La vita è bella. (Brunonia, pt 2)
Julia says my last entry sounds like the Brown viewbook, which I ashamedly admit is truer than I'd like. Let's see if I can do better now that I'm fully awake (or close enough... I'm not on Adderall like my roommate is, but eight hours of sleep is a decent remedy).
My room is in one of the least pretty dorms on campus, and overlooks a parking lot where drunk people on weekend nights hold loud intimate conversations, every word of which I can hear from where I'm sitting. They're often very amusing, but not exactly ideal when I'm trying to sleep. My room is also above the Mo-Champ Arch, which is one of the two places on campus where the a cappella groups regularly hold their outdoor performances--also very entertaining but not ideal for sleep. Two weeks ago, on International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day (which was celebrated by many), the pirate shanty group ARRR!!! made a visit and I took the opportunity to take a (very haphazardly cinematographed) video of my room featuring nice background music. This was before a minor earthquake hit and half the posters fell off the walls. Or perhaps I need better sticky putty.
My dormmates are... fairly interesting. I'll go ahead and describe four of the freshmen who live on my floor (out of a total of eleven, not including myself), but I will also add a disclaimer and say they aren't necessarily exemplars of what Brown kids are like, though they're definitely not outliers either.
Matt (one of four Matts in our freshman unit) lives two doors away. For the first two weeks of college I took him for nothing but a slacker druggie because everytime I saw him he seemed to be either smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, drinking, or otherwise avoiding doing his homework. His everyday vocabulary consisted mainly of statements such as "Fuckin' A, give me my beer" and "I'm taking a smoking break outside... please come with me?" (which he never said to me, of course, because I'd just be like "Yeah, and breathe in your second-hand fumes? no thanks"). And then I found out that he is actually a debate champion on the national level, and saw a video of his last debate in which he used ten long and unrecognizable words in the same sentence and left the opposition dumbfounded. So even though he smokes two different things and has asthma at the same time, I guess I won't be arguing with him about his habits. Moreover, the reason why he never seems to be doing work is that he is the most efficient skimmer of textbooks I have ever met, and writes all his essays two hours before they're due.
Matt's roommate Patrick, meanwhile, is perhaps the most flamboyantly gay guy I've ever known. I mean, there are definitely guys out there way more flamboyantly gay than Patrick, but I don't know any and he's pretty flamboyant as gay guys go. He's got neon colored sheets, decorates his wall with condoms, Warhol and erotic pictures of men, has "excessively tacky/slutty clothing" as an interest on Facebook, and wore a black dress outside the main dining hall last week as part of an effort to promote gender-neutral bathrooms on campus. If you get to know him better, he's a really normal and nice guy, but he definitely enjoys anteing up the gay image just for fun, especially in front of strangers. For example, our dorm hosted prospective students overnight last week, and the whole lot of us were sitting around chatting in his room when he came back, waltzed in and greeted the prospies with "Hey harlots!" And they asked him which other colleges he had been accepted to, as they had done with all of us, and we found out that he had turned down Princeton and Harvard for Brown (actually I was rather surprised that night by how many people just in my dorm had gotten into "bigger-name" schools and still came to Brown, for various reasons). All in all, though, he's a really sweet and funny guy and great to talk to, even though he almost burned down the fence outside last week (reportedly the burn mark was exactly in the shape of the anarchy sign, even though no one present was an anarchist) while he was drunk and then started arguing with random people about capitalism.
Further down the hall, there's Alex (one of three Alexes in Morriss), who's kind of a jock type--he's preppy, plays rugby, drinks a lot (he says it takes him ten beers before he gets even slightly drunk, but he does indeed get very drunk), and tends to laze around all day in a great effort to not do work. Thus he astonished everyone two weeks ago when he went to a frat party, got drunk (no surprise here), and then what did he do? He tried to steal books from the frat. He could have tried to steal their stores of vodka or maybe their girls, but no, he went for their library. Some other people from Morriss saw him leaning over a couch, looking intently at the bookcase behind it, and the next thing they knew he had a leatherbound copy of the Odyssey down his pants. Just then, the lights came on, and a bunch of frat boys saw him and were like, "Uhh, why are you putting a book in your pants?", in response to which he said, "I'm not putting a book in my pants... I'm taking it out of my pants to put back!" Being drunk and all, I guess it seemed like a good save. And then he added, "I wanted to take it 'cause it's such a nice copy, but then I realized it wouldn't be good to ruin such a fine collection and I decided to return it." Under all that jock-ness, I suppose, there still lurks a quintessential Brown bibliophile.
