Best and Worse

iLike #1 The Miracle of Life
No... not that miracle of life! I'm talking about the window garden that I keep. I decided one day that my room needed something to decorate it and I needed something to do with my time, so I went to Wal-Mart and I got myself a window garden. It's currently filled with African daisies, wax peppers, and some little baby pansies. I planted all of them as cute little seeds and I nurtured them up from there. Sounds pretty gay, right? Well... yeah, it sort of is.

iLike #2: Bagel:30
About halfway through first semester, I discovered something interesting about myself: I love bagels. Bagels, bagels, bagels, and more bagels. I also love cream cheese. So I decided to combine my two loves in one great time of day: Bagel:30 (pronounced "Bagel Thirty). Nothing beats back those late-night cravings like a good old-fashioned bagel (with the obvious exception of Steak 'n' Shake or Taco Bell, but you have to drive to get to those). Bagel:30 refers to a very specific time of day, although it doesn't translate onto a twelve-hour clock. Bagel:30 is a function of the Biological clock.

iLike #3: Resident Assistants
I remember it like it was just yesterday. It was the first day that we moved into our new rooms here on campus. I walked into our neat and tidy room (that was the last time that I have seen my room looking anywhere close to clean), and on each of the desks, our RA had left us a water bottle (college student's best friend), a foam squishy model of Archie the Eagle (the four in our room each eventually met with a dreadful fate: one was decapitated, one was impaled on a butter knife, one got dressed up like a gangsta, and the final one was lost to the endless depths of Tim's desk [shiver]), and a bag of candy so big that several pieces of it are still in my desk waiting to be eaten. That's the wonderful thing about a good RA. On top of lavishing us with gifts, she is there for us when we have drama on the floor (which happens almost daily), and she actually sees us as friends rather than residents. Love her!

iLike #4: The Honors Floor
When I moved into the Emerging Leaders floor, I thought I was going to be moving in with USI's best and brightest, those students who would be the cream of the crop, scholastically motivated, and critically involved. I couldn't have been more wrong. As it turns out, the vast majority of those on this floor are people who applied because there was no more room in the rest of the dorms when they finally got around to registering for housing, so we sort of ended up with a really eclectic group of people. A few of us are actually emerging leaders, but a lot of us are psychotic, dramatic, self-centered, and/or unstable. Lucky for me, the Honors floor is in the other wing of the third floor, so it's just a hop, skip, and a jump, and a few more steps, and I can be in a place where intellectually stimulating conversations are actually possible.

iLike #5: A Pitcher of Water
I remember the dark days before I finally gave in and purchased a Brita filtering pitcher. There was a time in my life that every time I got thirsty, I would have to walk all the way down the hall to the water fountain to fill up my water bottle. The only other alternative would be to drink the Cl-Pb-Fl-Cu solution that comes steaming hot out of our sink, and that was simply not an option. The pitcher filters out all of the nasties and keeps me from having to walk thirty steps to get water. It's all the delicious life-giving water that I can drink, conveniently located within arm's reach. Ahh... sweet American convenience.


iHate #1: Evil Incarnate in Food Services
Seriously, this company sucks. What kind of evil bastard* food syndicate executive would set policies in place that state that every eating establishment on a given college campus would close at like 4:30 on Friday. Now, I know that USI is a commuter campus, blah, blah, blah, but honestly, I get hungry on the weekends every once in a while, and since I only have a dirty cheese-caked microwave to cook with, guess who gets my food business. Anywhere but a Sodexho company. I'm a huge proponent of an on-campus, independent Steak 'n' Shake, Taco Bell, or The Slice for those late night cravings. Hello, Mr. Solution-to-all-of-our-USI-lacks-a-sense-of-community-and-weekend-life-problems. Sodexho is the culprit behind everything that needs improvement at USI. And I'm not even exaggerating.

*bastard here meaning that this person literally does not have a father, and should not be taken as a curse word of any kind.

iHate #2: My Roommate's Television
There are three things in this world that I care absolutely nothing about: politics, sports, and African-American court television. Guess what my roommate watches on TV all the freaking time. POLITICS, SPORTS, AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN COURT TELEVISION! There is nothing more annoying than coming home after a long day of being alive to try to do a little bit of quiet studying or sleeping when the stupid TV is on something stupid. To make it even worse, my roommate has a bad habit of parroting a lot of the stuff that he sees on TV in regular conversation, so the television doesn't stop when you turn it off. I get to hear regurgitations of Barack Obama's speeches, ESPN highlights, and Judge Hatchett's sassiest quips. Lovely.


iHate #3: Nasty Sinks
I can take clothes on the floor. I can take the mysterious smells that come from various places around my room. I can take an unmade bed, and I'll even overlook the fact that some people can't seem to figure out how to wash their 0wn dishes. But when I have to brush my teeth at a sink that is literally covered in someone else's toothpaste, baby lotion, and shaved hair, I get a little bit grossed out. Is it really too much to ask that we wash our toothpaste mess down the sink? There was a brief perioud that I tried to keep my sink sort of clean-looking. When I realized that I would literally have to clean my sink every morning and night before I brushed my teeth if I wanted to brush in a clean sink, I decided to just give it up and stomach the nasty.

iHate #4 Microwave Cooking
You never know how much you love something until you use it. In the dorms, we are lucky in the sense that we have a little kitchenette area in our rooms. However, you'll note that there is a conspicuous absence of anything that you can actually cook things with. The only "cooking" utensil we are allowed to have is a microwave, which really only serves to make things hot and soggy. We're not even allowed to have toasters, much less hot plates, toaster ovens, or George Foremans. I bought a charcoal grill for outside so that we might have a way to cook real food every once in a while, but then I was promptly informed that I could get in trouble with campus security for grilling outside, since we are apparently not allowed to own grills or something stupid like that. It probably doesn't help that the inside of our microwave is completely disgusting because it is apparently not common practice to put a lid or paper towel on top of things that might explode in the microwave.

iHate #5: Quiet hours
If you're like me, you might be looking at this clock here thinking, "10:40... time to get started on whatever plans I may have for this evening." If you're like the Victorian Nazi that wrote the rules for Ruston hall, you're probably thinking, "10:40... well the last of the students is probably crawling into bed around now, since it is a weekday and all." Here in Ruston Hall, we have a quiet hours policy that begins at 10:30 on weeknights. WTHeck?! During the weekends, they really let us live it up, though, and they extend the beginning of quiet hours all the way to midnight. Now what sort of legitimate college student goes to bed at those times? Whoever does should be hunted down and beaten ot they should just shut their yap and stop complaining about noise. For goodness's sake, people, this is college, not Soviet Moscow.

iHate #6: Checking the Mail
Ruston hall's mailboxes have the rare honor of using the world's only combination locks that spin to the left first. This would be terribly confusing to me, except that I only check my mailbox about once every NEVER, so most of the time I don't really have to worry too much about it. It is usually pretty comical whenever I actually do get around to checking my mail. I checked it once in February and I had a bunch of notes and letters from first semester.