 PM
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