Alex's roommate Tyler, on the other hand, is definitely not a jock. Instead, he's just about the coolest guy I've ever met, and one of the funniest. He reminds me slightly of Ben Park--he's very soft-spoken and can be really quiet while other people are talking, but then says the wittiest thing at just the right moment in the perfect tone of voice. He makes the most insane faces and impressions of people, and just has this certain air that gives you the impression that nothing could ever faze him. He's also pretty much a genius, and writes ten-page letters longhand to friends not about his personal life, but just "to exchange ideas." He has a turntable and the most wonderful collection of old jazz and classical records, which makes me really really want to have a turntable and record collection of my own. He also has a fishing pole, and intends to go fishing in the river sometime. He plays Go all the time with this other kid Noah, who takes a graduate-level math course, an idea-of-mathematics course ("it's technically a philosophy course," he says), a physics course, and a math-applied-to-physics course, and intends to have a similar course load every semester. Basically, Brown's open curriculum was made for people like Noah. But anyway, someone once asked Noah, "What are you taking, Math a Million?" and Tyler said, "Yeah, it's so high-level, they don't even do math anymore. They just sit there and count to a million. One... two... three... four..." Then this girl Michelle, who gives an impression of being kind of an airheaded drunk (we love her but we still tease her about it a lot), was watching them play Go and asked if they thought she could learn as well. Tyler said no, it wasn't really her kind of game because she probably wouldn't stick with it long enough to get good. So Michelle asked what they thought was "her kind of game." Noah said Candyland. Tyler said hopscotch. And ever since then Michelle has been known to us as Hopscotch, and she still thinks Tyler's the most hilarious person in the world.
So if it hasn't become obvious by now, my floor just happens to be a party floor. The kids are cool and very smart, including my roommate Olivia, but most of them just like getting drunk and/or high on weekend nights (and this occasionally includes Monday and Wednesday nights, which makes the weekday in Morriss really short), which isn't really my kind of thing. Fortunately, I get a kick out of laughing at drunk people, and there are also plenty of other people elsewhere on campus who like to stay relatively substance-free and do other things instead like playing midnight Ultimate Frisbee (with a non-glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, by the way, which accounts for the series of bruises on my arms and face), going to shows and concerts, and playing board games, which isn't as lame as it probably sounds, because games like Catchphrase and Cranium and In 25 Words Or Less can be insanely fun with a good group at two in the morning. Also, even though my floormates are kind of drunks, they're still pretty considerate people. Once, our RC Vinay (with whom my roommate and I share a semi-private bathroom) and I had to clean up about 23409859 beer cans from my room after everyone else got drunk and went off to a party somewhere else, and afterwards people felt bad and decided to throw him a surprise birthday party in the lounge.
Vinay's friends (he's a sophomore; there are kids under his "counsel" that are older than him) gave him a birthday surprise of their own... not knowing he was still inside
Our well-orchestrated surprise party... look at all the people hiding behind that one pole
Some ran out of options
We kind of failed at surprising Vinay, but it was still very sweet. My dormmates are good people. Just kind of drunk, but what can you do? It's college.
I like my classes a lot. This semester I chose only big intro lecture courses, which is probably not the best thing to do, but they are still awesome despite that. For Geology 22, we play around with pretty rocks and go on field trips to wonderful places like Attleboro. In Education 80 (Human Development) we read about traumatic childhoods and deprived monkeys, and the professor is a little Chinese lady who is completely crazy. My Anthropology 10 class has an awesome reading list and is also pretty crazy-- tomorrow we're supposed to go to class "redressed" in what we define as "gender-inappropriate clothing." I'm having quite a bit of trouble with this, actually, and I'll probably end up wearing a sign that says, "I spent a week confronting my subconscious inhibitions and trying to come up with something, and in the end I don't want to get arrested for public indecency, so... well, these clothes are gender-inappropriate in Saudi Arabia!" Which is pretty lame, but, well. My Cognitive Science 1 class is really fascinating. The last lecture was given by a graduate student who is doing virtual reality experiments at Brown (we have one of the biggest virtual reality labs in the world), which involve putting subjects in virtual mazes and making secret changes to them like adding wormholes or swapping corridors, and seeing how the subjects respond. He made a lot of references to pathfinding in videogames, which is an issue I very much identify with because bad pathfinding in videogames has annoyed me for years of my life. Yes. And we also wrote papers analyzing optical illusions. Basically, cognitive science is awesome.
We had a carnival during Orientation. Yeah, great use of our tuition money, all right.
We also had a midnight organ concert during Orientation, where everyone just lay down with pillows on the floor of Sayles Hall and listened to the humongous organ while staring at the darkened Gothic ceiling. It was pretty intense.
farmers' market in Wriston Quad every Wednesday
The soundproof piano practice cells: basically you pick a cell and lock yourself in. Unfortunately they are a 15-minute walk away from my dorm, which means that I haven't practiced piano in weeks.
