As requested, I've moved my story:

Umm...let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

Leaving for college: Wicked hard, but, frankly, if you give the homesickness a few weeks to wear off, you'll find that college can rock. Majorly. The night before I left for college, I was sick at heart and crying about leaving my life behind. Everything I knew and loved was in Rochester, NY, and I was going 4.5 hours away to school. Scary. But I knew I had to go, that this was the next step in my life, so I went. I sucked up. I cried a lot, and I took the advice of the school Powers That Be and friends who had been to school, and got involved in what was going on. Found some organizations that I enjoyed, and forced myself to be friendly and outgoing with people (by nature, I like to keep to myself). In a few weeks, I had 2 or 3 friends. My roomie was a pain in the rear, but that's another story (titled The Roomie From Hell). I found that I was Really Loving being on my own and having control over my own life, and I really liked it that if I was screwing up in class, they wouldn't be calling my parents like they did in high school. It was all me. And I liked that.

When I first got to school, I thought the six weeks until October break was only one day short of forever. By the time break came, however, I was all into the swing of college. By winter break, I didn't want to go back to Rochester. I was loving college life too much (the classes, I was glad to leave them behind). Fast forward 15 weeks. Now I really don't want to go home; the college town is more like home than the place I grew up. Or it's getting there. Fast forward one year, which I spent living off campus with a family from church (seven months of which gave me my first real taste in dealing with men, a story best titled Learning Took Place). A year on my own made me SO NOT want to go back to living at my parents, and I was itching to get out and on my own from May '99 until I moved here in August '02. So that's my story about getting used to college life.

On the flip side, there was another girl from the Rochester area, also a single child who'd never had to share a room before and was an introvert and was homesick. In that, we were similar. She, however, chose to always call home and pine away for home and go home every weekend and generally not get involved in college life, make friends, or put down any 'roots'. She lasted one year, and then dropped out. She was miserable, and it was her own fault. She was pessimistic and miserable about essentially everything and NEVER stopped crying about her friends at home or her family or WHATEVER.

Being away at college is, for a large part, what you make it. I have great memories because I chose to get involved and make friends and Carpe Diem. If you pine away in your dorm room all the time (a la the chick I mentioned above) you'll miss out on a lot.

Okay, next topic...roomies?

Roomie #1:

She was Dominican from NYC, FWIW, so right off the bat you have a culture clash, as it were. I'm born and bred Upstate New Yorkerer. I lived with her from the end of August until about the end of September. The girl stole my stuff, and she wasn't good at it, either. I mean, she steals a book of mine and then puts it on her bookshelf? *scoffs* But she did a good job of making my camera disappear. She made 3am phone calls to God only knows where and who; they were in Spanish, so I had no clue what was going on. Our beds were basically bunk style, so she's right under my head while she's making these calls. Sleeping was impossible. She'd come in around 12, 1am after I'm asleep (I need to crash early, around 10 or 11, to get enough sleep), and then leave the door open to the hall (you couldn't avoid being hit by the light) and talk kinda loudly to her friends. Hanging a flashlight on the back of the door for her to use to see her way around was never used. And I was stupid enough to let her use my PIN code for long distance. She ran the bill right up. Getting her to pay was, sometimes, like trying to pull teeth. Prime example: I'd already moved out at this point, but the phone calls hadn't stopped, and I was being billed. I stop by her room and tell her I want the money by Thanksgiving. She asks if she can give it to me when we get back. Yeah, okay. We get back. No money. Her mom just lost a job, and can she pay me in installments? Stupidly, I agree, and then realize we leave in 3 weeks. And it's not like she didn't know she was makign a lot of long phone calls. So I go to the resident director, tell him my story, and the upshot is that she was told if I didn't have the money, in full, by such and such a date, she'd be charged with theft. I got my money. Okay, back to the time before I moved out. She's using the fridge I paid for, in full, to rent and my TV. No biggie. Those are to share. She also uses my bike. Again, I don't care as long as it comes back in good condition. She wanted to use my laptop and take it to the campus library, but I drew the line on that. Near the end of our acquaintance, she decided she wanted to clean the room up. Okay, fine. I'm not a huge neat freak, so if she wants to, more power to her. I came back the next night to discover she'd been moving my stuff around w/o letting me know first. And I mean AROUND. There was stuff I'd had at one spot that was now in the closet. But she'd done a good job making the place look good, so I told her that. Then she posts a list of rules on the wall, where everyone can see it, and many of them could ONLY apply to me. I was POd in the first degree. And then she tells me (and I kid you not on this) I can't have my shoes and laptop case both on the floor by/under the desk. WHATEVER! That was my desk; she'd chosen to give up hers so we could stack the two desks, and put the stereo (hers) and the TV (mine) on top. The straw that broke the camel's back was the 6 or 7 nights in a 14 night period I woke up to find a guy I didin't know in her bed. First of all, he wasn't her boyfriend. That guy was going to a school in Arizona. Second of all, she'd never bothered to ask me if if she could have anyone in, and that's a cardinal rule. So now I need to get dressed for class, and I have to move my butt across the hall to the bathroom to get dressed, and it was mad incovenient. So I moved out. But the story don't end there. I took pity on her and left the fridge, the phone, and my bike, as she was using them. I'd take them back when her new roomie moved in. So, when Kim moved in, I took them. Kim had a fridge, a phone, a TV and all that. The bike, I left. My ex roomie said I could. Okay, fine. WELL! My ex got POd that I'd come in and, without telling her first, taken my stuff. I said Kim had moved in and had everything I'd taken. Ex wasn't happy. WHATEVER. So I moved in with Roomie #2...

