September 18, 1999: College
Yesterday, I moved in. Today, I am very tired. Despite my best efforts, I was up all night. I was convinced I was going to be the only person I know who did not stay up the whole night. It just didn't work out that way. Oh well.
Moving in was very strange. At my high school, you know everyone. Even freshman year, you know all of the people because you went to middle school with them. Here I know hardly anyone, it's such a drastic change. I feel like yelling and celebrating, going to look for old friends, but they're pretty much not here. Just strangers. Not a bad thing really, just odd to be experiencing.
Last night there was this long presentation about alcohol, and why you shouldn't drink and stuff like that. This morning, I was talking to a bunch of guys who'd already been involved with the police at a keg party. It sounded pretty dumb to me. They said the police didn't really care, they broke up the party but didn't really approach anyone about the alcohol at the party or anything like that. I thought that was weird. The same goes for the RAs, they asked who was under 21 (no one on my floor except the one RA), then said they didn't care if everyone else drank or not, as long as they didn't see it. It just struck me as funny that they should say that. Obviously drinking is a problem, something should have been said about it. The system, which the RAs represent, should not condone substance abuse. All of these kids here have an awful lot of money being spent on them to come here, it seems stupid for them to go out and begin to blow that money on the very first night. While waiting in a line today, a bunch of guys were talking about all these different ways of getting drunk faster, and how to deal with hangovers. It was amazing how much effort they put into getting blasted, I was completely astounded. Right now there's a guy smoking a blunt across the hall. How do I know? He came in to my room, asked me for a knife, and proceeded to use it to cut open a cigar. I was not expecting that at all. The dude is wandering around now in a slightly wobbly fashion.
The library here is awesome. I haven't figured out exactly how the stuff is ordered (basically, I couldn't find the computer books), but there's sooo much stuff in there. It's all sort of dark because they keep most of the lights out for some reason, but it was just amazing to see that many books and collected journals and stuff. I'm going to have to go there and wade through it sometime soon, it was really impressive.
Anyway, my room's pretty nice. Doesn't really feel like home yet. By the time the clock was saying 2 last night, I was wanting to go home. It was weird to come back to this little cement box instead. I think a lot of it has to do with the lights. It's really dark in our room, even when it's full daylight out. The lights that are in our room cast funny shadows and weird off-color light, it's most bizarre.
All this month, I've been waiting for school to start. All of my friends were in school already, and all sounded like they were having fun and doing interesting stuff, and I was just sitting around twiddling my thumbs. So I'm pretty glad it finally did... Now I just can't wait until they connect my damn phone and I can get my hands on an ethernet card...