6. Responsibilities and Such

As you prepare for college, teachers and relatives will more than likely try to scare you about all the new responsibilities you’ll face. They will tell you how the classes are harder and everything is different from high school. I ignored most of that, but worried because… well... my mommy wouldn’t be there for me. I don’t actually call my mom “mommy,” I promise – just trying to get a point across. Like many guys, there are a ton of things I’d always relied on mom to provide: namely, washing my clothes and keeping me fed.

For starters, did you know that at college you have to eat cafeteria food all the time? Granted, the food at the University is about four times better than in any high school cafeteria, but it sure is not home cooking. Don’t expect someone to put it on the table and remind you it’s time to eat, either. And how in the world is a guy supposed to know how to iron a pair of pants?

It’s bad enough that you’ll have to do laundry yourself, let alone keep a tiny closet in enough order that everything’s not overflowing onto the floor. Add in the absence of parents telling you to do your homework, harassing you for staying up too late, and so on. It doesn’t take long to realize that when you start out on your own, some of the biggest responsibilities are as simple as finding clean clothes and something to eat.

While summer break burned out, a real but humorous worry closed in on me. I realized I’d never done a single load of laundry. I was afraid I’d shrink or change the colors of my favorite clothes while attempting to wash them. I knew how to use an iron, but only if by ‘use’ you mean ‘turn on and make stuff real hot.’ Between that and not exactly knowing how to operate a washing machine, I expected to look like a somewhat wealthy hobo.

Luckily, wrinkles are easy enough to take care of. I wear jeans and t-shirts 97% of the time and have wrinkle releaser spray for the rest of my clothes. If I put everything away fast enough after it dries, it’s not usually a problem. And my dad showed me how to use a washer (which made little sense to me, since he has somewhat of a reputation for doing the very things I feared) before I left home, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I figured one way or another I would stay dressed and clean – after all, how hard could it be?

There was no reason to stress out. The washers in my dorm’s basement are idiot-friendly, with no timers or complicated settings. All I have to do is press a button for whites or colors. The machine adjusts the water temperature and whatever else it is that’s important for doing laundry, and bingo – come back forty minutes later to move everything to a dryer. I can even pay for it all using my ID card, so I don’t have to scrounge around for quarters! It’s a simple process, unless you put a new red shirt you got at a football game…this is entirely hypothetical, mind you…in with all of your socks.

Thanks to prudent financial management (spending just enough money to wash underwear and piling up my other clothes for mom), I stretched about $25 to cover a whole semester’s laundry. I usually wash clothes once a week, but I’m a sweaty pig. A person with normal sweat glands or more clothes could go a couple weeks before they had to do laundry.

If laundry is important, food is more so. Seeing as how you die without food, and all. I’m not the pickiest eater, but I haven’t exactly got an iron stomach either. Since I’m a cheapskate, anything not covered by my school meal plan is pretty much out of the question.

Under this basic setup, I get a certain amount of money to spend on each of three meals a day. It may not be the most convenient, but leaves me with plenty options since there are more than half a dozen dining halls on campus. If I’m not hungry during mealtime, I can use the value on my card to buy snacks or a microwave dinner from one of the University stores set up adjacent to the dining halls. Realistically speaking, rare are the times when I feel like walking any farther than right next door – there’s a dining hall with a huge buffet attached to my building.

I’m a person who likes to eat breakfast, and since I usually ate cereal at home I appreciate dining hall breakfasts. Most mornings there are bacon and pancakes, and I hear the waffles are good (although I’ve never taken the time to make one). Scrambled eggs are a semi-trustworthy staple. Finally, there’s a solid selection of boxed cereals to fall back on.

Lunch and dinner are not as impressive, but if the day’s home-style meal looks less than appealing you can always get pizza, pasta, a burger, or chicken nuggets. Much of the food isn’t extremely healthy, but fruit and salad bars are available too. It’s probably because of my laserlike metabolism, but I have seen no signs of that extra weight known as the dreaded “freshman fifteen.”

At the beginning of the semester I enjoyed the dining hall food, but I think they make it better at the beginning to mess with everyone later on. In reality, I probably just grew sick of eating the same food ten times a week. Regardless of the reason, by the time December came around, what had started out awfully well had become hardly bearable.

Solution? I learned to make a point of eating somewhere else whenever possible. This way, I never felt too disgusted by the closest location when time was short or I was feeling lazy. Especially since my meals were already paid for, I did my best to get three of them a day.

It wasn’t hard getting my body the food it needed to keep going, but what about exercise? College students – particularly at the notoriously superficial University – put a high priority on staying in shape, and eating right is only part of that picture. Now, I am not a big guy. And I don’t want to be shallow, but I don’t want to be scrawny, either.

At home I’d been biking over ten miles almost every day, which worked wonders for my legs. When I came to the University, I wanted to keep up my good biking habits and hopefully strengthen my upper body. I knew that because I get bored walking, biking should be no problem. If you’re going somewhere alone, why spend ten minutes on what would be a three minute bike trip?

For this reason it was great having my bike at school. I biked to class, up the unforgiving hill into town when I needed something, and mapped out a route that circled most of campus. I never got the eleven-mile tour through the country I was used to at home, but biking for exercise in my spare time sure beat doing nothing.

Then the brakes went out. I saw it coming, since the pads got louder and screech-ier as they wore through. Braking to maintain control through a steep downhill behind the art museum (the highlight of an otherwise slow and traffic-filled ride) did them in; at last the piercing sound was the strongest result of squeezing my brakes.

For a few days I biked in spite of this severe lack of stopping ability... it was embarrassing. Invariably there would be a group of girls walking past when I came to a light and squeaked to a halt. Plus, stopping with my feet tore my shoes up pretty bad. I decided it was time to lock my formerly trusty steed onto the bike rack for good. I could have bought new brakes, but that would have cost money and it was a six-year-old bike due for retirement anyway.

Maybe in the spring I would get a new bike; until then I might as well get used to walking. Besides, walking is more social and it made me nervous to bike with so many people around, even though I only ran into a couple pedestrians over the six weeks I biked constantly... pedestrians create stress. When you cut between a couple girls and one of them sidesteps into your handlebars, the guilt sticks with you.

Walking almost an hour every day is probably better exercise than the average American gets, but my arms had been neglected far too long. I’m not a big fan of looking like a stick figure – and while it’s wrong to obsess over being huge, it also seems dumb not to work out when you have every opportunity.

At school, I definitely have every opportunity. Admittance to weight rooms is free for all University students. This gives me access to a super expensive recreation center, with loads of different machines and free weights. I started “pumping iron” (that’s what we call it nowadays, folks) at the beginning of first semester, even before my bike was out of commission.

At first I hated going to the gym – I worried that all the humongous, serious workout guys would laugh at me. I expected to see meatheads pointing at me and chuckling, but for once my paranoia proved unfounded. I realized that people are too busy worrying about their own appearances to care about mine. This fear dispelled, lifting was still no treat but it’s healthy and I’m glad I did it. Two or three days a week I went with one of my friends, and over the first semester I got a little bigger.

The one truly problematic adjustment for me was learning to fight my headaches in a busier, nosier environment. Since junior high I’ve gotten serious headaches pretty frequently, and even though I’ve built some tolerance to the pain I often have to miss something fun to sleep off a migraine.

My funny doctor has repeatedly suggested a CAT scan to detect some explanation for my headaches but I don’t like that idea. Instead, I prevent the worst ones by not watching too much TV, avoiding smoke, trying not to stress out, and most importantly getting lots of sleep. If I fall behind on sleep for several days in a row, I’ll get hit by a killer headache that can only be stopped by two aspirin and at least an hour’s nap. This is not something that fits very well with anyone’s schedule, particularly if you have homework to do.

I had to hope I didn’t get stuck with a night-owl roommate or a whole corridor of guys who never went to bed until 4:00AM. I knew that if I regularly got too little sleep, my freshman year would be a continuous struggle against my throbbing head. I prayed for reasonable peers and the ability to adjust.

Unfortunately, it seems like three nights a week there’s a party right outside my door from 12:30 to 2:00, and not everybody feels the need to talk in a low voice. As much as I like the guys, it’s annoying that quiet hours mean nothing to some of them. It typically sounds like there’s a herd of wildebeests out there, running for their lives from a 90-ton carnivorous mammoth.

I know how irritating it must be for my roommate, having to live with a bumbling sleepyhead like me, and I’m thankful that he is pretty thoughtful. I think the continuous hallway noise is another way God’s telling me to be more patient…and I’m learning I just have to turn my back towards the door.

So, it turns out I do have trouble getting enough sleep at school, but I can take care of the problem by catching a nap in the afternoon. People can’t be noisy when they aren’t around, so midday sleep is good. I find myself doing that at least three days a week, and the ‘lazy bum’ reputation is completely worth it to fend off sick headaches.

Something I have more control over is how I manage my time. First semester at the University, I failed miserably at this. High school had been easy for me, because I’m bright and high school classes aren’t really hard. I took all the advanced courses my school offered but usually had a light homework load. Rarely did assignments take more than an hour.

Still, even in high school I would stay up late many nights because I’d spent the evening putting off schoolwork. If I wasn’t playing Nintendo or hanging out with my friends I would mess around outside or sit and watch TV for hours. We’ll say it’s because I’m creative. I’m creative when it comes to finding ways to make simple assignments take forever.

Really, having bad time management is like thoughtless spending with a credit card. You can waste all the time you want and ignore responsibility, but in the end you’re only hurting yourself. Just like interest fees dig you in a rut if you charge more than you can afford, wasting time can put you in a deep hole when responsibilities are overlooked.

If I were naïve, I could have convinced myself that since I did well in high school I would be fine in college. I knew a tiny bit better than that. The classes aren’t completely different, but high school and college material are definitely not the same. And in high school, homework is something you have to do in the evening for a grade the next day in class – in college, “homework” is more vague, and oftentimes there is nothing to turn in.

If you hate homework (and who doesn’t), this seems like the best news in the world. If you have trouble applying yourself when you could care less about the topic (as with most foundational first-year classes at a liberal arts school), lack of graded homework turns out to be trouble. Had there been assignments to hand in, I would have disliked my courses even more – but I suppose I would have gotten better grades. Graded homework means more points in the class, which means bad test scores hurt less.

In three of the four classes I took my first semester, I never once had to hand in homework. The professors gave us questions and assigned reading meant to help us understand the material, but didn’t check to see whether we completed either. When sections of a course contain anywhere from twenty to three hundred students and professors teach multiple sections, few professors have enough time or assistants to grade busywork.

There really is no excuse, regardless, for how I manage my time. Instead of doing homework I hated and knew no one would check, too often I chose to talk with my friends or play computer games. It seemed great for a while, because instead of the high school hassle of getting up at 6:30 and going to class for six hours... I could sleep in! After a hot shower I would go to a few classes scattered throughout eight hours, take my time eating before and in between, and then do nothing all evening.

I didn’t care to do study problems or out of class reading, but that made for more work when finals time reared its ugly head. And don’t think because I’m using past tense I’ve completely changed… I should be reading for class right now, but instead I’m editing this!

All things considered, the first semester of college is tough because many simple but new responsibilities mesh into one big challenge. I’m what most people would consider a responsible guy, and as a result I didn’t have too much trouble coping with the freedom of college. My biggest struggles were with stress and time management, but I prayed and focused enough when it came down to the wire that I got good grades (mostly).

My schedule was great as far as class times, and I got almost as much sleep at the University as I got at home. I didn’t have an unbearable number of headaches... I never got sick enough to puke in the community restroom... I got enough to eat that my weight stayed around a hearty 147. I turned only one small load of laundry pink – and having washed my socks again, you can hardly tell! My conclusion – pretend I’m insightful and wise for a second – is that if you resolve to succeed and rely on God for support, little can stand in your way.