To Be Continued

The stories I tell here are from 8/97 to 5/99. I'm long gone from there now. I went to a state college for my associates in Veterinary Technology.

Stalker, the system at your school sounds like a nightmare. I'd never be able to hack it; I need structure and organization too much. But on to Roomie #2

Her name was Beth. I'd met her through friends, and she seemed nice enough. It was move in with her or my friend, Erica, who was, to be nice, a bit of a nympho, and I knew her habit of having guys over for sex regularly would really bother me, so I moved in with Beth. Beth, to be nice, was a slob. As in when I moved in to her room in October, there was a mug with some butter knives on top of her fridge, and when we left for Christmas break, they were still there, unwashed. *gags* She also did not wash her knives from cooking class when she was done with them, and I once showed her set to my friends in culinary. The knives had dried egg yolk on them. And she was just messy. When my parents came to pick me up for October break, the floor was covered with stuff. I informed them that was 95% Beth's. They now leave me alone about my lack of organization, as they now see how bad it is NOT. That's the only complaint I have about her. She was quiet, she went to bed early (like me) and she was easygoing. She was friends with this girl, Teresa, who was in my major, and Teresa got in my face one day because I'd gotten cranky with Beth about not cleaning up her mess and said that if she didn't do it, I would. I guess Beth cried. And Teresa told me that if I made Beth cry again, SHE would make me cry. Teresa popped up in my life, albeit at a distance, the next year, but that's not relevant to this story. So that's Roomie #2. I moved to a larger room upstairs in January, when we got back, and spent 3 weeks living with my friend Tina, and I moved out because I was able to get a single on a quieter part of the building. I'm sorry, but being kept up by nose until 1 am does NOT fly with me, and the school refused to let me move off campus (long story). To shut me up, they offered me a single. I jumped at the chance. I moved to the single, and Tina moved in with our friend, Cindy. Tina's biggest 'fault' was her love of WWF wrestling. If you can call that a fault. So those are my roomie stories.

Oh, when I got my single, there was this girl down the hall who would have her boyfriend over night. Okay, whatever, right? Not when he's using the bathroom, which is for the women. So I walk in one morning to take a shower, and the first thing I see is his naked butt as he's taking a whiz. The stall door is open. So I'm there, in shock, and he looks back because he heard the bathroom door open, and I was so glad i was in a thick, bulky terrycloth robe, because if I'd walked in wearing my PJ's, he probably would have seen more. I was Not Amused. The next year, they moved to having co-ed floors, with guys on (for example) quads A and C, and girls in B and D. They said it was to try to get the guys to be neater; I said the only thing that would result is guys in the women's bathrooms. But I was off campus my second year, so I don't know if my predictions came true.

These are examples of why I lived off campus when I went to college! I refused to live in the dorms. I'm too anti-social anyway...plus, I have cats. Can't have those in the dorm.

Yeah, when they need to, they are more than willing to bend the rules. But when you want something, it's like pulling teeth!

I'm hoping I'll be able to deal with the issues you've guys have lived through and whatever else will come my way when I enter into dorm life. I know it's not all that it's cracked up to be but frankly, it's my only way out of my life with my parents 24/7/365... I'll need a break from them by the end of senior year in HS...

I'm hoping it will do the same for me. I've been having issues with my parents lately and I need to get them dealt with if I'm ever going to get through current life... And I'll work on the whole earplug thing. Thanks for the advice.

Oh gosh, you guys have so many horror college stories . . .
Mine is sooo boring in comparison! My college is like a five minutes drive from my house so I don't have to live on my own.
I end up walking around a lot to get to my classes though because it's kind of messed up.

All colleges are messed up. I've been to three, and they're all cracked and/or on crack over SOMETHING!