There’s nothing like a visit to the dorms to bring back all those memories of yesteryear. I still remember – it was 2006, and we freshmen thought we were cooler than waterbeds. We were free, dammit, free! So it’s no surprise what kind of shit went down. It was, after all, the result of 60 horny, naïve 18-year-olds cohabitating in rooms that were hardly more spacious than the average walk-in closet.
Those were the days. Some things were staples, like one girl in every dorm who tries to hold her long-distance relationship together but inevitably always ends up sobbing in the hallway on the phone screaming, “I thought you loved me!” the one night you actually make it to bed before sunrise. And the experience of walking in on complete strangers fornicating all over your bed. Or an orgy, whatever.
And then there are the random oddities I experienced, like the stench that took over my entire floor that I later discovered was from a dude who was brewing mead under his bed. The whole year was like a really whacked-out social experiment. And for reasons I’ll never really understand, it was way easier to find Mary Jane than Johnnie Walker. So when we did manage to score some drank, it was like, “Ooh, booze!” The next thing you knew, there were 12 people in your room and everyone was trashed. And everyone wonders why freshmen are borderline alchies. Psh.
The fact remains that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Making your way through a new sitch like that is like stumbling through the dark, kind of, except that it’s really fun and awesome and there are more ways to humiliate yourself than you ever could have dreamed of. Oh, the possibilities. In any case, here are some things I wish I’d known …
Don’t panic about getting written up. RAs resemble the real world in that some are cool and some suck. They make write-ups seem like a way bigger deal than they actually are, but in reality, getting written up is not that bad. It will not permanently maim your future. You can still become the president of the free world. Lying comes in handy in avoiding write-ups if you’re bored and want to torment the poor souls. Under the alias Marie Rice, I was able to successfully dodge many a write-up. I stopped counting at six. If you lie to your own RA, though, you’re just an idiot.
Looking back on it now, it’s kind of amazing what I got written up for versus what I didn’t get written up for.
Incident A) I was written up for watching “Entourage“ too loudly. Incident B) I came back to the dorms covered in puke and apparently my solution was to just strip down to my skivvies and walk around screaming at some random dude with my friend. Heeey, no write-up! As I was moving out at the end of the year, just for the hell of it I asked my RA if she knew that people had sorta been hotboxing a portion of our floor every night. She said that she did. Whether she was just saving face or she honestly had been cool about it all year, I don’t know, but I’ll give her the props anyway.
If you’re one of those people who dated Chelsea Chastity in high school and want to live the slutty life, this is the year to do it. Not only will your mother not walk in on you (yay!), but you get to live by the new rule that if you don’t remember it, it never happened. Strike before the social ties bind, because if you wait it out you’ll find yourself in hot water for playing naughty Twister with the wrong person and his crazy ex-girlfriend is gonna sic all her sorostitute minions on you. Besides, by the time you graduate, you’ll be able to just laugh about your frisky days. I hope. Just don’t spread the herp, there’s really nothing cool about that.
Beware of the hot tubs in Cuarto. Though we only joke about them swirling with STDs, my friend once found a funky, kinda clearish substance on her stomach post-tub sesh. I will never forget the glare on her face when I said, “Maybe it’s tree sap!” We’ll never be positive, but to this day we’re pretty sure it was, in fact, jizz.
MICHELLE RICK needs to update her list of jizzy hotspots on campus. Help a girlfriend out and hollaback to marick@ucdavis.edu.
