Aura Lee was my roommate for three of our four years in college. Sharing living space with somebody can be a challenge, but Aura Lee and I did quite well together. I began my freshman year with the Roommate from Hell - she was a smoker and had lied about it on her application (because she didn't want her parents to know, she said), she was a complete slob, she put empty beer bottles in our trash can (dry campus - hello!), and she had about six different guys in her bed and never changed the sheets all semester long (I know, TMI). Oh, and she enjoyed taking phone calls at 3 am and refused to leave the room even though it was a cordless phone... how inconsiderate was I to ask her to get out of her warm bed and sit in the hall to talk on the phone!Anyway, I was lucky enough to escape her and find another roommate for the next half of the year. I was sad to move away from Aura Lee (she lived right across the hall), but I was glad to get rid of The Evil One. I ended up finding somebody who actually wanted to move in with her, so we traded for the rest of the year. I got a nice, clean, quiet roommate who left on weekends (giving me the room to myself) in return. It was a good deal. So I thought I might stick with this roommate for the next year, too, because Aura Lee and her current roommate had talked about rooming together the following year. But suddenly one day, Aura Lee's roommate had another girl over in their room, and right in front of Aura Lee, they started talking about how they wanted to arrange the furniture in their dorm room the next year. So Aura Lee thought, "Okay, I guess we're not rooming together next year after all." I guess my evil roommate had rubbed off on her through the walls or something. Or maybe the doorbell that the girls next door had installed in their room drove her to insanity. Who knows. She just had some issues. Did I mention we were also friends with a pathological liar that year? Yep, we attracted strange people our first year of college. Luckily, we stuck together in the following years.
So Aura Lee and I roomed together in two different rooms on the first floor of the building over the next three years. The first room (where we lived for two years) was right across from the kitchen and the RA office - big mistake. RAs are supposed to make sure that nobody breaks the dorm rules (from big things like the beer bottles in my former room to somebody leaving a curling iron plugged in since it might spontaneously turn itself on and catch the building on fire - this was the only rule I was ever caught breaking, which is a very good thing for me), so you'd think the RAs wouldn't be problematic to live near. We also lived next door to the head RA of our whole building. But most of our RAs liked to disregard the rules about being considerate of other people living around them. I think they were all deaf in one ear, because the TV in their office was always turned up so that you could hear it clearly while taking a shower in the next dorm over. They also talked loudly, so as to make themselves heard over the TV. And they liked to be friends with every RA on campus and invite them all over at once. I don't know who was on duty in the other dorms ever, because they were always all in our dorm. Especially annoying was Bike Boy, who was extra-loud and for some reason brought his bicycle into the dorm with him. I think it was actually an extension of his arm or something, because I never saw him without it. Sometimes other people would use the kitchen in the dorm, and they were loud, but when the RAs used the kitchen, they were even louder than in their office somehow. I guess because the room echoed. To top it all off, we lived next door to a girl named Thunder (at least that's what was written on her message board attached to her door). Maybe she had this name because of how loud she was. Her loudness must have caused her premature hearing loss (or maybe it was the RAs that caused it, as she lived directly across from their office), because her answering machine was turned up loud enough for us to hear it clearly through the wall. And her friends always called her in the middle of the night. And she never woke up to answer the phone due to her apparent deafness. But we'd wake up and listen to some of the longest messages ever left in the history of answering machines. At first we thought maybe she wasn't home those nights, but then we noticed that we'd see her coming out of her room the next morning, still looking mostly asleep.
Boy, I'm getting sidetracked. Anyways, we moved out of that room and into a nice, peaceful one for our senior year. It was at the very end of a hallway, so the only loudness we experienced was the occassional group of people coming in through the outside door. We lived next to a quiet RA this time. We actually woke her up once, not by being loud, but intentionally. See, there was this loud banging noise coming from the basement one evening, and we went down to investigate. We found water leaking out from under a door that led to the unfinished section of the basement (the place where we'd go and sit on mounds of dirt when there were tornado warnings during our freshman year)... and this wasn't just a little puddle. It was like a small duck pond at this point. So we figured a pipe had burst, and we went to report it to the RA, who said, "Oh, I wondered what that loud banging was..." Not that it was her job to check out suspicious things such as that, but anyway...
