Just Imagining 3-12-10

   I don’t despise dorm life. I want to clarify that right now. Living in a dorm has taught me invaluable lessons and given me an innumerable amount of patience in dealing with conflict. Experts say it’s a valuable part of college and I agree.
    That being said, come May 8, I can’t wait to tell Housing to shove it.
    See, I never had to share a room at home. I never had to share a bathroom with three other people. I was used to having separate spaces to each, dress, shower, sleep and entertain myself and others. I don’t want to make it seem like I grew up over-privileged, but I was lucky enough to have plenty of space.
    College was a rude awakening in many ways. First of all, all those separate spaces I just mentioned were mashed together to form a quasi-living space. Mix in , and you’ve got one annoying cocktail - I mean, juice spritzer. (No alcohol in the dorms!)
    I’ve gotten used to having a private (and real) kitchen only four months out of the year. I’ve learned to buy things in semester-long quantities. I’ve essentially lived out of a suitcase for 46 of the last 56 months of my life.
    For my ideal dorm room, I don’t envision something with separate spaces for every little thing in my daily routine. That just isn’t feasible. I know some things must be combined, and that’s okay. But if we could add just a teensy bit more space between them, that would be terrific. A few ideas:
• The living room: Wouldn’t it be nice if your dorm room actually had a living room? I’d like that, too.
    I hate trying to entertain someone in my bedroom/kitchen/living room/dining room/walk-in closet when there’s no place to sit. If anything, why not have a greeting place and a spot for coats and rainboots (since we use them so much)? Less mess = less stress!­­­
• The dining area: It would be wonderful if, instead of spilling our Ramen noodles all over our beds and couches while attempting to balance both a bowl and the TV remote, we had actually tables. That’s really all I want. They wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, but just big enough for four grown adults to fit around. This would encourage more fellowship (a goal of residential colleges) and also healthier eating habits: Studies show people who eat sitting down with food on an actual plate tend to avoid overeating.
• The kitchen: Of all the things that come with living off-campus, this is what I want most of all. After cooking for myself (or, at least, trying to) for a summer in Europe, I can’t get enough of trying out new recipes. My ideal dorm would resemble my mother’s kitchen - fully stocked with everything I need, including plenty of “cooking” sherry.
• The bedroom: A thorn in my side each year was the rooms in Regents College have bookshelves and overhead lights stuck on the walls in very inconvenient places. It was impossible to push bunk beds up against the wall because 1) it left an open space under the bookshelf where the person on the bottom bunk could roll over and then roll off the bed, and 2) it leaves a tiny sliver of a walkway to the bathroom. Negotiating your way through that space during the day isn’t any fun, but trying to squeeze through it in pitch darkness when you’re half asleep is just plain dangerous.
    Nothing would give me greater pleasure than ripping my bookshelves out of my dorm room walls. They’re drilled in, and I’m not exactly toting a power drill around. The ideal dorm room wouldn’t have anything drilled into the walls. No bookshelves, no overhead lights, not a thing. This would free up wall space for hanging photos or posters and positioning furniture.
• The bathroom: Save goodbye to shower schedules and cramming four people’s shower accessories into one tiny shelf. No, in my ideal dorm, it’s one bathroom per person. It doesn’t have to be huge, just enough to get everything done. And magic fairies would be on the cleaning rotation. Not really, but in a perfect world, that would totally happen.

    Quote of the week: “You see things and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and I say, ‘Why not?’”
- George Bernard Shaw

    Song of the week: “Dreamworld”  
 - Rilo Kiley

    Contact Keen at jodi.keen@murraystate.edu.