omgitsemmy's blog

I know my last rant and probably every other post I’ve written would indicate that I had a horrible experience here, but that is just not true. This was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done-- things here just seemed to be exhausting, straining and never kind of panned out the way you’d expect. But these are all lessons you  have to learn at some point in your life and I’m glad they’ve come here. I hate that when bad things happen people need to juxtapose a kind of meaning to them, saying, “well it only made me stronger.” There are certain kinds of adversities that we shouldn’t welcome, like cancer or violence, but there are certain kinds that we need to go through to grow up a bit and to test ourselves, limits and values. How can we be so confident in the traits that we love about ourself if they aren’t fixed and don’t hold up when obstacles get in our way? We all feel strong and proud when things are easy. But it’s nice to know who we are when we feel weak. There were moments here when I honestly didn’t think I could get through all the work I had. Seven, 3,000 word papers in 4 weeks. That just didn’t seem possible to me given the head I was in. I had always been an over achiever in high school and in college and the quality of my work just didn’t feel good, I am a writer and I hadn’t really been writing except on here, I hadn’t been eating right, I just felt like I was dwindling. But I did it, I did all of that work and I finished early and I did it because I had to do it, because it was important to me that I did it and that I did it well. I like that in the end, my ambition will get the better of me-- that was probably most rewarding.

When I get back to New York City I am going to eat, I am going to eat everything and become subsumed in delicious coffee from street carts to Mud Trucks to hippie coffee shops. I think what I’ll do differently there is really become a part of the city. It’s the place that I feel like is my home, that I feel like shaped me as a person more than most things. I want to experience all of it more fully. I want to really look at the streets and buildings that I walk by everyday. I want to figure out why it shaped me the way it has and maybe get to know its history a little better. Maybe pretend like I’m a tourist a little bit..

I’ll always remember playing drinking games in K.’s kitchen where we all ask the same questions over and over again and still remained surprised at the dumb answers we gave during Kings. I’ll remember trying to speak spanish in Barcelona to a woman who clearly spoke English and was just messing with me. I’ll remember all the British crazies in Camden trying to explain America to me. I’ll remember talking to my parents on the phone and pretending that I was having a good time so that they wouldn’t worry about me. I’ll remember feeling closer to my family and friends than ever before, being so far away. I’ll remember the sound of slamming doors in Guilford. The sound of different gaits on the creaky floor. Waking up to cloudy skies every morning. I’ll remember the phrase “Emmy your life is a mess, but that’s OK, you’re a writer.” I’ll remember the student riots and wishing that something like that would happen in America. I’ll remember that everyone in Paris has a vespa, baguette and a cigarette and that I ate the best food I’ve ever eaten there. I’ll remember being around people who were so diametrically different than me and wondering if we could ever be friends and realizing that it was important for all our paths to cross even if just in this temporal world. I’ll remember Tesco sandwiches, digestive biscuits and almost getting hit by a car on a daily basis. I’ll remember it all. I couldn’t have asked for a more meaningful experience. Peace out, London! So long, Scarecrow! Farewell my black balloon! Tell the Queen it wasn’t meant to be, but the tea was good and the neighbors were quiet.

Would I recommend this site? No. Boo. I chose London because I had never been on an airplane and thought a country that was English speaking with a different history might be nice a transition. I feel like I could have just moved to Boston for a few months and had the same experience. But different strokes, and some people find the easiness of London to be more attractive than the knitty gritty excitement of New York City, where I am from. However, I DO NOT recommend this site, SOLELY for the pure and utter shittiness that is the NYU in London administration. They could give a fuck about us. Let me make this clear. They could give a FUCK! We are not allowed to live anywhere else but the dorms, which of course are overpriced. $6,300 to share one room with 3 other people, delicious! But that is expected. NYU is looking to make a cheap dollar any way it can. Most of which is by hiring shotty contractors to “renovate” the dormitory that they were still hot gluing and duct taping together when we got here. We have consistently had, NO HEAT, NO HOT WATER, and the fire alarm goes off about 495848 times a day. On top of that the guards treat us with such little respect so much so that they would COME INTO MY APARTMENT to tell my roommate that she should open the window when she is cooking. Thanks for the advice, make yourself a sandwich while you’re here! (Every goddamned day) So much so that they watch us going upstairs on the security cameras to make sure we go to our rooms. The NYU administration set up an 11 o’clock curfew in which we cannot sign in other NYU students who live in the opposite dorm. Even if it’s 10:30 the guards will still give you shit and refuse. What is the point in this? Safety? OK, that makes sense, we sign each other in you know who is in the building. The reason why this curfew is such a problem is because NYU provides no spaces for us to study and we are frequently assigned group projects and perhaps we might just go somewhere else if everywhere didn’t close at 5pm. When we voiced our complaints  they said “you’re in another country deal with it.” They ignore our emails. They are smug and condescending, who presume that all of us must be spoiled brats who just like to complain when not having the water we paid for STILL at the end of the year is a reasonable complaint.  I cannot emphasize the complete and utter lack of respect and blatant indifference that my peers and I have experienced.

