Head For The Hills! The Budget Is Coming!

College life is very enriching, college life teaches you how to survive in the real world, these are the best years of your life...

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Stress teaches you how to go long periods of time without eating so you can get your homework done. It also teaches the people who live with you to throw offerings of food in the room before they come in, so you recognize them as friendly when you look up from your hunched position over the keyboard at page 5 of your paper.

Friend, frieeeeeeenddd...

And now to the "Yes, Mom..." part of our story...

As a second semester Freshman at College X, I am now fully discovering how deep a trench I have dug for myself in terms of workload.

Ahem.

-I am taking 17 credits, and work 15 hours for the school every week, thus keeping me out of my dorm almost every day until after dinner.
-I took a wildland firefighting course, and can be called to duty before an exam.
-I am involved in a play now, where rehearsals are nearly every evening, for at least three hours.
-I must be crazy.

That's deep. I reached six feet, and kept going.

When some people - myself included - find themselves so oft away from the "home" place (the dorm, the suite, whatever) we find ourselves making up for it. Some people study their brains out, some people party their brains out, and some people buy things.

I e-shop.

I love getting mail. I love it. Seeing the little orange slip for the package claim in my teensy mail box gets me all giddy inside. So when Mom stops sending care packages, I buy new socks, or a perfume that helps your skin, or a sweater to keep me warm when the windy gusts on the way to my 8a.m. class fall below zero degrees.

There's a small problem with this. I'm on a budget. X amount of dollars for food, X amount of dollars for sanity.

The key is balance, Mom says.

When one's mind is quite unbalanced, thinking about your lab report due next week, and your readings for two other classes, and chemistry problems due on Wednesday, and don't forget to memorize your lines, it's hard to remember to keep to the budget...

But really, thank you Mom.

The seniors say it gets easier.

Heh. Heh heh, hee hee hoo!

That's a good one.

Gotta go check my mail.

No, Really, It's That Easy!

Before I get into the current episode of "Mom Knew Best", I must apologize for not updating for a month. As it turns out, doing nothing over Winter Break kind of makes it hard to write about frustrating experiences. You know, the whole not having frustrating experiences thing.

Life at College X is fabulous. I really love it here, but sometimes the size of my dorm room kind of gets me down. Especially when the back panel of your bookcase falls out when you're trying to move it to make room for the 3'x2'x5' snake cage that needs to go in the corner. And said bookcase has to be laid flat on it's front to slide the panel back in. And it's full of books that you really have no place else to put-the reason you got said bookcase. And you only have four eensy teensy nails to hold the flimsy back plate in. And did I mention the panel is just a hair too narrow, so it falls out of one side of the grooves on each side every five seconds? Yeah... dorms are great.

Seri and I emptied the bookcase, flipped it over onto it's front, and tried to slide the panel in. We encountered our first problem right at this moment.

The panel is too small, so it jumps out of the grooves faster than water on a hot pan. We try to slide it in smoothly, careful not to favor one side too much, so the panel sits evenly in both grooves. Here we encountered our second problem.

At the top of the bookcase (the end of where you need to slide the panel- it slides in from the base) there is also a long groove, to hold the top of the panel in place. The panel is actually three pieces of chip board held together with tape, so it wobbles, and the middle panel likes to sag. How to make it flat so it will slide into the last groove?

Seri got tired of me swearing at the bookcase after about twenty minutes, and left to otherwise occupy herself far, far away from me.

Now, I pride myself in taking after my father in his problem-solving skills. Find what's not working, or which point in the series is being interrupted. This works great for computers, not so much for ornery bookcases. After another ten minutes of thinking my father would be laughing at me, I realized something rather obvious.

I was fighting gravity. And gravity had been playing this game far longer than I. So how do I beat gravity? I don't! I let gravity work for me! I flipped the bookcase so it was completely upside-down, and dropped the panel in from the top. one minute later, I was done, and had nailed (and duct-taped!) the panel into place.

Hah! Take that, gravity! Excuse me while I do a victory jig.

In this case, it was a lot about realizing that there is never just one way to do something. And often, the simplest solution is best.

I tried the same way of sliding the back panel in probably fifty or sixty times, expecting a different result. I guess that makes me insane!

Alright, now I have to go make my coffee brewer work...

How To Make a Small Room Bigger

My roommate "Rosa" and I have experienced a recurring problem within our teeny 10'x15' room all semester... how do we make it seem bigger? Taking our the option of knocking a few walls down, we have - over the last few months- experimented with various furniture configurations. We have two twin beds (not bunked), two wardrobes (not movable - bolted to the wall), two desks, a book shelf, and a mini-fridge. The fact that we have room to walk around at all in our room is simply astounding.

Through our attempts to make floorspace, Rosa and I have become experts at Tetris. Not the actual game, but the concept. Rearranging things to make more space when you have none does indeed seem to be a necessary talent in dorms.

