I live on campus in the newly constructed Printing House Square that includes three buildings set in a U-shape. This eco-friendly building has shockingly hot apartments, not enough washers and dryers, and provides its own form of entertainment: stalking. Each bedroom and kitchen is equipped with very large windows that let in a lovely amount of sunlight (for the five minutes it’s out), but this does allow us to stare right into everyone’s rooms. We watch each other live our days on display like some kind of zoo or study in human behaviour.
Back when I was in undergrad I shared a bathroom with a whole floor of men and took to counting how many times the toilet seat was left up. For those of you wondering, it was 75+ in less than three months. But you see, Trinity is kindly not making me live in that war zone and I have my own little bathroom. If I gain five pounds I won’t fit in the shower anymore, but I’m happy. The only problem is now I have nothing to count.
As some of you know, I go to bed at 9pm and say “oh my god, I’m so wild and reckless tonight, it’s 10:30pm!” This then means I get up fairly early in the morning, so while I drink my tea and eat my breakfast (not cereal) I have taken to counting the number of different men I see eating cereal before 9am. Why men eating cereal you may ask? Eh, why not. (Better than counting the 30+ bottles of alcohol as they go missing from that one dude’s desk.) I write to inform you that this Tuesday morning broke a record! I saw a total of six men eating cereal. I will concede that some may consider my counting scheme as creepy, but in my defense, everyone stares into everyone’s windows, so I don’t feel too bad about it.
While the U-shape buildings provide me with ample people watching possibilities, it also creates somewhat of an echo chamber in the courtyard below. If anyone so much as whispers down there, I can hear it in my third story apartment. You see the problem in this is that Printing House Square is supposed to be an undergraduate dorm only, but there are a few masters and PhDs students damned to the spare rooms. Turns out, 19-year-olds like to stumble home late at night and have the audacity to sound happy at midnight. Which is all good fun, unless your career depends on your ability to impress and write a dissertation of publishable quality. Us poor postgraduate souls need to be asleep or having a mental breakdown at midnight, so the loud singing and laughter has to go. The only solution I have found is sleeping with my noise-cancelling headphones on and some practice in anger management so I don’t scream out my window “get off my lawn!” Overall I have drawn two conclusions from living in this building: men like cereal and my masters has already aged me 70 years.
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