The only thing worse than sharing a house with 7 other people, is sharing a house with 7 other people you’re related to and their 4 parakeets, whose only role is to treat their cage like a hotel, not a permanent residence. With my 95-year-old great grandmother’s ancient opinions to my 12-year-old brother who’s still in the phase where he thinks he’s God’s gift to comedy, the need to escape between the hours of 9am to 3am the following morning was imminent.
Wanting to avoid the perpetual noise of my family members, along with the sweet blend of constant bird-squawking, did not necessarily mean I wanted silence. I just wanted different noise. My summer schedule, consisting of working from 8am to 5:30pm and then going out afterwards, was the perfect alternative, but also made focusing on college decisions the last thing on my mind. My Facebook is embarrassing, and I already had exactly 420 friends, so the idea of finding a college roommate through social media went right out the window. Spending more than approximately 5 seconds on StarRez was out of the question, therefore when the final email came in bright red and bold font, it declared any hope for choosing a room null and void.
The aggressive emails made me think that it was somehow a bad thing for me to have chosen to be placed completely randomly within my Undergraduate College, but I honestly did not care. However, when it was discovered that my random placement was into a triple in a 24-hour quiet community with a substance ban, I started to care a little bit. I made constant jokes about becoming the plague of Dreiser College: the nightmare-ish frizzy haired monster with the knife tattoo that my great grandmother likes to describe to jazz up my appearance when talking to her bingo friends about me. During my first few weeks in the hall, I lived in slight fear that my one and a half inch tall, EOS lip balm shaped speaker was eventually going to destroy my standing as a respectable resident. I was nervous about propping my door open, especially on nights where my roommates and I synced up in terms of stress and loudly groaned simultaneously for hours on end. But the hall isn’t the stereotype that I invented for it. It’s not just stuffed with snot-nosed child prodigies who will quickly dial 631-632-3333 if they hear a cough while they’re studying.
Or maybe it is! Regardless of the demographic, the 24-hour quiet community is made up of a community. A bunch of humans, and in my 18 years of experience with these kind of guys, it’s borderline impossible for a bunch of humans to be quiet for 24 hours. Everyone is still screaming, still singing, and still staying up until 5am laughing with their friends. Dreiser College is simply just a place where college students have to be a little more cognizant of their manners.