Big Changes Senior Year

We had a brand new residence hall building my senior year, with each resident getting their own bedroom, albeit a very small one.  I managed to get an ideal corner room, with a good view of my side of campus.  That layout isn't very conducive to community, and my roommates were all CS majors, so that only compounded the problem.  They kept strange hours, and I would occasionally come into the kitchen at 3am to get a drink of water, and find them in the middle of making a multicourse meal.  But we did have a full kitchen, so I didn't get a meal plan that year, and instead cooked all my own food.  Not eating at the cafeteria further decreased my social interaction and involvement in the community, but the increased quality of the food I was eating was probably worth it.

J only lived a block away from campus, so she was basically over every night for dinner.  Shortly into the semester, we had a few long talks about our relationship.  She was nine months out of college, in her eighth relationship, and ready to get married.  I was in college, on my first relationship, and not ready to get married.  I recognized that I had a lot to learn still, and knew that our relationship wasn't ideal, but had no real basis from which to evaluate it.  She correctly deduced that I really needed to experience closer relationships with other people before I would be confident enough to get married.  So we "broke up," for real this time, but on good terms, so we were still quite close.  I had a few people to talk to about it, which helped a lot, and it happened gradually over a period of time, so that made it easier.  She still came over every night for dinner for the next few months, since she still didn't really know how to cook, but the romantic aspect of our relationship ended abruptly and completely.  Eventually after Christmas, we had grown apart to the point that we no longer saw each other, and that was that.  We connected back up when I graduated, to trade back some items we still had from each other, like a bike and a microwave, but we were never really close again.  She ended up moving to Washington a few years ago and then got married last summer.

After three years of successful Bible studies, I tried to start another one my senior year, for a repeat performance.  Basically it was a complete failure, in that no one ever really came.  I went out to the lounge once a week for about a month, and read the Bible by myself, until I gave up on anyone else showing up.  Ironically the front desk worker who observed all this became friends with me later, and told me how she had always been impressed that I came out every week and read my Bible in the lounge, having no idea that I saw those evenings as failures, being frustrated every time when no one showed up.

An amusing incident happened early in the year, when I agreed to help teach the Computer Science Departmental Assistants how to maintain their computer lab.  This would alleviate the task from the school IT Dept, where I worked.  I was told by the head professor of the dept that the only time that worked with everyone’s schedule was super early in the morning, so I reluctantly agreed.  I arrived early that morning, and the professor was there to unlock the lab, but no assistants showed up.  When I asked him the names of his assistants, I discovered that all three of them were my roommates.  I had never seen any of them get up before noon, so I could have told him they would be a no-show back when we scheduled it.  Instead of getting up and heading across campus super early in the morning, I could have just told them what they needed to do while we were relaxing in our dorm room the night before, or any other time for that matter.  Needless to say, they didn’t show up, and we all had a nice laugh about it later.