University + Dorm Life

… aka everybody else is doing it.

No, literally, everyone is. It’s actually getting on my nerves just a tad.

tl;dr version: it’s fun, but it’s hard.

So. To start off…
I recently entered University.. at Waterloo.. in Waterloo.. in Ontario.. in… Canada. >___>
Yeah. Sure, whatever.

I’m typing this blog in a computer science lecture…

I’m such a bad student.

You could say that up until now it’s been… interesting. Transitioning from high school to this is hard. Legitimately hard. In high school you could skeet through everything, and I mean everything. You could study the night before and ace tests like a boss. Not here. You don’t have guided homework that will show you what you need to study, you don’t get help from the prof – they could care less, you have to depend on yourself, well, our floor has an exception.

Oh great, now my prof is singing happy birthday to someone else.

Moving in
Moving in was bad. It was awkward because once we got there it was extremely crowded, and when we got off, there was literally a group of people waiting for me to unload my stuff so they could help carry it to my room. That was awkward.

So I handed them my pillows and sheets (all in bags of course) but then they couldn’t carry any electronics so I had to carry some of my heaviest stuff myself. And on that particular day it was at least 80 or 90, so it was extremely warm. I was sweating so much.

Once we got to the door, one of the person was like, you gotta push the door in. I tried doing that, didn’t work, so I thought he said pull out (ehe), but then a girl said PUSH IN, PUSH .. IN, so I was like OHHH PUSH IN, so I did and apparently the door was stuck the first time, and I saw my room for the first time…

…

It was tiny. Well, tiny is an understatement. If you stood up, and you walked diagonally, you’d be at the other wall in 3 steps. Now you might be thinking, that’s not bad, that’s 3 meters diagonally – yeah, but you gotta count the furniture, there was a bed, and that’s 1 step right there, desk, 1 more step, and on the other side? BAM, a closet. Yeah. NO WALKING SPACE. 😀

(Okay, there’s like a tiny bit of floor space for a fridge and a heater on one wall, but you get the point.)

Not that I’m complaining, it had a very homely feel to it.

Meeting the neighbors
So my parents didn’t leave my room for the longest time, and I hadn’t seen any of my floormates yet. Based on my scouting intel, I knew that the person right next door had a 40″ TV (more on him later), and there were a lot of asians on my floor (14 people in total I think).

But eventually I saw 3 of them talking in the hall, so I joined in, introduced myself, and we chatted for the night. 2 out of the other 3 were also in my program Computing and Financial Management, which had about 40 kids in total.

Frosh week – aka the week of people getting drunk and ..
My frosh week? Nothing special about it, I just walked around with one of the people I met on my floor. I didn’t do anything during that time.. but other people.. they went all out, they partied hard, drank hard, hungover hard, had pretty hardcore s-

well I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Classes!
Ahh, classes, something I could finally relate to omg, omg, omg why are classes so hard. I was expecting introductory courses, since I had Accounting 101, Business 101, Calculus 2, Algebra 1, and CS 135. But nope, all of them are hard, except my two business courses, the math classes were intense. The assignments took forever to finish, and didn’t help much when it came to the midterm. I almost failed my algebra midterm, and I literally failed my calculus midterm. It’s that bad.

I’m doing okay in the other courses, managing mostly 80s, which is more or less the average. And the only reason I’m even surviving in the first place is because one of the people on my floor went to Cegep, so he learned a lot of the material already – and it helps that he’s a bloody genius and can solve every problem (or almost every) we throw at him. He’s basically the unpaid tutor for our floor. lol.

Dorm Life
And now the woes of living in dorm life.

See, the problem with not wanting anything to do with girls/alcohol/drugs is that it’s easy in high school, where you don’t have to see, hear, or smell it. This is not the case in University, since everyone lives together. You will see, hear, AND smell it. It ain’t pretty, especially when you’re not part of any of those, and you honestly do NOT want to be part of any of those things.

From the top of my head, I can estimate that there’s maybe 3/14 people on our floor that doesn’t drink, me included (unless you count that one time I put a few drops of alcohol into some eggnog and it was really bad). Now out of those 11 people, I can guarantee at least 2 get high on a regular basis. Out of the 14 people on our floor, more than half has girlfriends, and half of that have them sleep over. Do you know how awkward it is when you see a random girl in your bathroom?

No? Well let me tell you.

It’s fucking awkward.

Now you may think I’m overexaggerating, but the thing is, it’s everywhere. Not that I’m personally annoyed by it, but when you’re trying to focus, and everyone around you is having fun, it’s really hard not to get distracted. Sure, you could run to the library and study, but then you would be an outcast, so that balance is really hard to find. 🙂

Sometimes it’s really funny though, this one time, me and two other friends were playing cards, and one of them had a roommate who was definitely drunk out of his mind, he literally knocks on my door, and tells his roommate (the one not drunk + playing cards) that there was a girl that wanted to snuggle with him. When he point blank refused, he just kept saying sorry and tried to hug him. I think we played cards until 3 in the morning, and when he went back into his room, I followed and just saw bodies everywhere. There was the stench of puke too, and he had to sleep on the floor because there was a girl passed out in his bed. lol.

Apart from all .. that, there’s also the fact that my room is the goto place when people are bored, my room because it’s super clean, and the “tutor’s” room because we need help with assignments. I really try to keep my room in impeccable shape, mostly because of a personal lifestyle choice, but also because it’s just nice to come back to classes in a nice room, with a blanket sheet on top of the bed so you can lie down on street clothes, closet full with actual blankets, folded neatly, and clothes all on their hangers. Most other people just don’t bother, they throw clothes on the floor, laundry just strewn about… it’s remarkable how much the floorspace of a room just disappears completely, especially since we didn’t have much to begin with. 😛

Why is this bad though, when people go to your room? Well, there are these random occasions when people just decide to go there and keep me awake. Until 1 in the morning. And I have a lecture at 8:30 in the morning.

🙂

Oh and when my neighbor is tickling his girlfriend and they’re laughing their guts out? That keeps me up.
Oh and when people come back from drinking at 1 in the morning and start banging on doors randomly sometimes? That keeps me up.
Oh and – 😛 I’ll stop complaining.

But it’s cool, I’ve adapted I suppose. And I think the more I go to bed early, the more others go to bed early too. So it’s good. And now that Skyrim’s out, most people are playing that instead of going out to drink, so it’s been nice and quiet lately. xD

Future plans
Finals are coming up. Study time. 🙂

Free time
What do I do in the free time?.. I have a flowchart.

Bonus pool in starcraft not 0? -> Play ladder matches.
else -> Other games to play? Yes -> Play other game.
No -> Check on other people on the floor and see if anything interesting is going on.

Repeat infinite amount of times.

We play cards a lot, I found out. Not overboard, but we sometimes go until 2/3 in the morning…

And that.. is University life.. for me anyway. ^^;