So, I’ve been meaning to get that off my chest. With that said this was not a bad experience but it could have been better had we not be treated like children in a prison. Just because something is an “experience” doesn’t mean you need to be deprived of basic necessities. Things will spice themselves up!  London it self has some cool spots, Camden Town and the East End, pretty cool, worth seeing if you are here, I wouldn’t say they are worth coming here for. I think studying abroad ANYWHERE is a worth while experience. I never expected to be so homesick or to feel like a different person. But feeling that way has ultimately been more productive than not. My friend N. always said, “EMMY didn’t you come here to find yourself?!” I think for a while I lost myself, but you can’t find something that’s already there. I’ve never worked so hard, drank so much, puked so much, laughed so much or cried so much. I don’t regret a single thing.

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“Thanksgiving Break” in London to my dismay, they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving! What?! Can you imagine? Everything isn’t the same everywhere? Anyway, NYUL’s administration did not hesitate to send us emails assuring us that they want our asses in class because they could not give less of a shit.

 

After being invited to several celebrations and agreeing to go to all of them ‘cause I am an idiot, all, “It’s Thursday? Sounds familiar, I think I have something to do that day, but it’s probably not important.” Then Thursday came and everyone is all, blaaah at me. Anyway, I opted to partake in none of my viable options. 

 

My family back home isn’t particularly religious, we’re not particularly close to our extended family and we’re not particularly involved in one another’s lives the way other families are, but we certainly love each other and we’ve never had to question or wonder about this the way other’s do examining their shortcomings and breaches of expectations. We could never afford to go on vacations or family outings. We never really did the kind of stuff that families are supposed to do. But my family’s love is reciprocal and largely unspoken of. I have a mom, a dad and an older brother. Every Thanksgiving my mom cooks way to much food, like waaaay too much for the four of us. We eat, never at the dinner table, but in the living room on the couch or in my parent’s room, or even in our separate rooms. Then next day my dad makes breakfast with leftovers and we eat again.  We expect nothing more or less and this is the only ritual we have.

But now I’m over here and my parents live there and my brother moved there and who is going to watch his dog? This makes things largely difficult and so over the phone my mom declared no Thanksgiving, not until I get back, because what would be the point? And I agree, what would be the point? Some say families are grown not bred and maybe I could have started a new family here or tradition, maybe that would have been nice. I could hear the others outside going back and fourth laughing and celebrating together and I’m sure that was nice. But sometimes there’s no sense in grasping for something new when what you’ve got is just fine, even if it feels a million miles away. 

I think De Botton is saying something interesting about the “travel mindset” in his discussion on “traveling around my bedroom.” It’s the expectation of “newness” and “exoticism” when we travel that we are searching for. This was at first my disappointment when I arrived at London. It wasn’t different enough. But there is something to be said about the familiar. In writing it’s the process of “de-familiarization” where the author takes an object or something easily recognizable but describes it in away that makes it appear strange or different. Imagine if we could do this all the time, if we saw every cup that we drank from as its own individual cup and not just another cup. But I wonder if there is a juxtaposition of specialness when forcefully trying to make something unique. It is also arguable though, that humans, as meaning making creatures always do this, but we do it arbitrarily so. Is there really a difference between the post-card of the Mona Lisa or the real thing? Some might argue that the real thing has an aura and that its replication diminishes this. But I would assert that we simply want to feel something special when we see things that are supposed to be special. 

When we travel we expect to see things that are special, which I find is becoming some what more difficult given the exportation of capitalism, globalization and cultural diffusion. For me the only things that really distinguish cultures are the values and attitudes that have evolved through a previous cultural history that was once more isolated by the mere incidence of a lack of technology. 

Now we all eat McDonalds and drink Starbucks, everywhere. Capitalism is the North Star of the world. It kind of dismantles the mindset of exoticism that we hunger for when we travel and perhaps forces us to stay at home and find new things the way De Botton suggests. 

He was a stout man of average height. Round, round head, round gut. His plaid shirt tucked into his jeans wrapped in a leather belt that he would grip momentarily, almost making sure it was there every few seconds. He had a smug face as if he knew something everyone else didn’t. Like “oh this is all bullshit” or “oh this is a reality show” or “oh I secretly hate you all.” Cogs and wheels clearly turned in his head discerning something different than what was coming out of his mouth. 

He was the mumbling type, he looked down when he spoke and walked around the classroom. His voice came in and out and his sentence or phrase would often finish with something that was intended to be a joke. No one got it. No one ever gets it. But he’d smirk and force out a laugh, half amused by himself, half embarrassed by it falling short.

He’s middle aged, probably, but still has a spark that’s not yet resigned and when he’d show us boring documentaries he wouldn’t pay attention either but text message on his phone. He knows quite a bit about what he is talking about but no one seems particularly interested, ever. The awkward silence often fills the classroom until someone forces out a comment. He looks disappointed because he doesn’t expect much and demands even less. He can never figure out why this happens every week, but every week it must happen. 

Street coffee is my favorite cafe in the East End (in London, dam you Costa!). A tiny sign pokes out as you’re walking down Brick Lane. It says “COFFEE” in glowing, thin pink letters. You’d probably walk past it a thousand times unless you looked inside. Another trendy coffee shop, yes! With furniture that looks like it was found in the street. Endless outlets for your laptop. A lamp with only the shell of its wire shade sits on the bar stool across from the barista counter. Next to it sits a plastic electronic globe from when Russia was still the U.S.S.R. and a stack of “Just Seventeen” magazines from the 80s’ with interviews from when Bret Easton Ellis had just written Less Than Zero.
 
The dimply lit coffee shop with street art and fliers to shows that you consider going to, but never will, is full of other trendy young people in fur coats and leggings. Young people with bleach blond hair shaved on one side. With leopard print flat shoes. Young dudes with leather jackets and bowler caps. They are all too part of the coffee shops layout and aesthetic. I feel cheap here, everyone is peacocking, do I look as good as they do? Do I care? Nope. They’re just props, much like the young baristas with similar attire. They’re friendly, they remember me because I go there often enough-- often enough to have earned a free coffee. 

It’s always crowded there. People are always peeking into see if  seats are available then walking out, but I always manage to find one. There’s always one there, waiting for me. It’s the only place  where I (I would want to) can be by myself and a part of the world without the tainting of other NYU students (no offense). There are no proper places to study at NYUL (what the hell?!) and everything closes early. So alas, I take that trip on the tube, walk many many blocks and there it is Street Coffee. My own private get away.

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When I first began reading Virgina Woolf’s The London Scene, a book of six essays describing the London experience, I rolled my eyes and sighed. The first impression in the essay “The Docks of London” is, oh no this is going to be completely self-satisfying and glorifying. The docklands as I learned in a class on immigration were worked on by mostly poor, Jamaican immigrants, historically. They were gone for weeks, worked long hours in horrible conditions, paid very little, couldn’t get much rank on the ships they worked on, all of this took place on those ships Woolf describes quite beautifully and majestically. But her description does not end there. 

The image of the glorified London comes to a halt and Woolf begins to describe a kind of gloomy, decaying London. But Woolf's description is not a criticism of what goes on in those Docks, but is suggestive of a critique on industrialization and environmentalism. "Can it be that there is Earth, that there once were fields and crops underneath this desolation and disorder?" She condemns "labor" and longs for "pleasure" in the natural world. What's amazing to me about this particular essay (from a writer's standpoint) is that it is all description and yet clearly implicit of more complex ideas about capitalism, industry and aesthetic. 

My experience at the docklands was a bit different than hers, but the critique would be the same. Tall buildings, glass, pristine, an underground maze of commercial shopping stores and franchises, business men in suits who are the only ones that can navigate this area. The area that is still quite desolate and empty. It's sinister, even now that it is clean-- almost too clean. What's most interesting to me is how clear and present the seeds of the future are and how very easily we ignore their ominous message. 

This past 2 weeks (almost 2 weeks)  was NYU in London’s big holiday off. Eagerly, the overworked and overstressed adolescents of NYUL scattered like flies with carry-ons, passports, and oh-my-god-i’m-about-to-miss-my-flights, creating mayhem all over Europe and even Africa. I spent my break in Barcelona and Amsterdam, a nice dichotomy. Good food vs. horrible food. Nice weather vs. horrible weather. Illegal recreational drug use vs. legal recreational drug use. I’d like to spare you details, for my own sake, of my nefarious antics but I’m not going to do that. 

I’ll say this blog has certainly helped me document a metamorphosis in which I enter my beautiful chrysalis a caterpillar and exit a budding alcoholic. But I’ll also say my life isn’t as melodramatic as I am capable of articulating it. And so this “travel story” begins. 

Preface: I don’t remember any of this happening. I had never blacked out before. But this is what probably happened: So the drinks in Barcelona are like waaaaay bigger. They are like waaaay bigger and they fill half those gigantic glasses with liquor. They do not do this in London. Everyone drinks beer here, I do not, so they overcharge for mixed drinks and water down all the liquor. No one in London gets drunk at bars, not unless they pregame. I am a light weight, but being in London distorted this for me. In essence the last thing I remember is going to Club Mix in the Gothic Quarter. Club Mix is not a club. Club Mix is a dimly lit bar with vampire looking decor and scantily clad waitresses that hover next to your table, practically with their palms out, waiting to be paid, as you sip your over-priced black russian with way too much alcohol in it. So you pay her and she goes away. Then you turn around and slurringly say to N. “That waitress was such a biiiiiiitch,” then you take the beautiful, large, crystal ashtray at your table and put it in your purse. “Now we’re even.” Now you’re a scumbag, it’s official. A ton of other customers see you, but you don’t care, you are justified, you are drunk, next bar. Mojito, Margarita, Baileys, Wine-- uh oh!

Here comes the blur: It’s time to go home. You have to pee. You pee wherever, honestly wherever. You drunkenly text message your friend in Canada because he is so great. You yell at N. because you think we are lost. You get into the Metro, you puke on the train. You puke on your dress. You puke on your hands. There is puke on your face. It’s your stop. You slip in your puke. You face plant on the floor. You teleport back to your hostel. N. tells you go to the bathroom. You say, “I’m not going to puke, I’ll drink some water.” You puke. You puke all over the hostel floor. You puke all over your leather jacket. You puke all over your purse. You will not get the puke smell out of these things, ever. You puked your little brains out, then you went to Amsterdam. 

As I was drunkenly bumbling about the streets of London, lost from my friends, phoneless, moneyless and confused-- the tube was shut and I was a long way from home-- I had a cathartic moment: Ah! Yes, my life is a mess. But your life is a mess too in London. It was as if during the same moment in time a wave of temporal English rain fell upon all of our brows and began to follow us, hanging overhead, dark and stormy-- lame. 

 

But in the moment that I sat on the stoop at 3am, wiping tears from my eyes, thinking about how I had practically become one of the bridge and tunnel girls on a Friday night in NYC with no shoes, body glitter and running mascara because of some mysterious club incident-- I hate those girls.  And as the polite, male stranger (who could have killed me) hailed me a cab and gave me a 5’er, I realized that my life wasn’t a mess. That none of our lives were really a mess, they were just different. They weren’t the lives we were used to leading and so they felt wrong. They just felt wrong. These aren’t the things I normally do so they must be bad. 

 

Living somewhere else is a challenge. Not because of any culture shock-- there hardly is any, relative to other abroad sites-- it’s because we are inexplicably forced to critically look at ourselves when we face new choices that are seemingly meaningless. The sheer temporality of studying abroad. “Once and a life time experience,” that’s what everyone says. “When else are you going to get the chance to..” Each and everyone one of us is trying to jam pack our moments here with meaning and when they feel meaningless we feel useless. We’re not living here, we’re LIVING IT UP here. We’re burnt out with weeks to go. We’re tired of the constant social decorum, the excessive spending, we’re tired of wanting more, of trying to suck, squeeze, drain and extract every drop of London and life and travel and excitement and newness and exoticism and energy and whatever else we can find that’s worth telling someone else about later. 

 

We’re obsessively and compulsively trying to make meaning and value so much so that we are exhausted. Now we feel cheap, hedonistic, impractical, neglectful, reckless and yet, probably most of all, we’re still worried that we haven’t done all that we can do here. 
 

So when I got home that night to my phone with missed calls and texts. I plopped into bed and instead of thinking about all the places I should go, I thought about where I had been and could revisit, because what I was missing wasn’t some great adventure in a foreign land, it was a sense of mundanity and comfort, it was a routine in my new home. 

I’ve read Goffman’s The Presentation of Self In The Everyday Life and I think MacCannell makes some interesting connections to that and tourism. In my experience in London social decorum does become more tricky because your accent always reveals that you are an outsider.  Not only this, but I’m sure you can apply the Heisenberg principle to any experience: by observing something we ultimately change it. 