One of the many problems with configuration experimentation is... you need free time! Free time... in college?! Don't make me laugh. The worst part of it all is that just as Rosa and I have mostly figured out a system that works... she decides she wants to move back to her home state... I had to find a new roommate.

Never fear! I managed to find my secretly-separated-at-birth twin sister, and she has agreed to move in with me! So I get a new roommate... and her three snakes and various musical instruments... Oh boy.

Just the other day we sat in my room for about four hours, discussing how to:
1- fit all of her stuff and my stuff in the same room without killing each other for space,
2- plan how we wanted the desks and beds configured,
3- how she was going to build a loft for her snakes' cage and put her instruments under it,
and much, much more.

My "new" roommate, we shall call her Seri, is also quite skilled at "Tetris." We've agreed to some major changes in the room (some of which involve flipping the beds over and hitting the frame with rocks to put the bed on a higher notch) that will give the more cramped room an airier feeling. We've also agreed upon certain methods of retaliation when our next-door neighbors blast their music at two in the afternoon... our speakers can go louder than theirs.

I'm Living in a Pigsty!!!

I have an amazing roommate at College X, let's just call her... Rosa. Now Rosa and I came to a certain conclusion about our room rather quickly after we moved in. There are things that live in the dorms... some of them move and some of them ooze. The first week in our new "home" we discovered we had fleas living in our carpet. We coated everything with bug spray, and spritzed our ankles before going to bed.

My roommate and I suffered very little compared to some of our other dorm mates. A woman down two floors was harvested by bed bugs every night for a few weeks.

Fleas living in the carpet, silverfish eating holes in clothes left on the floor, and fruit flies buzzing around your breakfast became a common occurrence. But it was still nasty.

My roommate and I reached our breaking point only a few weeks later. Both completely frustrated by the amount of stuff that had built up, we spent the better part of a weekend cleaning our room, consolidating boxes, and ranting about the black ooze growing in the shower stalls down the hall.

How does this relate to nagging mothers? Come on, you know why. For years, mommy dearest tells us to clean our rooms. "It's a fire hazard!" "It looks bad!" "It smells awful!!!" But what mom really liked to say was "I don't know how you can live like this!" And now I can honestly say, I can't anymore.

Living in a dorm is slightly different from living at home. For one, your room is half the size, and you share it with another person. Also, everything you own is kept in that same 10x15 room - your dishes, your textbooks, your groceries, your clothes, your pots and pans... you get the idea?

As I was saying... I am beginning to believe that living in a college dorm has the potential to give a person slightly OCD tendencies. For example: I clean my side of the room three times a week, and can't stand to leave dirty dishes on my desk...

I also learned that opening a questionable can of soda right over homework and right next to a very expensive laptop is a reeeeeeally bad idea. sticky keyboards are no fun.

We have also discovered the bane of every family's existence - grocery shopping.

It is quite possible to spend fifty dollars a week on groceries, or even one hundred if you aren't careful, or if you are stocking up on necessitites (bread, milk, peanut butter). It is absurd how much food costs... and I'm sure every mother is nodding enthusiastically right now.

Some students fill the gap in their lives by buying lots of "things"... I buy food. And I'm still losing weight.

Time to go clean!

Get It Right, Goldilocks!

Well, people have told us for our entire lives that procrastination is B-A-D. Teachers, parents, older students... do we listen? Of course not! We have far better things to do with our time than homework! Pssh, it won't take that long anyway...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to admit that I... am a shameless procrastinator. (I have not updated for almost two months, if that is any proof.) Procrastination leads to rushing which leads to panic and stress, which lead to ulcers and migraines. No, really... they do.

My first week of college was all sunshine and light, with orientation and lots of other freshmen who were as happy as I to be starting a secondary education. We were told it would be hard, we were told it would be stressful... We smiled and nodded, thinking that as High School graduates we knew what "stressful" was, and we could totally handle it.

Ha!

The first week of classes in college is kind of like a tropical storm. You look out the window and see "Oh, it's raining. I should probably close the windows." You close the windows, but don't bother locking them, because it's only a little rain. As the storm gets closer, your foundation starts to shake with the rumbles of thunder, but you keep typing away at your laptop and updating your facey-spacey because you closed those windows, so everything is okay. The rain beats harder at your walls, and you start to wonder if maybe you should lock those windows... and maybe the doors... and nail down the furniture... But just as this becomes a thought, a branch breaks off a tree and knocks a window open, and your brand new imported hardwood floor is ruined by rainwater pouring all over it.

By the way, that window is homework. If most of it is done (or just whatever's due tomorrow) you feel okay, and that it's perfectly fine to go into town for a few hours and stare at storefronts. However, that paper that's due in a few weeks is sitting in your bottom drawer... it's just waiting until you're fishing around for a pack of gum, notice the assignment, and suddenly remember it's due tomorrow!! Panic time.