The sundae bar at the dining hall downstairs is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Freshman 15, here I come.
My room is in one of the least pretty dorms on campus, and overlooks a parking lot where drunk people on weekend nights hold loud intimate conversations, every word of which I can hear from where I'm sitting. They're often very amusing, but not exactly ideal when I'm trying to sleep. My room is also above the Mo-Champ Arch, which is one of the two places on campus where the a cappella groups regularly hold their outdoor performances--also very entertaining but not ideal for sleep. Two weeks ago, on International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day (which was celebrated by many), the pirate shanty group ARRR!!! made a visit and I took the opportunity to take a (very haphazardly cinematographed) video of my room featuring nice background music. This was before a minor earthquake hit and half the posters fell off the walls. Or perhaps I need better sticky putty.
My dormmates are... fairly interesting. I'll go ahead and describe four of the freshmen who live on my floor (out of a total of eleven, not including myself), but I will also add a disclaimer and say they aren't necessarily exemplars of what Brown kids are like, though they're definitely not outliers either.
Matt (one of four Matts in our freshman unit) lives two doors away. For the first two weeks of college I took him for nothing but a slacker druggie because everytime I saw him he seemed to be either smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, drinking, or otherwise avoiding doing his homework. His everyday vocabulary consisted mainly of statements such as "Fuckin' A, give me my beer" and "I'm taking a smoking break outside... please come with me?" (which he never said to me, of course, because I'd just be like "Yeah, and breathe in your second-hand fumes? no thanks"). And then I found out that he is actually a debate champion on the national level, and saw a video of his last debate in which he used ten long and unrecognizable words in the same sentence and left the opposition dumbfounded. So even though he smokes two different things and has asthma at the same time, I guess I won't be arguing with him about his habits. Moreover, the reason why he never seems to be doing work is that he is the most efficient skimmer of textbooks I have ever met, and writes all his essays two hours before they're due.
Matt's roommate Patrick, meanwhile, is perhaps the most flamboyantly gay guy I've ever known. I mean, there are definitely guys out there way more flamboyantly gay than Patrick, but I don't know any and he's pretty flamboyant as gay guys go. He's got neon colored sheets, decorates his wall with condoms, Warhol and erotic pictures of men, has "excessively tacky/slutty clothing" as an interest on Facebook, and wore a black dress outside the main dining hall last week as part of an effort to promote gender-neutral bathrooms on campus. If you get to know him better, he's a really normal and nice guy, but he definitely enjoys anteing up the gay image just for fun, especially in front of strangers. For example, our dorm hosted prospective students overnight last week, and the whole lot of us were sitting around chatting in his room when he came back, waltzed in and greeted the prospies with "Hey harlots!" And they asked him which other colleges he had been accepted to, as they had done with all of us, and we found out that he had turned down Princeton and Harvard for Brown (actually I was rather surprised that night by how many people just in my dorm had gotten into "bigger-name" schools and still came to Brown, for various reasons). All in all, though, he's a really sweet and funny guy and great to talk to, even though he almost burned down the fence outside last week (reportedly the burn mark was exactly in the shape of the anarchy sign, even though no one present was an anarchist) while he was drunk and then started arguing with random people about capitalism.
Further down the hall, there's Alex (one of three Alexes in Morriss), who's kind of a jock type--he's preppy, plays rugby, drinks a lot (he says it takes him ten beers before he gets even slightly drunk, but he does indeed get very drunk), and tends to laze around all day in a great effort to not do work. Thus he astonished everyone two weeks ago when he went to a frat party, got drunk (no surprise here), and then what did he do? He tried to steal books from the frat. He could have tried to steal their stores of vodka or maybe their girls, but no, he went for their library. Some other people from Morriss saw him leaning over a couch, looking intently at the bookcase behind it, and the next thing they knew he had a leatherbound copy of the Odyssey down his pants. Just then, the lights came on, and a bunch of frat boys saw him and were like, "Uhh, why are you putting a book in your pants?", in response to which he said, "I'm not putting a book in my pants... I'm taking it out of my pants to put back!" Being drunk and all, I guess it seemed like a good save. And then he added, "I wanted to take it 'cause it's such a nice copy, but then I realized it wouldn't be good to ruin such a fine collection and I decided to return it." Under all that jock-ness, I suppose, there still lurks a quintessential Brown bibliophile.