In this way there is no way to get into the back of the stage, at least not interactively. Once you reveal yourself as a stranger, as an American, then the conversation becomes about archetypes. “It’s like that over there, well it’s like this over here.” What would I see if I gazed into the windows of a British home? A few old hens sipping tea? How many google searches have me and my friends done to find an authentic pub? What makes it authentic? The crowd an authentic pub must attract, must be authentic people? How do we know if a person is authentic or not, especially if according to Goffman we are always wearing a mask for the occasion?

But we do know when reality is being blatantly constructed by overpriced knick-knacks and stereotypes. As a New Yorker I know that Times Square isn’t the coolest place to hang out. What we’re really looking for is the difference between an apple picked off the tree in a farm and buying one at Walmart. We’re looking for a world that seems untainted by capitalism and commercialism. We feel things are authentic when we’re not being sold a culture, but being immersed in it. I don’t know if there is anything spiritual about this, I do know that when I go to a tourist area I immediately feel like I am being conned and cheated. 

There is, however, something to be said about traveling because we want to experience something different and there is something enticing about seeing how others’ day-to-day life strays away from our own. But in the end I think we strive for authentic experiences not for the novelty of rituals or odd customs, but to truly find some kind of connection with people who appear so distant. Mostly we’re just trying to find our own authentic self. 

In Small Island Andrea Leavy creates a story about navigating fantasy and reality. Hortense and Bernard dream of leaving Jamaica to go to Britain. In their minds they've created this idealized nation. But similar to the immigrant stories in the U.S. about the American Dream, the fantasy of escaping poverty and gaining respect was simply unreal. Hortense and Bernard finally move to Britain but instead encounter extreme racism in spite of their citizenship and loyalty to the Queen.

While I cannot compare my own experience to such extremes. It is clear that as an American we tend to build up these fantasies about where we are going abroad. But it isn't until we finally get to London that we realize the English don't all look like Ricky Jervais, have bad teeth and pompous attitudes. Likewise the stories I hear about how great America is here are just wrong. People think Muslims are welcomed with open arms and that we have the best comedy because Jim Carey is the best! That is just wrong. Small Island teaches one to appreciate things for what they are as opposed to holding things up to what they are not.

Instead of complaining that London is not New York City, that things close to early or the food is horrible. I can say that I love the markets and the idiosyncratic people I meet. There are things here that I simply cannot get anywhere else. But I only know that because I have truly experienced it, not because of things I've heard or seen on television. Like the characters in Small Island who have to reconcile their fantasies of the Motherland, we all have to negotiate the fact that the codes and symbols encoded in our culture don't always represent the truth about all the places we've decided we want to go.

I couldn’t think of anything to write because my brain is a puddle of soggy biscuits drenched in the bottle of wine that accompanies me right now. Today is the aftermath of The Great Fall of the Emerald Empire. I’m Emerald, but you don’t really care. What I’m talking about is the 3000+ word paper that absorbed all my brain power like the brand new model of an apple product does its battery after a month. Malfunction. I malfunctioned. But I don’t do that. I talk ever so much self-assured shit about my academic prowess. Not in a douchey way. I swear not in a douchey way. But when it comes up, my ability to churn out a decent paper in a short amount of time might be mentioned. I don’t stress about school because I can’t handle stress. So I avoid it. Duh. That makes sense. 

I mistriangulated. I always finish my papers two days before they are due. Count them. 48 hours--  How many minutes is that? I don’t know math, I’m in Gallatin-- before they are due. I hate feeling rushed. 

But abroad you don’t function on your normal schedule. I mean for fucks sake, I don’t even know what’s going on in Gossip Girl! I’m all out of whack. I’m a wino, now. But everyone says that’s OK because writers are drunks, “you’re a mess, Emmy. it’s good though.” That’s what they say, my awesome friends! So when I said, no I’m just staying in tonight. When I said, no I have work to do. They told me they’d be over in half an hour and K. came out into the hall because she heard voices and we should come over to next door to play drinking games and let’s go to Tesco to get mixers for that Smirnoff of yours because N. never gets drunk because he is 17 feet tall and takes five hours to drink one beer and is too cheap to by a second. Let’s have fun, we’re in London. “Are we  going to talk to each other after this?” “Of course we are, we didn’t know each other before, we know each other now, well, we have to”. And then we pondered for half a second about whether any of us meant that and who we were before we came and who we would be when we return and are we the same person now or just in some weird transitory limbo. Because when N. is sober he always says “Emmy didn’t you come to London to find yourself?” and I say, “Yes. EMMY!! EMMY!! Where are you?!” But when N. is drunk he says ever so candidly, “Emmy I love you. I want to know who you were before here. Were you a whore?” 

