The weather has been unseasonably warm here for February. It is still cold, damp and dreary but unfortunately it is just warm enough for the students at Smallville's institution of higher learning to break out their insanely loud music in order to better torture the inhabitants of Smallville. To me, this is mysterious, unfathomable behavior.
Years ago, during my first week away from home at university in another city, I was invited along to a frat party and, naive and curious, I went. I lasted less than 6 minutes. The music was so loud that, even shouting in people's ears, I couldn't make myself heard. I don't drink alcohol, so there was nothing to do but watch people in a room that seemed to be vibrating with music so loud it was distorted beyond recognition. Unfortunately, the main activity turned out to be boys inviting girls to accompany them upstairs. I wasn't so naive that I didn't know what that meant. When I saw a young man distributing pills, I slipped away, unnoticed, and walked back to my dorm. The relative quiet felt like the sweet balm of early Autumn pouring over me like honey. I watched the sun set and wondered if I really belonged at university.
Luckily, I had garnered a spot in the designated "quiet dorm" (I like to study, okay?) The building itself was well over a hundred years old and had … character. It had been converted from an enormous stately home into a dorm building, so the rooms were weirdly shaped and tiny with a lot of nonfunctional bits and ceilings 12-14 feet high. Plumbing was an afterthought, installed by someone with no respect for architectural integrity and with only the most rudimentary understanding of how the newfangled pipes were meant to work. The pipes had their own symphony of sounds that they performed day and night. It would have been nice if they had also performed their allotted tasks as diligently, but instead various sinks, showers and toilets were forever on the verge of breaking down, actually broken with the attendant signage and puddles, or in the process of being repaired by teams of harassed-looking maintenance men.
One of the first things we learned when moving into the dorm was that the cold part of shower water came from the same tiny inflow valves as the toilets, so if a toilet was flushed while the shower was running, the water in the shower would briefly become a scalding torrent. If someone was taking a shower, we were obliged to shout out, "Flushing!" before actually flushing to warn them to step out of the flow of water for the 30 seconds or so it took to refill the toilet tank. Since bellowing loudly enough to be heard over a shower is not in my repertoire of volumes, there were many mornings I spent dancing around outside the bathroom waiting for a shower to be turned off before I could relieve myself.
Why, you might wonder, was the water so very hot? Well, it also was used in the radiators to heat the building. In my sheltered life I had never previously encountered radiators, and the banging, rattling, singing, screeching and gurgling that they produced still haunts my dreams sometimes. For a "quiet" dorm, it was pretty raucous. The thermostat controls didn't actually work, so I had two choices in my postage stamp sized dorm room: either a sweltering 85-90 degrees or icy cold with frost building on the walls and windows.
Today, hearing the distorted music from across town, punctuated by inarticulate shouts and whoops and howls of students … celebrating? letting off steam? protesting? … brings back to me the horrors of 7:00 AM final exams, the crackle of brittle linoleum floors, the gritty feel of never getting enough sleep, and the weight of the backpack full of textbooks that I schlepped everywhere so that even a few minutes in the laundry room or waiting for a class to start could be utilized to finish some reading or scribble down some notes for an upcoming essay.
Most of all I remember the feeling of transience, of not belonging, and wondering if I ever would. Maybe it is that feeling that has the students screaming wordlessly while the distorted music pounds through them.
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