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My so-called dorm life

Arizona Daily Wildcat

On-campus living is where the elite meet for ice-cream socials and $10 lock-out fees, plus the convenience of being able to wake up 10 minutes before class starts and see several hundred people who walk around your halls in their underwear.

But none of this was what I first noticed when I stepped into the dormitory hallway for the first time. I saw a behemoth construction paper tree, fake branches and leaves attached to the ceiling and walls, like a deplorable cartoon version of the greenery I found growing beneath my sink later that day. From this brightly colored monstrosity dangled little red paper apples with girls names on them - the names of the girls who lived in this wing. I learned that every floor had a "storybook theme" as my RA chirpily informed me. Our theme was "Where the Wild Things Are" and that the third floor's was "Winnie The Pooh." Funny, though, we're not allowed to even hang up Christmas decorations from our ceilings, yet the yarn and paper jumbles transcending from the plaster are allowed with great gusto and celebration.

When I tried to remove the painstakingly hand-colored monster next to my name by my door and placed it elsewhere in the hall one night, I awoke the next morning to find that the buck-toothed beastie had returned to his place, stuck next to my name with blue tape. I tried to abandon the wild thing, but like the stray dog that keeps showing up at your back door begging for scraps, the smiling monster was sitting next to my name again, boldly proclaiming the dogged determination of whomever was returning these childlike horrors to the side of my door.

In conjunction with the pervading pre-school atmosphere of the dorm hallways is the new rule that if the university finds out about on-campus inebriation (in other words, if they decide to open their eyes whilst passing by the greek houses), they'll notify your parents. Even if you're not a minor, if you came to the university completely bereft of parental guidance or financial aid, they still get a call, a violation of one's personal privacy if ever there was one, just like releasing information about sickness.

In opposition, however, with the stringent and unjust rules about alcohol and brightly colored kindergarten decorations, are the bulletin boards in every nondescript classroom. Every day, new ads for rock shows and on-line textbook distributors appear on neon paper. But more prevalent than these are the ads for The Rock, Gentle Ben's and other liquor serving establishments, promising scantily-clad women, cheap-o booze and a palpable undulation of sex mixed in the club atmosphere.

My RA, the same one who later took back the abominable whatsit next to my door, in her neo-semester rounds, was making sure that everyone knew about the said alcohol rules. "You guys know about the drinking policy, right?" she asked. "Yeah, do it off campus," I quipped. She brightened up - I had given the right answer.

Don't drink, says the establishment, self-assuredly in its James Earl Jonesesque Oz voice.

(Well, we know you're gonna do it, but don't besmirch our good name with your boozy-breathed mumblings, they whisper in secret.) But the pouty-lipped girl in the halter top on the poster in our classroom knows the true message. She seems to murmur "Come drink Tequiza with me, and you'll be as cool as those kids in the tech vests on TV ..."

It's really quite unfortunate that you don't get to escape from people who will tattle on you even if you aren't a minor and your parents have no right to know how sake-bombed you were last Saturday night. Too bad you don't get to escape from the tattered and drooled on pages of ye olde picture books abandoned in cardboard boxes. But I believe that when Matt Groening, in his highly insightful text "School Is Hell," poses the question "Why go to college?" his answer is dead on: that for your whole life, "You've been stuck with irksome tests, annoying busywork, irritating grades, pointless rules [and] yourself. Well, college won't change that. But you DO get to escape from your family."