281 things tothemaxxx likes Explore more popular stuff on Tumblr →

When I was in college, I was like, rarely on an even keel.  I hear that this is totally normal: people in college have lots of ways to go crazyballs, like they never leave the library, or they are bad at experimenting with drugs, or they sleep with a billion people and then freak out and confront their drinking problem but it’s too late because they’ve already failed Orgo and their parents are like, “Your voicemail is full!” Another way people can lose their grip during college is that they don’t like co-habitation.

My freshman year, I had a lovely roommate who I can’t bear to diss here because the truth is that she was, and still is, really nice. However, I am an only child, and I’m so bossy, and I really like to be alone; my roommate was not this way, though she is also an only child (I think), and she loved to do things like, oh, dance. And do her hair for hours and hours in front of our tiny mirror. And talk and talk and talk. And watch Interview With A Vampire while reciting all of the lines along with our 13” television. These quirks went from adorable to eh, all right, to making me lose my mind and construct a daily schedule that kept me a) away from her specifically and b) in relative solitude, away from people in general. For instance: nobody much went to the gym before 6 AM, or during peak meal times, so I could read a book next to the running track or listen to my iPod walking s-l-o-w-l-y on the treadmill. The grocery store, a mile or so away, was also a good way to avoid running into people who might want to chat. Oh, and of course, I could walk downtown and hide in the mall. The mall is always there for people who hate to talk to other people.

Eventually, class seemed to be getting in the way of my self-imposed isolation, so I found ways to avoid that, too. And hey, when you’re missing class on the regs, the dorm room you reluctantly share can be yours alone! I put curtains up so that my half of the room was obscured. When my roommate parted them to ask if she could borrow a CD, I leapt up and yelled NO NO THEY’RE MY CDs, and then off I went to get takeout from a sandwich store that specialized in Giant Sandwiches and eat it behind the bleachers all alone. I wasn’t sleeping — instead I found a lonely corner of the library where nobody ventured but me. I wasn’t doing work there, because I’d fallen behind and that would have been depressing, to try to catch up. So I just sat there and wondered, “How the fuck can I move off-campus or drop out of school right now?”

Brown makes you live on-campus for 3 out of your 4 years. There are singles (charmingly called “psycho singles” — this just made me feel better that I wasn’t alone, part of a movement of people who hated roommates), but it was too late for me to get one. I moved in with Molly while I attempted to beat the system somehow. I showed up at Residential Life day after day, looking increasingly decrepit, which I felt would help my cause but was also how I rolled back then. I was so tired that all the ResLife woman had to do was look at me and I’d cry. The only way I might be able to get a single or move off-campus, she said, was to convince the school therapist that I was as crazy as I…was.

I don’t remember how many times you meet with the school shrink before you have to start paying for it or they refer you to someone local. I did know, however, that it was important that I impress upon this dude how much I was losing my grip and needed even, like, a janitor’s closet to live in versus proximity-to-people conditions. I sat down and introduced myself, and he asked what the problem was, and I dissolved into a puddle while he patiently watched and I told him I hadn’t slept in four months and I wished I could just wrap myself up in a cloak of Invisible and eat my giant sandwiches in my own space because for whatever reason I couldn’t function as a part of society. And he nodded, and passed me Kleenex, and asked where I grew up.

“New York,” I said. This was confusing. Who cared? I needed a note, man! “Then I moved to Connecticut for a few years, and then I moved to LA.”

“And so your parents are in LA.”

“No, they moved back to Connecticut.”

“Why?”

I paused. My tears had dried. This was irrelevant.

“I suppose they liked it.”

He scratched his head and looked aggravated. “Look, I’m just trying to get this straight. So they were in LA, and then when did they move?”

This went on. He appeared to be drawing some sort of diagram of the migrations of my family across US states, and he wasn’t understanding his own approximations. Why would they move here, then —? And then back? What was LA like, anyhow? Was it that bad?

Eventually, our time was up. “I’d like to see you next week,” he said. “And will you be around over the break, or will you be in LA?”

“I’ll…no. Like I said. I don’t live there any more. Remember?”

He looked at his notepad. “Sheesh, that’s right!” he said. “This is going to take forever for me to remember!”

“You don’t have to remember. It doesn’t matter. My problem is here, at school.”

I went to the empty gym to sit on a stationary bike and think. Was I closer to the goal, to moving into a single? Did I feel any better at all? Was this a tactic that the bespectacled, balding doctorman had devised in order to NEVER LET ANYONE MOVE OFF CAMPUS? I became angry. I called to make another appointment for the following week. When I got there, the doctor was sitting in his chair. He asked me my name.

“Tess,” I said. “I was here last week?”

“Riiiiight,” he said. “I’m so sorry, I think I forgot your file.”

I sat down, controlled. I would not let this man upset me. But if he did upset me, I would be very upset, and he would know that I deserved a Psycho Single. I looked for objects to throw. No no, wait, said the Reasonable Brain Half, if you’re too nuts, they’ll send you home. And then you’ll tell your parents that you got sent home because you threw a box of Kleenex at the school therapist in a fit of impotent rage.

“That’s all right. I feel really —” and then of course I began to cry and could not stop. Something about his face: stupid, ineffectual, patient. This therapist waited for you to cry, and then, as you cried, he hit you with question after question about something unrelated to your sorrow until the time expired and you were sent back to your misery. Nothing would ever change.

“Hang on, hang on,” said the shrink. “You’re that girl who’s from all over!”

“Yes,” I attempted, “And it’s made it so hard for me to acclimate here. What with moving around so much.”

“Riiiight,” he said, “and have you tried meditating?”

“I’m currently taking a lot of Sominex?”

“Riiiiight. You said you couldn’t sleep?”

“I think I just need my own space?”

With this, his eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “Well, I’m sorry, but you’re too late,” he said. “If you wanted to get a single, you would have had to come here in August, before classes started. You’re just going to have to suck it up, I’m afraid. And you’re going to have to try meditating.”

I got up to leave, pissed off, with still something like 30 minutes left in our session.

“Hey, hey! Have a seat!” said the doctor. “I’m really curious — what’d you think of LA? Where were you living? I have a colleague in Santa Monica? I think it’s Santa Monica. Maybe Santa something else.”

I left his office, applied for the night shift at our local Ben and Jerry’s, and moved into an apartment off-campus the following week, dragging my suitcases behind me, miles back and forth, away from the dorms where ResLife would keep sending my mail for three and a half years.

My top 15 energy lifting songs of 2009. Somehow I have almost made it through this year and am about to be onto 2010, I owe a lot of my thanks to these songs.

2009 was a pretty unbelievable year of new music and new tunes. Until I post my top 10 albums of 2009, feast your ears on this tuneage. It might even make you feel really good.

Magic Wands - ‘Black Magic’
La Roux - ‘In For The Kill’
Junior Boys - ‘Parallel Lines’
Hockey - ‘Too Fake’
Lo Fi-Fnk - ‘Want U’
Local Natives - ‘Airplanes’
Mew - ‘Introducing Palace Players’
Ganglians - ‘Voodoo’
Washed Out - ‘Feel It All Around’
Wave Machines - ‘Keep The Lights On’
Dirty Projectors - ‘Stillness Is The Move’
Fanfarlo - ‘The Walls Are Coming Down’
The Whitest Boy Alive - ‘1517’
Animal Collective - ‘Taste’
Surfer Blood - ‘Anchorage’

___

Oh wow, I just realized I forgot a major player in my 2009 listening experience. Pony Pony Run Run’s song ‘Hey You’. Can’t live without it right now. Get obsessed here.