As I write these words, it is Sunday night. Move-in Weekend is coming to a close, and the Berkeley campus is overrun with freshpeople. There’s lots of them, disproportionately lots of them, since other undergrads don’t really need to be here until next week. But instead of simply mocking their gawky clothes, or lusting after their hot, nubile near-jailbaitness, let us ponder the significant events happening in the dorms tonight:
A lonely freshman from Massachusetts begins a lifelong cigarette addiction simply because he wants an excuse to stand outside and talk to the guy across the hall he spotted wearing a System of a Down T-shirt.
A chemistry major from Orange County desperately tries to think of a way to casually work his SAT score into conversation.
Three different girls in three different dorm rooms simultaneously hang identical black-and-white prints of “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville.”
In Ida Sproul Hall three guys named Dave are all assigned the same triple room. Down the hall, two other Daves share a double room. At no point in the upcoming year will any of them switch to “David.” In the Housing office, the administrators do another bong hit.
Four weeks of anxious anticipation end in disappointment when a freshman from Fresno learns that the girl he met at CalSO has decided she just really likes being single right now.
After five minutes of soul-searching and internal struggle outside the Sweetheart Cafe, a young man decides that ordering a honeydew boba tea would indeed make him gay. He gets a Pepsi.
An EECS major’s heart leaps when he mentions Akira to his roommates, and nobody laughs or even says “What’s that?” GAA they just nod knowingly.
While her roommate listens unaware, a girl plays the first of what will eventually be 324 renditions of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” over the course of the year on her Winamp player.
A future medical career is derailed when an intended biology major is forced to sign up for two separate 8 a.m. lab sections. He will drop both classes, and enroll in the Haas School of Business two years later.
Two guys discuss the situation at length and reach a consensus that, yeah, there are probably a lot of hot girls at Cal that they just haven’t met yet, probably because they just live on another floor or something.
In a horribly shortsighted decision, a girl from San Diego chooses “blinkfan@berkeley.edu” as her e-mail address. She will type it in with shame for her final five semesters.
A nervous freshman boy leans against the wall of the first stall of his co-ed bathroom, going through prime numbers in his head in an attempt to relax enough to urinate. In a nearby shower stall, a different boy whistles as he pees directly into the drain.
A 19-year-old virgin grabs two condoms from the bowl outside the Health Worker’s room, just in case.
A hike to the Big C begins, inevitably doomed to suck ass.
