I’m standing in line holding a towel, shampoo bottle and bar of soap. There’s two girls in front of me and two behind, all of us waiting for one of three narrow showers to open up.
It’s College Dormitory Life 101, and I’m at the University of Texas in Austin at a summer journalism camp.
While listening to the girls whine about lame boyfriends, I thought about the two years I lived in a college dormitory back in the 1970s.
Heading off to Southeastern Louisiana University was my first big adventure, and I thought life in a dorm would be fabulous.
Back then, sleeping in the top bunk on a hard-as-a-rock university-issued mattress didn’t faze me. Neither did having a community bathroom for everybody on the first floor. I was the eldest of seven in a house with one bathroom, and we made it work.
My roommate and her mom were the decorating types, and they fussed over making sure we had matching blue rib-cord bedspreads from Sears and home-made gingham blue checked curtains. My contribution was a purple fish-net hanging in the corner and a James Taylor Mud Slide Slim poster.
In reality, I could’ve cared less about our decorating scheme. All I cared about was getting away from home and being on my own.
Now We’re Adults
I thought about those days a lot during our seminar as all the campers stayed in an older dorm, Jester West, which was built in 1969 and can accommodate up to 3,000 students.
Fitting a small city on 11 floors requires scrimping on square footage. Each room had two beds, a sink and some shelves, but I don’t think a VW Beetle could fit inside one comfortably.
Throw in two girls with their laptops, power strips to plug in hair dryers, curling irons, flat iron straighteners, cell phone rechargers and iPads and there’s barely enough room for the obligatory stuffed animals and piles of tennis shoes and Crocs.
Then there’s the matter of where to put clothes. Back in the seventies, Karen and I comfortably shared a closet because our wardrobe consisted of T-shirts and bell-bottom jeans.
Today’s college kid must hang clothes hangers from the ceiling to accommodate their 10 pairs of jeans, T-shirts from every punk rock band from the 1980s and two or three sets of pajamas for heading down to the first floor Wendy’s for midnight fries.
That doesn’t even take into account the other essentials: hoodies for cold classrooms, an oversized backpack for long treks across UT’s “40 acres” or a Keurig machine for those needed late-night cups of coffee.
Everybody has to have their own refrigerator and microwave plus a place to store the Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn, instant mac and cheese, hot Cheetos and Pop Tarts. By the time you’ve shoved all that into this tiny room, it’s a wonder college kids don’t suffer from claustrophobia.
But I’m looking at that dorm room from an adult’s perspective. What seems like a tiny space is actually a comfortable cocoon far away from the prying eyes of mom and dad.
And let’s face it. Sharing a community bathroom isn’t a big deal if you find a sympathetic ear about that political science final while waiting in line for the shower. Boring white walls are an invitation to put up profane glow-in-the-dark posters.
As a bonus, might I suggest fish nets in the corners and a James Taylor poster.
I hear retro’s in.