Four In The Morning, Really?

Like most university students, I juggle classes and all that goes with them and a part time job that helps pay for school. I am, however, the only person in my house that works. We all juggle school in this house, and it can get stressful when we're all studying and working hard. I work quite a few hours at work, mostly on the weekends, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Often, it's late Friday nights, followed by early Saturday mornings. This usually means I work Friday and then fall into bed after eating dinner, just to get up and do it all over again the next day.



Anyone that lives with roommates can relate to this. There are times when you crave the quiet for sleeping or doing work. It seems that the time you most desperately want quiet is the time when people decide to be the loudest. The constant issue with noise that I have is Friday nights. I work for over five hours and then come home to find my roommates already on their way to the amazing state of inebriation. I know that we don't really have enforced quiet hours, except for during exam time, and my roommates love to party it up on the weekends to unwind. I try my hardest to tolerate the noise most nights, but there are still nights when I end up getting woken up by noise. This usually results in me getting out of bed, walking out into the hall, and politely asking them to quiet down. I've even started putting notes on my door, before I go to sleep, reminding them that I have an early morning. This is generally a bizarre idea, seeing as how most people, when having good time with their alcohol, aren't able to read all that well.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/sf/10-13noise.jpg

A few weekends ago, I had a very early Saturday morning with Track and Field all day at the St. Denis Centre, and decided that an earlier night than usual would be necessary. Seeing as how past attempts to ask my roomies to quiet down have sometimes failed, I decided to Google tips on how to deal with loud roommates. My results led me to a eHow page, entitled How to Deal With a Loud Roommate. I read six steps that I should follow, that will help me. After reading the steps out loud to myself, I couldn't help but laugh. The first five steps alone hardly ever work, or at least wouldn't in my situation. The first step involves communicating with your roommates and explaining what the problem is. I wonder if anyone has ever been able to talk to four roommates, who may all be slightly intoxicated, and ask them to quiet down. Ground rules don't work, because we all forget them. Earplugs won't work; I won't hear my alarm in the morning, if I'm drowning out noise the night before. These steps aren't very useful at all, and may not work for anyone. Their tips revolve around: talking to inebriated roommates, wearing earplugs, and setting rules that are easily forgotten. I wonder if somewhere out there, there's a website or wiki that will help me with noisy and sloshed roommates.

Holiday Obsessions Gone Wild

As a kid, I loved decorating for the holidays. No matter what holiday it was, I was ready to help put up any decorations we owned. As I got older, I saw how much effort my parents put in to decorate the house. Whether it was my mom struggling to get the tree to stand straight or my dad outside on a ladder yelling obscenities at a string of Christmas lights, they made the holidays special for my brother and me. Nowadays, at home, with me being a young adult and my brother a teenager, it is more of a sentimental value to decorate at home. It is almost a way to remember the past and bring a little warmth into the house.




However, here in my house in Windsor, the holiday decorating has gotten a little, well let's say, out of hand. I still love the idea of decorating for the holidays, and I love the idea of doing it with my roommates. It makes the place feel a little homier. If you came into our house, you'd be attacked by holiday decorations. We do celebrate a lot of holidays in the time we're here for the school year. We decorate for all of them. However, we apparently don't take any decorations down. Why this has happened I am not sure. We went all out for Halloween. We had one of those witches who looks like she ran into a house, a Dracula face on the bathroom door, and caution tape near the staircase. We celebrated Halloween, and soon thought about decorating for Christmas. Well, needless to say, the Halloween decorations stayed up. One of my roommates decided that we should leave our decorations up all year around, no matter what season we were in. So now we have garland, witches, snowflakes and a soon to be added string of Valentine's hearts. I love my roommates to death, and I constantly laugh at their crazy and wild antics. However, the obsession with decorations is going slightly overboard. I feel like I'm going crazy when I see decorations from every holiday imaginable, or I wonder if I'm forgetting what month we're in.



As you can see in the picture, it's a little crazy. I was always under the impression that you waited so many days or weeks after the holiday, and then the decorations came down. Apparently, here, that rule does not apply. The one thing that I think about is what their houses are going to look like when they have families of their own. Are they going to be crazy decorators still? We can only wait to find out. I may have a roommate that's one day known for their crazy lights at Christmas that can be seen from space.

You Never Know...

Right now, my roommates are simply my best friends and my family. Being so far away from home, we function like a family. We do everything other families do, we laugh, we fight, we cry, we make-up, just to do it all over again. The girls are my family away from home, and we help each other get through every day. We don't know where we'll be in 2 years, 5 years or even 10 years. We can hope to still be close and see each other, but who knows what the future holds? Where will we all be in 10 years? We could be living close together, or on opposite ends of the world. We also can't guess where we will be holding a job. We can't predict anything of the future, we can hope to still be close, but things change too often to have any certainity.

Browsing the web today, during my well-deserved homework break, I came across something that caught my attention and led to write this post. The 44th President of the United States officially became President today, Barack Obama. Everything on the Internet, radio, and television was about his offical inauguration today. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing or seeing it. The Internet had constant updates of the day's events, where President Obama was, what everyone was wearing, you name it, they updated it. I snuck a quick look at the New York Times website, to see their coverage, and came across a blog that I found interesting. President Obama's former roommate at Columbia University talked about his time with the President in their three room railroad flat, with unreliable heat and water. There was no way this man knew his roommate in college would go on to become the President of the United States. I could never imagine the shock, seeing the guy you went to the university gym with and slept in the next room to, on the tv, taking the oath of office.

This got me thinking about my roommates and our futures. What will become of us? English is a major for two of us, so we're still deciding where that will take us. Another is a concurrent education major, she'll be a teacher no doubt. The other two are Arts and Science majors, one with concentrations in biology and classics, the other interested in math and french. What if one of them invents the cure for cancer or solves some math equation that has never been solved before, and wins a Nobel Prize? It seems unrealistic now, we're just trying to make it through each day. You never know though. I could be living with the first female Prime Minister of Canada.

Maybe.

Let me set the stage for everyone. February 2008. I made the decision to live with four roommates in a university owned residence. What an adventure that turned out to be.

I live four and a half hours away from home, hailing from a city 30 minutes outside of Toronto, Whitby. I spent my first year of university in residence, living with one roommate. I lived on the same floor with 30 other people. After a crazy first year, I chose to do it all over again. I signed up t live with four of my best friends, all girls, in a townhouse style residence, restricted for upper year students. It was a place that offered the convinence of residence, but the freedom of independent living. We chose to live above a houseful of boys, who were all floormates the year before. All the boys are like brothers to me, and they treat me like a little sister. We're all very close, so in fact that two of my roommates are dating two of the boys downstairs. Sometimes, we get on each other's nerves, but in the end, we all love each other.

The purpose of my blog is to share my experiences of living in residence and with roommates with fellow bloggers. I hope to offer some tips on how to deal with some situations that may come up while living with roommates and just some stories and experiences we face together. I hope to find other bloggers out there that blog about the same thing, and maybe some sites that offer tips and ideas.

Look for my next blog soon.