The comfy couches and fuzzy blankets beckon; the whiteboard inspires doodleage and arbitrary superlatives; the tables, each the perfect size for a puzzle or three or eighty-six; the breadth of carpeted floor space, vast enough for card games of any size and/or sort; the television, televising. The culture of the common room is yours to mold, but one song remains the same: the common room is a cherished space of lore, where Gower Gangs of the past, present, and future have hung and will hang out. When looking forward to your trip to London, you might be tantalized by the sights you’ll see or places you’ll go, but the friends you make, movies you watch, bottles you sip, inside jokes you share, and hours upon hours you spend with your group in this space in Eckerd’s homely little hovel on Gower Street will become your fondest memories of your time in this city.
If you are feeling uneasy about how your group might get along or have concerns about fitting in, fear not. The common room as an entity is an uncomplicated one; at the end of the day, it’s just a living room, no fuss. It’s designed to accumulate bodies, and congrats, soon enough you’ll be one of them! Here are some tips that will hopefully expedite the awkward and ensure that everyone gets real comfortable, real quick. Tip #1: Be yourself. Suppress the eye-rolling echoes of your teenage yesteryears and accept it. You will have more fun and less self-esteem issues in the long run if you don’t alter your personality to fit in with your group. No group is worth less of you. If you have felt that you had to do this your entire life to get by, no worries; in the common room, I guarantee that you will get to know people – students, professors, and non-Eckerdian strangers included – that are far weirder than you, and all the more wonderful for it. You are worth getting to know, and if you don’t believe me, there’s no better way to find out for yourself than to spend a couple hours of your day in the common room. Sit there long enough and someone will start doing every variation of the splits on the floor while crying about their freshly dead dog or talk about how much they love sucking toes or start putting on-fire objects in their mouth, and you’ll just think they’re so odd and so honest and so great, and then you’ll think, hey, maybe other people could feel that way about me, too, if I said and did more things. And then you’ll have learned something. Tip #2: Do your thing. The common room is full of things placed there specifically to entertain and to bring together the inhabitants of 35 Gower Street: DVDs, puzzles, two identical poker sets at varying levels of completion, an array of card and board games, a single deck of cards without its box or any sort of slipshod mechanism to keep them all in one place that, despite all odds, still contains all fifty-two. The existence of these objects does not mean that you have to make use of them. If you would prefer to:
Do that, you glorious bitch. Do that. The common room is probably the easiest place to bond with your iteration of the Gower Gang, but there are no rules. The comfy couches and fuzzy blankets beckon; the whiteboard inspires doodleage and arbitrary superlatives; the tables, each the perfect size for a puzzle or three or eighty-six; the breadth of carpeted floor space, vast enough for card games of any size and/or sort; the television, televising. The culture of the common room is yours to mold, but one song remains the same: the common room is a cherished space of lore, where Gower Gangs of the past, present, and future have hung and will hang out. When looking forward to your trip to London, you might be tantalized by the sights you’ll see or places you’ll go, but the friends you make, movies you watch, bottles you sip, inside jokes you share, and hours upon hours you spend with your group in this space in Eckerd’s homely little hovel on Gower Street will become your fondest memories of your time in this city. If you are feeling uneasy about how your group might get along or have concerns about fitting in, fear not. The common room as an entity is an uncomplicated one; at the end of the day, it’s just a living room, no fuss. It’s designed to accumulate bodies, and congrats, soon enough you’ll be one of them! Here are some tips that will hopefully expedite the awkward and ensure that everyone gets real comfortable, real quick. Tip #1: Be yourself. Suppress the eye-rolling echoes of your teenage yesteryears and accept it. You will have more fun and less self-esteem issues in the long run if you don’t alter your personality to fit in with your group. No group is worth less of you. If you have felt that you had to do this your entire life to get by, no worries; in the common room, I guarantee that you will get to know people – students, professors, and non-Eckerdian strangers included – that are far weirder than you, and all the more wonderful for it. You are worth getting to know, and if you don’t believe me, there’s no better way to find out for yourself than to spend a couple hours of your day in the common room. Sit there long enough and someone will start doing every variation of the splits on the floor while crying about their freshly dead dog or talk about how much they love sucking toes or start putting on-fire objects in their mouth, and you’ll just think they’re so odd and so honest and so great, and then you’ll think, hey, maybe other people could feel that way about me, too, if I said and did more things. And then you’ll have learned something. Tip #2: Do your thing. The common room is full of things placed there specifically to entertain and to bring together the inhabitants of 35 Gower Street: DVDs, puzzles, two identical poker sets at varying levels of completion, an array of card and board games, a single deck of cards without its box or any sort of slipshod mechanism to keep them all in one place that, despite all odds, still contains all fifty-two. The existence of these objects does not mean that you have to make use of them. If you would prefer to:
Do that, you glorious bitch. Do that. The common room is probably the easiest place to bond with your iteration of the Gower Gang, but there are no rules.
0 Comments
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |