Dictionary

Housing at CMU is determined by a lottery. You and your roommate are both assigned a number, and you get to pick your room in that order. Unfortunately, both Andrew and myself were assigned numbers higher than 450 (out of 500), so we were put on the system called 'Open Housing.' This essentially means that your room is chosen for you. Nothing is guaranteed, but it's pretty likely that you'll have your chosen roommate.

As things turned out, I'm roommates with Andrew and another guy named Wei-Zhao. He's an exchange student from a school in London, and he's originally from Singapore. He's here for the entire year, studying Chemical Engineering. He stays in his room for the most part - in fact, it's almost impossible to tell when he's in his room. Sometimes he'll walk in the door at 5 in the morning. On separate occasions, he'll leave the room at 6 in the morning. Who knows what he's up to.

At any rate, we all live in Webster Hall, a building which was a hotel until somewhat recently. My dad actually spent a few nights here, although he apparently does not remember where. My room consists of 2 bedrooms (one for Wei-Zhao), a kitchen, and a main room.

My bedroom does not have any windows. I cannot tell anything about what time of day it is when I wake up. On more than one occasion I have looked at my clock and been off by 12 hours. I need to step into the main room to see any sort of daylight. This however is not much of an improvement. Directly outside of our window is a giant parking garage. I tried to complain about this to a friend, but apparently nice views in Webster are relatively uncommon. For example, the view out his window was straight into the window of another person's bathroom.

Once I've got my wits about me and I've established what time of day it is, I go to the kitchen and make food. I also try to check the weather, but the limited view makes it rather difficult to do so. While water is boiling or something is in the microwave (more often the latter) I quickly google "weather." We're past the point in the year when Pittsburgh is actually nice, so it's raining about 80% of the time. My mom told me that Pittsburgh has the highest percentage of overcast days among cities in the United States, surpassing even Seattle. That was some cheerful news.

Going back into the kitchen, I look through our supplies. And by 'our' supplies, I mostly mean Andrew's. His parents brought every kitchen utensil known to man and then some. I'm not really sure what all of them do, and I've probably misused them from time to time. One time I couldn't find the scissors to open a package, so I used the cheese grater instead. Not to say that I don't know what the cheese grater does, I was kind of in a hurry that day ...

To leave Webster, I have to go down one floor. The elevator is conveniently placed close to my apartment. However, the architect saw fit to put the stairs as far away from my door as the building could possibly allow. Consequently every morning I am faced with a tough decision - should I take the elevator or the stairs? On the mornings I take the elevator, I press the button and then start praying that no one else is on the way down. Every time I get in the elevator and hit '2,' I get these judging looks that say, "Really? For the second floor?" Or at least, that's the way I imagine it.

When I come back to the room, I never fail to notice how much of our personalities are apparent from just looking at the place. And by 'personalities,' I mean how disorganized we both are. The place is more or less trashed. No less than 10 empty bottles of cream soda line the floor next to Andrew's desk. My first 211 assignment (from 4 weeks ago) can be found at the bottom of a huge stack of papers on the coffee table. An unused TV lies on the couch, serving no purpose other than to take up space and prevent too many visitors.

But through all the garbage shines a little bit of personality. The dining table almost always has a chess position that one of us finds interesting set up. Textbooks for mathematical logic and applied combinatorics and automata theory are immediately apparent. My ping-pong paddle frequently sits right at the entrance to the apartment, right next to the notice that management left informing us that they'll be installing new water-saving toilets in our room sometime in the next few weeks. Perhaps most telling of all, on Andrew's desk you'll find an ugly cap covered in drawings of diamonds. He dubbed this his "thinking cap," but I'm pretty sure it's just an excuse to wear a hat backwards.

Last year, I didn't have enough space to trash my dorm too much express myself where I lived. It's kind of cool to walk in the door and think, 'yeah. This is how I want things.' I'm really not a neat person. I might be a little bit difficult to live with. But it's kind of nice to know I'm not the only one out there, and it's cool to see how we can make a place feel like home without giant posters on the walls. All it really takes is my computer, a few misplaced textbooks, a chess board, and a paddle.