Aura Lee and I had lots of fun sharing our living space over these years, despite the problems of dorm life described above. Here are some good memories:
- Fridays were our favorite days. There were several reasons, the most obvious being that it began the weekend. Also, we loved to go out to eat and would look forward to it all week. We'd decide on a place and then go there either Friday or Saturday night. Among our favorites were Los Portales, Cracker Barrel, and Restaurant. In fact, this photo of us was taken outside Cracker Barrel in one of the double rocking chairs. Oh, and another great thing about this day of theweek: "We don't bathe on Fridays, we don't bathe on Fridays!" (Insert annoying music in your head here)
- Our many chants and sayings included the following: "Kafra's in diorite!" (repeat over and over, chanting, woth a brief pause after the word "in"); "I'm... normal!"; hissing at things/people who irritated us; and of course, the "we don't bathe" song.
- One of my favorite memories of Aura Lee's phone conversations with her mother: She was in her dorm room and her mother called, and while talking, a "private" topic came up. Aura Lee's mom began to whisper. "Aura Lee? are you alone right now?" she whispered. "Yes," answered Aura Lee (I must've been in class or something). "Why are we whispering?" Her mother whispered, "Well, I wanted to ask you if you needed any more... TAMPONS. Because I just bought a big box if you do." Aura Lee at this point said, "Mom, nobody else is there with you, are they? So why are you whispering?" Apparently it was too private to speak out loud even with nobody around to hear. I'm sure she'd be appalled if she knew this was on the Internet!!!
- Our many kitchen experiences: other people in the dorm must've thought we were little Martha Stewarts or something because we cooked a nice dinner in the dorm kitchen at least every one or two weeks. Some of our favorites were quiche with Aura Lee's mom's yummy homemade crust, taco cassarole, and of course, snacks that were not heathly such as sausage balls and cookies. We also had an annual tradition of baking a cake for Phil using the special Phil's Birthday Cake Pans (this is why they were purchased and it was basically their only function throughout college. Oh, except once I baked pumpkin bread in one of them and it got moldy because I made it with real, fresh pumpkin and didn't eat it fast enough.), and one year we burned it somehow (see more on this in the "JOSTA!" post).
- We'd watch Days of Our Lives some evenings, which I'd tape record. We made fun of how stupid Austin was and how lame the whole plot was in general. Aura Lee really liked Kate, for some reason. But taping it was the way to go: we could fast-forward through the commercials and boring parts.
- We would always read the campus newspaper as soon as it came out to see what was for dinner all week in the dining hall. Our ultimate favorites were quiche (sometimes spelled "keesh" by the dumb food service staff), taco salad, ... and that's about it. Chicken tenders were decent, and creamed chicken over puff pastry... but luckily, they had a waffle maker and sandwich line to satisfyus on all the days of nasty entrees. Quiche was by far the highlight of our dining hall experience. They'd always look at us funny when we'd ask for three pieces.
- Our favorite store in the local mall was B. Moss. Whenever they'd have a 40% off sale, we'd get a call on our phone about it. That was always lots of fun. Unfortunately, B. Moss closed in that mall recently :(
- One interesting thing we saw one day in the dorm bathroom was a mesage written on the mirror with a dry-erase marker. Another student had written it. It said: "Please do not urinate or blow your nose in the showers - it is NASTY!" We thought this was weird, because honestly, how would anyone even know if somebody peed in the shower? Does the cleaning staff have video cameras, or secret spies who watch people taking showers? I mean, I understand how you'd know that somebody was blowing their nose in the shower because you'd hear them, but you wouldn't hear peeing over the sound of the water running. Aura Lee made the comment that it's probably more sanitary to blow your nose in the shower, because you're getting soap and shampoo all over your hands, thus cleaning them, whereas most people don't normally wash their hands after blowing their noses. Anyway, we wore shower shoes (flip flops) for a reason.
