First Days

The title of my blog has, much to my dismay, finally become accurate. The daily lows hover around the upper fifties and for the next couple of days, the highs aren't even expected to reach room temperature. All of this is further worsened by the rain that we're told is to disappear after Sunday.

Orientation week was filled with loads of free food, random events and a number of stage productions for the freshmen discussing topics ranging from the campus environment and the new experience, both positive and negative, to a presentation from one of the architecture professors. I learned it takes nearly ten thousand one dollar bills to suspend an iron safe from a ceiling...

A week ago, I moved into my permanent dorm which was decided in a process known as dorm rush. Over the summer, you rank the dorms from 1 to 17 with ties allowed. A lottery algorithm then assigns every person to their first choice and then randomly removes people from dorms that are too saturated. The process is then repeated for the next rank and so on. When you first arrive here, you are placed in a temporary room based on the summer lottery. If during the time you are temped in the dorm you discover you don't like it, you can usually move during dorm rush. I got my first choice in dorm and was quite content with the room I was in and hoped to get to keep it. Then there was dorm rush.

I'm going to go off on a tangent describing the dorm; MacGregor is divided into two parts: the sixteen story high-rise and then low rise wing. In the high-rise, the floors are divided into "entries" based on where the elevator stops which is approximately every through floors. Usually, the floor the elevator stops at, the one above and below that compose one entry. Going from the second floor up (the first floor is where the gym, music room, lobby, front desk, entertainment room and some other things are), the entries are lettered E to A. In the low rises, they are lettered G to J with "i" being omitted because it's imaginary (unless you're an engineer then I suppose my entry would be the imaginary one). In the low rise wing, the entries are grouped based on building segments.

Back to dorm rush. All the freshmen in my dorm were divided into nine groups before being herded through all the entries of MacGregor as well as the "housemasters'" apartment by groups. The housemasters are the overseers of the dorm as a whole and have been living here for around ten years. We were chocked full of free food and we conversed with the upperclassmen of each dorm and tried to get a sense for the personality and atmosphere of each entry. Some, I stuck at the bottom of my list instantly generally because I knew they would be too loud for me such as the entry that had turned one of their lounges into a dance room that was very well done with colored lights hooked up to respond to the surround sound, a computer with a large music library and Pandora open 24/7 or the entry whose spokesman sounded like a megaphone and announced how much they liked being loud. Others seemed like they would be OK but unacceptable for one reason or another, most often because I felt my keeping a closed door constantly would feel out of place in an open door entry. If I were in a segmented room, I might not mind but when I have one door that leads into my small six by ten room, I don't feel like hearing what everyone else is doing in their room or the conversations in the lounge. When I visited J entry, it was perfect. The Graduate Resident Tutors (G.R.T.s), boyfriend and girlfriend in the case for this entry, were nice and the latter likes to cook a lot and does it well. Most people keep their doors closed and it was quiet but not anti-social; the personality of the dorm fit me. It's kind of like the McCreary's place minus their kids and steak (the G.R.T.s are vegetarian). At one point while I was visiting another entry, I used the lack of a water fountain in the area as an excuse to run back to J entry. The G.R.T.s and the upperclassmen can add or remove weight for people interested in joining their entry in the lottery algorithm. I introduced myself as Eric to them all but I am "James Pruitt" on all of the documentation around here so I got that straightened out. Lo and behold, I ended up in J entry.

There is something random going on in this entry on a regular basis from free candy on the third floor, watching Blazing Saddles or singing along to West Side Story in the main lobby. Just a day or two ago, Donny, one of the G.R.T.s, Ben and I were playing laser tag.