Description of My Dorm

     It’s just another no-sleep night, just after midnight, to be exact, and nothing much is out of the ordinary around here. There’s the late-night hockey game on the TV, I’ve got the sound muted to not wake any of my neighbors up. It’s one of those 12, 13-inch cubes, about ten or fifteen years old, the kind of TV set that folks set in their closet after an upgrade and give away five years later when their wife is organizing a garage sale. No plugs or anything, so I can’t even hook up a VHS or a DVD player. And the cable’s not the greatest around here; mostly a grainy collection of really strange niche channels that completely blacks out in bad weather. Anyway, Edmonton is at home against San Jose, the score is tied at 1-1 late in the third period.

            Looking around the small, confining space I live in, the TV is perched atop my refrigerator, one of those mini-fridges that has a high capacity of very small items. Right now it’s full of about nine cans of Diet Coke, two cans of Rockstar, half a Subway sandwich that’s tomorrow’s breakfast, and three receipts. Next to the fridge is one of the desks, in need of cleaning, pencil-marks adorn the flat, scarred surface. Makes sense, though – that’s where a broken pencil sharpener sits, spilling sawdust everywhere on the rare occasions it gets used. (I hate pencils, and try to use them as little as possible.) Next to the pencil sharpener is a desktop Christmas tree I found in October at Wal-Mart last year, unplugged at the moment because it doesn’t fit the tone just right now.

            Above those items is my bookshelf; home to a select company of my most treasured friends. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Princess Bride, Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s Web, The Book of Virtues,  To Kill A Mockingbird, the first book of Jan Karon’s Mitford series. There’s three or four well-worn reporter’s notebooks, four songbooks, a battered paperback dictionary, three books of poetry, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Over off in their own section I have Associated Press stylebooks from 1994 and 2012, together with a Grammar Girl and a couple other useful books for journalistic pursuits and essay-writing. One of those titles included in the communication section is a Biblical-focused guide to dealing with the underlying issues our comm disputes cover, fantastic book that I bought from our pastor’s bookstore several weeks ago. There’s my Bible sitting on top, kind of above everything else, within easy reach. The spine came loose about six years ago and the cover is only very loosely attached, much of Deuteronomy is stuck together by time and elemental damage, but it’s a good copy of the NIV, well-marked. There’s a shot glass next to the Bible, decorated with some of the major landmarks of Washington D.C., I got that while visiting my junior year of high school. It’s filled with guitar picks. Light-gauge, medium-gauge, one or two extremely stiff and unforgiving high-gauge picks. All different colors; red, purple, white, lime green, a kind of tan for the plastic fingerpicks, the shining chrome of the metal fingerpicks. A stuffed toy dog, yellow Lab named Dusty, guards the shot glass on one side and my videocamera on the other.  

            There’s a poster with a quote from Emerson taped with sticky-tack to the cold off-white cement-block wall, the only other decoration on the walls is the glow-in-the-dark basketball hoop above the bed that my sister sent me freshman year.

            There’s my “couch”, in reality the spare bed, but since I don’t have a roommate, the space is there to use. My backpack sits there; holding all my textbooks, several notebooks and planners, a stapler, calculator and pepper spray, among other things with the Snoopy keychain on the outside. My leather jacket is spending the night there with my jeans, since it’s supposed to be pretty cold in the morning, it being winter and all. Abby Lee the guitar and Summertime the mandolin live on the couch, too.

             A towel hangs on the rack atop the closet door, I try to keep my bed neatly made. My CDs are arranged in alphabetical order next to the CD player which needs to be replaced, the microwave sits just above them on the other shelf. A pair of sunglasses lie next the microwave, which must be at least twenty years old and makes alarming noises like it’s going to blow up every time food is cooked inside.

            I keep the laptop on this desk by my bed, along with my phone, wallet, keys, watch, things like that. In the drawers you’d find about nineteen pens waiting to be used, nail clippers, scissors, a hole punch, flashlight, paper clips, several necklaces, glasses case, my camera, quite a few charger-cables belonging to various items, several old newspapers, a pocket book of logic puzzles, condiment container of honey mustard, and old letters, along with jars of peanut butter and Nutella, paper towels and a powerful bleach-based disinfectant inside the file cabinet.

            I keep the volleyball and soccer ball in the closet, where a half-eaten box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch converses with the shampoo bottle.

            The arrangement of belongings is designed that the essential items can be gathered up in a hurry and you can be gone instantly in case of emergency. It’s considered very clean, but there’s a certain amount of messiness just in daily living. Which can be maddeningly solitary at times….I never have guests.

            It’s not that I don’t have friends or anything; more like it’s just that the few people I really enjoy hanging out with around here are also mostly introverts, and private, so it’s like there’s this unwritten code that says we’re don’t usually come into each other’s territory. There’s some exceptions, but I don’t really qualify for any of them. So most nights are spent watching TV or surfing the Internet, doing exciting things like homework and having thrilling adventures like catching a marathon of The Rockford Files. It’s part of being a writer, I suppose.

We scratch out ideas as they come, sometimes using anything from cardboard boxes to discarded sandwich wrappers, and then transfer them into our “scrap bag” of potential items notebooks, which are usually dog-eared and well-thumbed through. Sometimes they come frantically and your hand almost matches your brain’s processing speed, and other times new ideas don’t come very often at all, more like a slow leak in the roof. Sort of like the leak in the bathroom of Grandpa’s trailer, never quite fixed, but usually usable, if a headache to follow.

Anyway, we’re part of a tight-knot drama group, an outreach of the BCM here on campus, and besides that, several of us are writers and other creative types, so we occasionally bounce ideas off each other while hanging out. Not just friends, although we are that. We’re a family. Extremely dysfunctional at times, but we’ve got each other’s backs through rough times. College is miserable alone, and a lot of us know that from personal experience. So we’re there for our siblings and cousins and mom and drill-sergeant aunt.
 Eating a late dinner of some microwaved food, it looks and smells like cat food.