{"id":212,"date":"2006-03-26T22:27:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-26T22:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5265.temp.domains\/~brucewi2\/photos\/2006\/03\/26\/nick-9-25-2004-life-within-oberlin\/"},"modified":"2019-09-02T21:50:44","modified_gmt":"2019-09-02T21:50:44","slug":"nick-9-25-2004-life-within-oberlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/nick-9-25-2004-life-within-oberlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick 9\/25\/2004:  Life within Oberlin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lo.<\/p>\n<p>College is like the best ever, I&#8217;m more happy now than I&#8217;ve been since I was<br \/>a woodpecker, and I have the luck of a creamless bagel: not only did I get a<br \/>corner room, but I pretty much got the sweetest floor in the sweetest dorm<br \/>(all first-years). Everyone is interesting and hangs out all the time and<br \/>random conversations between lounge denizens about whatever frequently last<br \/>until five and everyone has sooo much music and there&#8217;s frequent<br \/>table-rolling through the halls (and down the stairs where you jump over<br \/>them like in Donkey Kong)! But like on 2nd floor, I&#8217;ve heard, no one leaves<br \/>their rooms and when they do, there&#8217;s just mad drama all the time. Plus<br \/>there are ghosts down there.<\/p>\n<p>Also, somehow I managed to score 16 credit hours&#8217; worth of classes but not<br \/>have to spend more than a few hours per week doing homework. All the other<br \/>people are always moaning, &#8220;Ohhh, I should be doing my hoooomewoooork,&#8221; and<br \/>I figure they just have a lot of homework that day, but then they&#8217;ll have to<br \/>do even more the next day, and the next week, and so on forever. Whereas I<br \/>seem to have none: chemistry is all review for me at this point so I don&#8217;t<br \/>need to do problems, computer science is easy to grasp with no problems to<br \/>do outside of lab, poetry is just reading a few poems each week and writing<br \/>one poem (which takes a long time but that&#8217;s not really work), and Go class<br \/>is further from work than chunky peanut butter from a red balloon. The only<br \/>class I have to really do anything for is Words that Matter, reading a<br \/>miniscule amount and writing two two-page essays a week (or one five page<br \/>essay), but I figured out how to do those swiftly instead of laboriously.<br \/>The secret is kung-fu. Seriously, the last paper practically wrote itself<br \/>because it had Jet Li in it (it was about the excellent film Hero (and the<br \/>use of language in it or something silly like that)).<\/p>\n<p>So when everyone else is too busy working to play Soul Calibur II or throw<br \/>the spikeball around, I borrow DVDs from other halldudes. So far I&#8217;ve<br \/>watched: Bottle Rocket (lame), Get Shorty (okay), Monty Python&#8217;s The Meaning<br \/>of Life (not as funny as the other ones), Amadeus (aurally pleasurable),<br \/>Koyaanisqatsi (visually pleasurable and sleep-inducing), Dark City (sweet),<br \/>and Waking Life (undeniably, unmitigatedly, undulatingly awesome). I&#8217;ll like<br \/>raid Bill and Nick1&#8217;s room for a DVD and they&#8217;ll be working, and then I&#8217;ll<br \/>watch it and come back for another one and they&#8217;ll still be working, and so<br \/>on, and each time they&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;You seriously don&#8217;t have any work to do?<br \/>I hate you.&#8221; And then I went and wrote the same paper they&#8217;d been working on<br \/>the whole time (they&#8217;re in my Words that Matter class) and came back and<br \/>they were still doing theirs. Poor dudes tried to write their papers on<br \/>Beowulf instead of Hero.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also watched Amelie, 10 Things I Hate About You, When Harry Met Sally,<br \/>Labyrinth, Sweet November, Return of the Jedi, The Lord of the Rings: The<br \/>Two Towers, and Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro just from wandering into<br \/>the lounge or scoring free movies shown in a lecture hall. And in the local<br \/>movie theater, I&#8217;ve seen The Manchurian Candidate, Without a Paddle,<br \/>Fahrenheit 9\/11, and Hero (twice; it&#8217;s the most beautiful movie ever!), all<br \/>for $8 total. Life is good and movies are cheap, so I have extra money to<br \/>buy stuff with. I went to the store and bought a 5 1\/2&#8243; styrofoam ball, a<br \/>12-pack of rubber bands, a 100-pack of wooden skewers, a 20-pack of tacks,<br \/>and a deck of cards. I left the cards in the lounge, stabbed some cardboard<br \/>to the tackboard with the tacks, wrapped the rubber bands geometrically<br \/>around the ball, and then stabbed it with a bunch of the skewers, creating<br \/>an awesome spike ball which the RA made me take down from the ceiling<br \/>because it would set the building on fire or something.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m eating well, eggs, apples, bagels, and powdered-sugared, cream-filled<br \/>long johns forming the majority of my diet (guess which one I eat the most<br \/>of!). Working in the dining hall is cool because I wash dishes during<br \/>breakfast, and almost no one gets up early enough to eat breakfast, so it&#8217;s<br \/>whistling time. Except for last Thursday, something smelled extremely foul<br \/>by the incoming dishes area so I had to watch from afar until someone<br \/>deposited a tray, then take a deep breath and rush in to wash it and run out<br \/>before I ran out of air. I got a paycheck for $35.86, I&#8217;m gonna be lazy and<br \/>not deposit it until forever though.<\/p>\n<p>The recharging power cord thing for my razor is lost, I think it traveled<br \/>with me not. My razor is out of bloodlust and rarely works, so I&#8217;m getting<br \/>like beardified. Oh, woe.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m trying to convert my friends to the ways of the shoeless, but they are<br \/>mostly stuck in their ways and will not walk without wearing woeful<br \/>wrappings on their feet. My feet are free and joyful, though. The only time<br \/>I have to wear shoes is working in the cafeteria and when blowing stuff up<br \/>in the chemistry lab.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve attached two pictures: one is my glorious ball of spike and the other<br \/>is my roommate (he is sick and just got up, plus he&#8217;s undead).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lo. College is like the best ever, I&#8217;m more happy now than I&#8217;ve been since I wasa woodpecker, and I have the luck of a creamless bagel: not only did I get acorner room, but I pretty much got the sweetest floor in the sweetest dorm(all first-years). Everyone is interesting and hangs out all the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2396,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions\/2396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}