Then I wrote my paper, with a stunning bibliography, and it mostly sucked. 

What interests me most about Banksy is not really his artwork so much as the mystery around him. Moreover, the fact that when wandering the streets of London, the posh residences, the cobblestone alley ways-- oh look there’s a Banksy. You stare at it for a moment, you laugh, you keep walking. I’m not a visual person, so no painting, graffiti or exhibition will sustain any kind of aura in my presence. 

What’s more interesting to me is how his art has become commodified-- T-shirt bootlegs and merchandise fill the Camden Markets and how he has become a myth himself. Banksy isn’t just an artist he’s a part of mainstream popular culture, but he himself remains anonymous although having done a few interviews, maintaining an agent and a website. 

His fame clearly comes from his mystery, but we shouldn’t forget no one would have cared if his political, guerilla art wasn’t substantial, meaningful or just cool to look at. I wonder, how many people keep his secret? How many people does it take to vandalize a wall without being seen? What is the point in keeping it all a secret? Is it simply for creating a gimmick making it easier to profit off of your art, which is impossible for most artists? Or is there a genuine desire for privacy? I also wonder if there are Banksy copy-cats and if he takes credit for them. 

Either way there is something about the grittiness of the art  that adds something to London. A darker more cosmopolitan feel to the posh neighborhoods and corporate coffee shops attached to the bottoms of castles. 

Everything is expensive-- I think. I mean, if I were paid in pounds then everything would probably be cheaper.  But this exchange rate is a pain. There’s no such thing as a bargain in London when you’re paying by the dollar.  Eating out is a plain and simple, no thanks. Shopping, well, I’m a girl it’s just a part of my nature. But there’s nothing here you can’t get in America so I try to refrain. Drinking-- it’s a part of the culture. It’s inevitable almost. “What are we doing tonight?” “Pub crawling.” “Oh, of course.” That’s where your money goes. Beer. I hate beer. So I drink cider. Everyone finds it harder to get drunk here. The liquor itself is apparently weaker or watered down or something strange. With this transaction rate, if you don’t get drunk, you’re just paying for calories. It’s the lifestyle of a functional alcoholic here in London, at times, anyway. The practical schedule of drinking straight after work, around 5 and being done by 11:30. You still have the full day after. It’s scary how easy it would be to fall into this trend of liquid abuse. 

So you go out, spend too much  money, get drunk, then you realize you have all this work to do. Here in the Guilford dorm this thought may make you want to “eat chocolate and die.” You see, the only comfort you have away from home is chocolate, but you don’t want to return home all obese, so you eat these cookies, excuse me, biscuits, called “Digestives.” The most appetizing name, I know. Well they are pretty much graham crackers with chocolate on them. You get the “Digestives: Light” because they are 30% less fat and after all the cider calories you consumed, you’re going to pretend like you actually care about your body. But you live in the Guilford dorm, so your body is in constant discomfort anyway. Your mattress is lumpy as all hell for no reason. You feel like you’ve slept on a bunch of rocks everyday. After a month you are used to it. You are used to a sore body. You’re also used to never having hot water. You see in the first 3 weeks at Guilford they were still duct taping and paperclipping the building together and didn’t get that whole water situation worked out. So you just didn’t have any. But it was OK, they put you in a hotel 3 days of those 3 weeks and are refunding you some money. But now that you have some water, certainly not hot water, everyone pretends like it’s no big deal.

Now that you’re done complaining you want to go study. But you can’t. There’s no where to study. There’s a library that closes too early and is dimly lit. There’s a study room where people talk and eat instead of studying. There are cafes that serve the worst coffee you’ve ever tasted, have no wifi and generally skeeve you out. There’s a Starbucks, but, it’s Starbucks. So you walk around for an hour? An hour and a half? Trying to find the right place to study, lugging your books and your computer. Then you give up because there just isn’t anywhere that feels right. You’ll work at home-- oh you got a text! You’re so popular. Your friend-- your new best friend that you’ve known for 4 weeks, I mean it really feels like a life time!-- so you go out to a pub. You spend too much money on cider. You’re in bed by 11. You pass out even though your bed feels like a cactus. You wake up in time for class and drink the worst coffee you’ve ever had. You shower. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.