Author: Emily Jensen
Dear Housing Services:
I would like to arrange to live in a double room with my darling roommate Felix. This year, we had a grand old time in our state-of-the-art room featuring jagged broken tiles that stabbed us in the feet wherever we went and a magnificent view of a dirt wall that blocked all natural light from reaching us. Not to sound ungrateful-we thoroughly enjoyed the awkwardly shaped desk chairs that tripped us whenever we ventured toward our dressers, whose hideous particle-board construction and indignantly unyielding drawers became the bane of our existence. We’re not going to hold a grudge about how facilities has yet to respond to the report we filed the first day we got here about how our phone doesn’t work-to be honest, the phone worked out just fine when we hung it from the ceiling and used it to play tether ball, although that may not be what it was originally intended for. And angels that we are, we won’t even complain about the fact that our heater made loud, mysterious jungle noises as if filled with stampeding elephants for about half an hour every night starting at exactly 11:47 p.m. when it turned on. All that we ask is that we can plan on living together in a double next year. We figure our $45,000 a year should cover that, and we feel that we are being extremely reasonable.
WELL APPARENTLY, WE’RE NOT. Apparently, we can expect either to be crammed into a triple with some random stranger who won’t understand our freaky insomniac tendencies and encroach upon our precious friendship, or be viciously torn apart and thrown into a sizzling sea of awkwardness with two other fools we do not choose. Or so it seemed! Room draw, you crazy effing tease. I lived in terror for days thanks to upperclassman friends’ horror stories of being forced into a double or triple against their will, along with ominous, disturbingly vague emails from Housing Services threatening that they “reserve the right to consolidate you into another half empty double or triple if there are no other empty rooms left for paired roommates.” I have never heard of “consolidating” human beings, but I don’t like the sound of it.
As moronic little first-years, my roomie and I were duped into taking up residence in a dreary, miserable cave officially classified as Bell Young’s room #113. We are literally underground, which is not nearly as hardcore as it sounds. Every time I look out our window at the crumbling dirt wall that eclipses all sunlight, a little shred of my happiness ignites and blows away in a swirl of dismal ashes. I don’t even want to talk about the tragic fate met by our pig-shaped Chia Pet, Glen, whose once lush green coat shriveled up and rotted due to dire lack of solar contact. We figured that enduring the ridiculous state of our living conditions this year would entitle us to at least be able to uphold the bond between us that only communal suffering can produce. But when even that was placed in jeopardy, I experienced some major, irreversible trauma. I was all set to buy a trailer and park it in the quad, and live there, not budging until the injustice of room draw was rectified. Actually, I was kind of looking forward to fending off Campo, LAPD and President Prager all at once in a valiant effort to prove my point.
But just when I was preparing myself for the Apocalypse and planning names for the awesome guard dog that would join my roommate and I in our new fortress of justice… nothing bad happened. All this panic, all this hype, and you know what? Everything’s fine. We got a double in a dorm with a view of the sky instead of the wall, with a carpet and our very own sink. Room draw produced no casualties and I hear there are even a few rooms left wide open. And now . . . I’m just upset that I got upset for no reason. And that I can’t have that guard dog.
Emily Jensen is an Undeclared first-year and staff writer for the Weekly. She can be reached at ejensen@oxy.edu
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