Procrastination isn't the only evil of college life, however. Another one is doing things too early! How, you may ask, with work and homework, and dirty laundry biting at your ankles do you find time to do work early? Free time comes when your professor cancels a class because she thinks the schedule is stupid, and really hates waking up early on Fridays. Or free time appears when that really boring thing you had to read for class wasn't really that boring, and you liked reading it, so it didn't take as long. This is the time that you may think "Hm, that paper is due in three weeks... I'll try and get it done now!"

This is a bad idea, don't do it.

Doing work very early means it's out of the way, but professors assign due dates when they do for a reason (and no, it's not because they're sadistic). You learn key lessons in class that will assist you in writing the paper, or the professor decides a few days before it's due to have in in-class session where you brainstorm ideas about your paper, and work out the kinks.

If you finish the thing before this time, you either have to write a paper twice, or you have a very underdeveloped paper, with meaning that's shallower than a soup bowl.

Too early, too late, when are we supposed to get our work done???

For some people, sleep is an optional element of college, and much of their inspiration comes and three in the morning, right before the paper is due. Pass the chocolate covered espresso beans, please. For others, too soon is not soon enough. "If it's done, I can go out. I don't really need to learn anything from it."

Mom was right, yes. Procrastination is bad, but so is working yourself crazy in order to get something done so early that you'll get a bad grade for not understanding the material.

Relax! Don't put it off forever, but don't worry about finishing it the same day it's assigned! Rather than spending hours testing porridges, wait until the teacher tells you which one is probably not too hot, and which one is ice cold.

If It Looks Like A Dog...

And smells like a dog, and has fleas like a dog, it's probably a dog.

I got caught by a phishing scam.

I have only possessed a debit card for about three weeks, and have been at college for a week. As things are, I am in a very pliable state. I had a good day, and was enjoying good food and a good television show when I got a call on my cell phone. It was "my bank" they stated, and my VISA debit card had been suspended. To reactivate it, I only had to put in my 16 digit number, my pin, and the expiration date.

Mom always said, be suspicious. If it's important, they'll call you back. Nothing in life is that convenient, either. Mom always said there are people who make their living tapping into strangers' accounts, and there will always be someone willing to sell a debit number and a cell phone number.

Please be gentle, and remember I am a bright-eyed college student, who is just discovering all of the wonders that the world has to offer. And apparently, all of the horrors and dysfunctions.

I entered my information, and just because I felt quite suspicious about it, I called my mom. Go figure. She told me that it sounded like a phishing scam, and I should call the bank immediately. In tears at my mistake, I called the bank. twice, because I entered the wrong option. After two minutes I finally managed to talk to a human being, who instantly froze the card number.

The bank had been getting calls about this phishing scam all day. I felt humiliated and embarrassed and ashamed that I had fallen for this, especially with all of the signs telling me it was bad.

I will get my new card in the mail in a week or so, and will be living off humiliation until then.

Please remember, if it looks like a dog, growls like a dog, and barks like a dog, be careful. It might just have rabies.

Okay, Maybe You Were Right... And Maybe You Weren't

I was just in NYC with my mother, wandering around Manhattan for four days. She wanted to see museums and cathedrals and do lots of touristy things, and I wanted to shop. I'm leaving for college in two weeks, and I won't have many chances to shop out in the boonies. After finding myself unable to avoid visiting at least one church, I grumbled and whined the entire 20 blocks up 7th avenue to the cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was recently devastated by a horrible fire, and only recently has it been restored to it's former glory.

I was not terribly fond of churches as a young girl. They were awfully dark, cramped, and everyone was far too quiet for their own good. As my mother and I approached the cathedral, we paused in the gardens. Besides the twenty-foot-tall statue of St. John, there were countless small sculptures scattered in the lush greens, all made by art students. It was fabulous and fascinating. I took picture after picture, not caring how silly I looked.

After spending more than half an hour in the sweltering heat, we moved to the cathedral for "a brief look around." i was awestruck at the beauty of the cathedral. I could hardly imagine people devoting their entire lives to creating one square foot of the beautiful structure. I reluctantly conceded that maybe, maybe, my mother had been right.

At the same time, something that had seemed far more interesting than sitting in a church for an hour was not so overwhelming. In fact it was quite underwhelming. Walking the high line, an old railroad turned nature-y walking path, has need of some growth. The trees need time to develop and create actual shade, and the plants need time to grow out of their transplanted circles. It was quite pretty, but not the overwhelmingly fabulous journey newspapers hailed it to be.

So it seems sometimes moms can be right, and sometimes they can be a little right. It was enjoyable, but I won't be skipping up the stairs if we go again.