Alex's roommate Tyler, on the other hand, is definitely not a jock. Instead, he's just about the coolest guy I've ever met, and one of the funniest. He reminds me slightly of Ben Park--he's very soft-spoken and can be really quiet while other people are talking, but then says the wittiest thing at just the right moment in the perfect tone of voice. He makes the most insane faces and impressions of people, and just has this certain air that gives you the impression that nothing could ever faze him. He's also pretty much a genius, and writes ten-page letters longhand to friends not about his personal life, but just "to exchange ideas." He has a turntable and the most wonderful collection of old jazz and classical records, which makes me really really want to have a turntable and record collection of my own. He also has a fishing pole, and intends to go fishing in the river sometime. He plays Go all the time with this other kid Noah, who takes a graduate-level math course, an idea-of-mathematics course ("it's technically a philosophy course," he says), a physics course, and a math-applied-to-physics course, and intends to have a similar course load every semester. Basically, Brown's open curriculum was made for people like Noah. But anyway, someone once asked Noah, "What are you taking, Math a Million?" and Tyler said, "Yeah, it's so high-level, they don't even do math anymore. They just sit there and count to a million. One... two... three... four..." Then this girl Michelle, who gives an impression of being kind of an airheaded drunk (we love her but we still tease her about it a lot), was watching them play Go and asked if they thought she could learn as well. Tyler said no, it wasn't really her kind of game because she probably wouldn't stick with it long enough to get good. So Michelle asked what they thought was "her kind of game." Noah said Candyland. Tyler said hopscotch. And ever since then Michelle has been known to us as Hopscotch, and she still thinks Tyler's the most hilarious person in the world.
So if it hasn't become obvious by now, my floor just happens to be a party floor. The kids are cool and very smart, including my roommate Olivia, but most of them just like getting drunk and/or high on weekend nights (and this occasionally includes Monday and Wednesday nights, which makes the weekday in Morriss really short), which isn't really my kind of thing. Fortunately, I get a kick out of laughing at drunk people, and there are also plenty of other people elsewhere on campus who like to stay relatively substance-free and do other things instead like playing midnight Ultimate Frisbee (with a non-glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, by the way, which accounts for the series of bruises on my arms and face), going to shows and concerts, and playing board games, which isn't as lame as it probably sounds, because games like Catchphrase and Cranium and In 25 Words Or Less can be insanely fun with a good group at two in the morning. Also, even though my floormates are kind of drunks, they're still pretty considerate people. Once, our RC Vinay (with whom my roommate and I share a semi-private bathroom) and I had to clean up about 23409859 beer cans from my room after everyone else got drunk and went off to a party somewhere else, and afterwards people felt bad and decided to throw him a surprise birthday party in the lounge.
Vinay's friends (he's a sophomore; there are kids under his "counsel" that are older than him) gave him a birthday surprise of their own... not knowing he was still inside
Our well-orchestrated surprise party... look at all the people hiding behind that one pole
Some ran out of options
We kind of failed at surprising Vinay, but it was still very sweet. My dormmates are good people. Just kind of drunk, but what can you do? It's college.
I like my classes a lot. This semester I chose only big intro lecture courses, which is probably not the best thing to do, but they are still awesome despite that. For Geology 22, we play around with pretty rocks and go on field trips to wonderful places like Attleboro. In Education 80 (Human Development) we read about traumatic childhoods and deprived monkeys, and the professor is a little Chinese lady who is completely crazy. My Anthropology 10 class has an awesome reading list and is also pretty crazy-- tomorrow we're supposed to go to class "redressed" in what we define as "gender-inappropriate clothing." I'm having quite a bit of trouble with this, actually, and I'll probably end up wearing a sign that says, "I spent a week confronting my subconscious inhibitions and trying to come up with something, and in the end I don't want to get arrested for public indecency, so... well, these clothes are gender-inappropriate in Saudi Arabia!" Which is pretty lame, but, well. My Cognitive Science 1 class is really fascinating. The last lecture was given by a graduate student who is doing virtual reality experiments at Brown (we have one of the biggest virtual reality labs in the world), which involve putting subjects in virtual mazes and making secret changes to them like adding wormholes or swapping corridors, and seeing how the subjects respond. He made a lot of references to pathfinding in videogames, which is an issue I very much identify with because bad pathfinding in videogames has annoyed me for years of my life. Yes. And we also wrote papers analyzing optical illusions. Basically, cognitive science is awesome.
We had a carnival during Orientation. Yeah, great use of our tuition money, all right.
We also had a midnight organ concert during Orientation, where everyone just lay down with pillows on the floor of Sayles Hall and listened to the humongous organ while staring at the darkened Gothic ceiling. It was pretty intense.
farmers' market in Wriston Quad every Wednesday
The soundproof piano practice cells: basically you pick a cell and lock yourself in. Unfortunately they are a 15-minute walk away from my dorm, which means that I haven't practiced piano in weeks.
The sundae bar at the dining hall downstairs is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Freshman 15, here I come.