The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Well, it’s been about eleven days now here at AU. I’m not entirely settled yet (still working on it), but I am now pretty much used to the timezone, actually getting used to the warmer temperatures (just wait until winter comes around), and some of the habits of living here. The craziness of Welcome Week is over and classes have started, and I’ll hopefully get used to that soon. Nevertheless, here are some observations that I’ve made after my first week and a half here.

1) It’s All About Where the Next Meal Comes From
There is something to be said for a home-cooked meal: it’s got a perfectly-portioned smidge of love baked right in. But the opportunities for those of us living away from home to get some of that love are few and far between, so the consumption of food here is directed by two guiding principles: “Variety is the spice of life,” and “The best things in life are free.”
No way to overemphasize the latter point. If you plan a college event and want people to show up, you offer free food. If you’re a college student, you know where the events that offer the free food are. I mean, yes, we’ve got meal plans for TDR (the Terrace Dining Room), where you just have to swipe your card and you’ve got an all-you-can-eat-in-one-sitting buffet there. And the food is actually pretty good. Except that it lacks the love, because it’s prepared in bulk. Who can spend all of their time eating food in that type of loud environment (which could definitely benefit from a bit more atmosphere) when it doesn’t have any of the love?
Consequently, there are some other places to eat on-campus that you can use EagleBuck$ (stored value on your ID card) for, with more of a fast-food style. Or you can go off-campus, either to Tenleytown or to wherever the Metro will take you to explore the scene. All of which is also very good food, and provides some variety to the palette, but again you lose the love. Throw in that you’ve got to plan where you’re going to go to get that food and how you’re going to get there, and juggle the schedules of when certain places to eat are open and when they’re not, and then plan to do this for at least three meals a day, and you can see why food is on the college student’s brain very, very frequently.
In other words, after eleven days here, I’ve really got a craving for a home-cooked meal. I crave some of that love in my food again.

2) If It’s Free, Let It Be
This piggybacks off of the last section, but that’s the truth: people here like stuff that’s free, whether it’s on-campus movies, games, or food (obviously). But here’s an example of how free-mad people can get. AU has this thing called eSuds, which is a thing that lets you track the washers and dryers on each floor. You can see live which washers and dryers are in use and which ones are available, can get notified by e-mail or text message when one becomes available, and can also be notified when your cycle is finished. And you pay for the cycles with EagleBuck$, just $1 a cycle. Except here’s the catch–the washers and dryers in my section of my floor aren’t hooked up to eSuds. So that means that the system has no idea there’s washers and dryers on this floor, which throws the whole convenience factor out of the window. BUT, and here’s the big but, this means that for now, our washers and dryers work for FREE. And so no one wants anyone to report this issue because they all love having free laundry–and this even goes for the Resident Assistants (RAs), who are supposed to report these kinds of things, because they ALSO love the free laundry! Personally, I wouldn’t care about paying for the laundry just to have the convenience of eSuds, but I’m sure that if I reported anything, my head would get chopped off! (Metaphorically speaking.) Heck, we now even have an issue with people from other floors taking our washers/dryers to get free laundry. I guess it’s a dog eat dog world out there…

3) Coffee!!! Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee…
While I’m sure that most of the people here aren’t as bad as my roommate, who I consider to be a coffee-holic (in that he claims that he needs a couple of cups a day in order to stay active, and that I’ve seen him struggle to get out of bed in the morning when it’s been awhile since his cup of Joe), there is no shortage of places to get coffee out here. There’s The Perch, open nightly 8 PM-2 AM, part of the first floor lounge in Centennial Hall that has been turned into a coffee house/hangout spot with music and board games, where you bring your own mug for $1/cup of coffee (or buy one of their iconic biodegradable tumblers for $3 with a picture of a bird that almost looks like it was ripped off from the Twitter logo). Or there’s the Davenport Coffee Lounge, a student-run place in the School of International Service building (SIS) (that quite frankly makes the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had). Or there’s the Mud Box, located in the basement of Bender Library and open at not-quite 24/5, but close to it, which I haven’t actually been to yet. Or you can get coffee almost anywhere else on campus (my roommate says that the McDonald’s coffee is the absolute worst of the bunch, although being a writer, he has some much more interesting adjectives to describe it). And of course Starbucks lovers (generally looked down upon here) could take the shuttle to Tenleytown for their cup of Joe.
And here’s little old me, who only occasionally dips himself into a cup of decaf (“Gasp! Decaf??? That’s not even real coffee!!”), so loaded up with cream and sugar that you wouldn’t even know what it came from. Whatever, it’s still a part of the culture out here. Just wait until exams start…

4) “Traditiooooooooon! Tradition.”
And that’s my horrible typing impression of what the song from “Fiddler on the Roof” sounds like. Still, there’s plenty of awkward traditions at any college, and this place is no exception. You could start with “Wings and Water Ice” that happened on my second night here, where everyone was invited to an event in McDowell Hall with games, music, socializing, and–you guessed it (or didn’t)–barbecue chicken wings and water ice in cherry, lemon, mango, or pineapple flavors. Without a doubt one of the weirdest combinations I’ve ever encountered, even though each were individually pretty good. Or there’s commencement, which was last Friday (hot day!), where they paraded the 1500+ freshmen around campus with bagpipers playing in the front, eventually leading into Bender Arena, where the marching band played the AU fight song at least 40 times in a row while waiting for all of the freshmen to find seats, and then had a number of people give speeches. And I’m sure that there’s plenty more of these traditions coming up very soon that I don’t even know about yet.

5) Campus Bookstores Stink
For half of my classes, they got the textbook listings messed up, they run out of textbooks quickly, and quite frankly the prices they charge are big ripoffs. ‘Nuff said.

What’s the point of this somewhat random post? Well, after eleven days here, I’m still not very settled in yet. Welcome Week certainly had some fun activities, but it definitely was not normal in terms of helping to formulate any kind of living pattern to get used to. Getting used to not having seven classes a day, every day, all in sequential order is not easy, and there’s definitely going to be a lot more high-stakes work to do on my own time for those classes, which will have to push me out of summer-break mode to start doing those. And of course, I’m trying really hard to avoid the world of pain that I fell into during my last freshman year: where I got involved in so many interesting activities that I over-committed myself. Trying to avoid that world isn’t easy when I have to apply for everything I’m interested in participating in, and a lot of the things I would like to commit myself to are pending upon hearing back from something else.

Anyway, the honeymoon is over. Right now is the rough patch where I’ve got to dig in the trenches and hold my breath. After all, “we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure of what is normal anyway.”

* Quote from Chapter 9 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, according to Wikiquote, anyway.