12 September 2009

The Resident Diva Goes To College


It is an ending and a beginning, all in one day.

It is a ritual that has become as American as baseball and apple pie.

Moving away from home and into a college dorm is the beginning, for many teenagers, of the rest of their lives.

After spending a good part of the morning yesterday lifting boxes and carryalls and suitcases, I thought, "this girl sure has a lot of stuff." I remembered my own trek from South Carolina to Atlanta twenty five years ago, with a trunk and a couple of suitcases and a couple of plastic bags and a boom box that took my brothers and my parents ten minutes to unload from the back of the station wagon.

The other rooms I passed on the way to the Diva's, though, looked like showrooms at a furniture store compared to the Diva's minimalist design scheme.

Who would have ever thought that a college dorm room would have a design scheme?

I stood in the middle of her room and said, "my first dorm room stopped about right here." I walked around the big expanse, still talking. "Come to think of it, I think I could have reached out and touched my roommate, his bed was so close to mine. We had no choice but to talk to each other before we went to sleep."

The Diva will be fine. She's been to enough sleep away camps to know the roommate protocol, and she has gotten the jump on her roommate by getting checked in first, so she can rest easy, knowing that she wasn't forced to take the bed that was left.

I guess S. may rest easy in a few weeks, as she slowly gets used to the idea of an empty bedroom upstairs, and the reality of a student with a key to the whole wide world who is living away from home.

You can already tell the difference. It is the quiet of emptiness - or it will be, when S. stops walking around in the Diva's room after a couple of days, rounding up the items that now are all important because somebody didn't take my advice and start packing her stuff two weeks before leaving.

Oh well.

I learned a lot of things the hard way myself.





8 comments:

  1. I don't know where the name "Resident Diva" came from but I love reading her trek to college. I took a jar of pennies to Morgan yeeeeeeears ago that made my father fuss from the time we left Upper Marlboro til he drove off from MSU. "That's ALL she's carrying while I' carrying all this? She better put some pillows under each arm or something".

    Thanks for those memories BMTH!!

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  2. While she and her mother were cooing over how well the color scheme she had selected for her bed had come together, I was lugging in boxes and hollering "where is the Clorox? You all need to wash that tub and that toilet down. You don't know who was in this room last."

    These two were worried about whether the colors in her decor clash, and I was worried about somebody else's DNA rubbing off on her ass.

    Nothing like priorities.

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  3. Awww! I took my niece to college during the first week in August and then just returned from visiting her Labor Day weekend. She'd grown up so much in just a month. She lived w/ me for 2 years so I'm feeling a little bit of the empty nest syndrome right now, but the freedom is GREAT!

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  4. Ok, BMTH... I will refrain from any laughter as I sincerely reminisce over my trip to MSU and more stories than you'd want read.

    Females & their "priorities" eh?? (squishes head in pillow crying laughing) Wait, in retrospect to what you've said... my father looked at our bathrooms. The paint was falling off the ceiling and some NUT CASE had the audacity to paint the inside of the shower walls. Must have been a man. oooooooooooooooooooops.

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  5. My last college apartment - actually, my first college apartment, because the place I rented before it qualified hands down as a garret - not the romantic artists garret, but a house sliced up into a rabbit warren type of garret - anyway, my last college apartment had a tub that someone had painted white.

    Took me two days and three gallons of paint remover to get that shit off.

    Between that and a couple of gallons of Clorox, their wasn't a bit of the previous tenant's DNA in sight.

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  6. Oh yeah B, I would have had ot go that paint remover and Clorox route as well. I moved into OC when it was fairly new so it was a nicer dorm. But later on decided I wanted to be "UP THE HILL" and moved to Harper/Tubman... WHAT A DUMP! It looked like it did when my parents were there. It had the metal radiator in the middle of the floor but towards the back of the room it was so old.

    OC was done the hill which kinda seemed "off campus"... KINDA.

    Zane - no you didn't leave that link. AHAHAHAHA!! B will not be looking at that, for sure. Or maybe he's had a minor change of heart. Doubt it.

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  7. I will make sure and bookmark this page, I will come back to follow you more.

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  8. تمتع بافضل العروض على خدمات مؤسسة العنود مثل شركة جلي بلاط مكة وتلميعه كما يتوفر شركة تنظيف كنب بالبخار مكة باساليب متطورة وايضا يوجد شركة مكافحة ارضة مكة مع مجموعة متخصصة من العمال للقضاء عليها نهائيا بالاضافة الى تنظيف خزانات مكة لازالة الترسبات والاوساخ واخيرا شركة تنظيف منازل مكة لتنظيف الفلل والشقق .

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