Dorm Living

Nikki B.
2-16-05

Dorm Living
Living in a dorm gives new perspective of what is normal. In fact, I think that living in a dorm is probably my most eye opening experience of college so far. It is funny what you can learn about others and even about yourself.
I always thought that I was raised normally. I was wrong. Each of our parents have instilled in us their weird habits that you don’t notice are strange until you live with a lot of other people. You pick up strange terms that may only apply in your household, or in my case, on my dead end road.
I am certainly not the only one who is a little strange. Currently there is a girl brushing her teeth in the bathroom. This is should be a normal action, but in her case, it isn’t. It is 10:30 in the morning and I the morning and I personally have seen her brushing her teeth three times today. She has an electric toothbrush and if her neurotic brushing wasn’t enough, she paces back and forth across the bathroom while she brushes her teeth. Can anyone say OCD?
I can’t say that I have a lot of room to talk. I have found out that I am more like my mother and my mother’s mother than I ever thought. I have picked up on their weird habits. I pronounce thinks as they would, which is with a little polish emphasis that sounds completely ridiculous. Then there are the words that my best friend and I invented over the last 13 years we have spent together. Somewhere in those 13 years I forgot that we invented them and I sometimes don’t realize that people don’t have any idea what I am talking about.
One example of these crazy words is “grunds.” I didn’t realize that we made the word up. We have used it for years. When I said the word grunds to my roommate, she looked at me like I was from another planet. I explained that it must just be a Portage, WI thing, but that didn’t work either. She thought the word was so funny that she asked all of my friends from home that she met. The only people who knew that grunds were in fact underwear, were my two best friends who lived on the same dead end road as me and my father. The funny thing is how logical it seemed to me. A grundy is a wedgie and well, that relates to underwear. My roommate just laughed at me.
My roommate, Katie, has no room to talk though. Her mother was an OCD housekeeper and she didn’t realize that sometimes people use towels more than once. She thought they had to be washed every time. She also didn’t know that clothes didn’t have to be washed if you tried them on and decided to wear something else. If she wore something for 10 minutes it went to the hamper.
I can’t believe how strange I am, but at least I have the relief of knowing that everyone is a little strange in different ways. I guess that finding this out is just one of the joys of living in a dorm.