The Beginning

It hasn't exactly been smooth.

First of all, I spent the first day of orientation trying to stay awake in the carious sessions after getting a total of 90 minutes of "sleep" the previous night. That's going to bed at 5:00 and having to be finished with breakfast at just after 6:30 for an 8:23 flight out of Midway. I thank dad for driving, or else I would have gotten about thirty minutes of sleep. I know that at some point in the next four years I will be in a similar hypnoidal state. I hardly expected day one to be the first.

Day one was rough. The cab driver was a talkative little mid-50s woman. One lesson we learned from the widespread publication of that article about women and men speaking the same average number of words per day is that there's actually no way that women and men speak the same average number of words per day. So this driver was a perfect example; I told her that I was a freshman at Brandeis. She spent 28 minutes and 20 seconds of the next 29 minutes telling me about her obsequious mother giving her Sicily house to an old caretaker; the other guy she drove today; the smell of some factory' her granddaughter's party in Georgia to which she drove; her thoughts on the Democratic Presidential primary slate for the '08 election. There was probably more that I've either forgotten by now or didn't hear because I fell asleep (and I made up the 29 minutes, but that's about what it should have been according to Google.)

So we get to campus, they ask me if I know what dorm I'm in, and I answer with the one they sent out four days before the beginning of the week, and they tell me I'm wrong. This means that the room-assigning arm and the list-making arm aren't talking to each other. Keep this theme in mind.

I can't go to the place I'm supposed to go (which is the room I told them I was supposed to go to) because there was a "medical emergency" in that quad (four or five dorms in a circle around a pond). The cab (which wasn't even a cab; it was just a regular green car with a crack across the entire bottom of the windshield) obviously didn't want to stay, because her unmarked cab makes a business of driving college students from the airport to their various Metropolitan Boston colleges. (Is that like "Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana [Chevy dealer]"? I digress.) We unlaod my two suitcases, duffel, two backpacks, and computer onto the ground where about 20 Orientation Leaders (keep this theme in mind) are sitting around because most students have already come. Finally a golf cart comes to take me and the stuff up to the dorm.

I figured the key they gave me would open the door to my room, and when it didn't I figured that my roommate had somehow messed up the door-latching system like I've done at home once or twice. Turn. Click. Un-turn. Click. Re-turn. Click. But all the turning didn't actually open the door. So after practically picking it, turning and pushing just the right amount, it finally opened and my roommate...

...wasn't there.

And today, three days later, he stil isn't. That's quite interesting. Room 203 is the third room I was assigned to. The problem with the first was that it was a single and I didn't want a single. Then I was switched to the building I'm in now, room 211, but four days before coming out here they emailed me again to say that I was now in room 203 with a guy whose first and last names are anagrams of each other. I assumed this--such a late change--would mean that there was some sort of confirmation that Anagram Armagan Maranga (because according to facebook, his middle name is also an anagram of the other two) was actually going to be here. My current theory is that he's in Israel, or will be within the week. I emailed him. I'll keep you posted. I now have a single room (which I didn't request) in a double room's body on a single-sex floor (which I didn't request).

The ID-card machine stopped being broken on the second day, but then it was time to take the class picture so two dozen of us were shooed out of line. On the bright side, no organization can rival Lincoln Park HS in terms of disorganization regarding ID cards. LP was so bad that for the last three years of high school they used the same sophomore-year photograph. And it took two or three weeks into the year to make sure everyone had one.