By By Rob N. LeDonne

In a way, dorm life is like living in a nursing home. Everyone around you is your age, you have a roommate, there is always a foul odor and people occasionally wet the bed. All of that is okay though, because college is an amazing experience where you’re taught to love, laugh and learn almost as much as a Lifetime TV Movie. I’m a freshman and from the second I started thinking of college, back in grade 11, to the hour before I moved in, I anxiously awaited the answer to what dorm life is actually like.

Sure, we’ve all seen those crazy movies about the college experience, from Animal House to Old School to Apocalypse Now. Maybe not Apocalypse Now, but to me, it felt like the apocalypse when I found out I had to use a public bathroom. The point is, the way the media describes the college experience, you’d figure when you walked into a dorm you’d be walking into the part of the hell even Satan is afraid to enter. Look at some of the news magazines on television-at least one, this week, has a story on the college experience gone wrong.

The summer before I moved in I imagined dorm life as walking in a dimly-lit hallway with speakers blaring Ozzie Osborne’s lame stuff, going to a fungi-infested bathroom, while stepping over decaying bodies and hoarding food from the garbage in order to stay alive for the next couple of hours. The truth is dorm life is not the slightest bit like that (well maybe the hoarding food part). Living at college is actually no big deal. Bathrooms? Pretty clean. The hallways? Pretty sane. The people? Not bad at all. I’ve spent a month here and have a pathetically low amount of embarrassing stories to tell. I thought I’d have a chock full by now, something like my roommate “Sharpie’ing” a penis on my face or some dude drunkenly spraying the fire extinguisher around the hall.

No, friends, I have no stories at this point, except one. It’s a classic college story, and though it’s not very wild, nor very earth shaking; it is a lucid changing point in my dorm life. It all happened on a Saturday night, a night when every good college story takes place. I was at my friend’s dorm and it was 3 a.m. when I decided I should head back to my room.

I made the trek across campus trying not to attract the attention of the drunks staggering home. I made it to the beloved door of my dorm, opened it and found about four people asleep on the floor. Then I remembered that my roommate said earlier his buddies from high school were coming up for the night. I stood in the doorway for about a minute, wondering whether I should go back to my friend’s dorm, or just sleep in my own bed, which, graciously, no one was sleeping on.

It was going to be a challenge to walk through the array of sleeping bodies on the floor to my bed on the other side of the room, but since I had just watched Spiderman II-I was up for challenge. I began my way over, made my first, second and third step-tiptoeing toward my bed; I took great caution not to step on anyone’s face. Sure enough, while taking my last step before the bed, I go giddy, lose my footing and step on someone’s darkened face. “Uggrhh-Garhh” the sleeping body exclaimed, then turned over and fell back asleep. I hopped into bed and pulled the covers over myself. “Mission accomplished,” I thought. “Good going Rob, you old card, you!”

Now, if you thought the story was over, you’d be sorely mistaken, because the second I closed my eyes I had an amazing, catastrophic, sudden urge of biblical proportions to pee. Why the bladder waits until you are fully comfortable before releasing the urge to pee is beyond me, but it’s probably something someone has killed over. I was about to stand up, when I looked down and remembered the maze of bodies leading to the door. I decided to ignore my hellish bladder and try to fall asleep. A half hour later I was still lying there, a monstrous urge lingering. I tried to forget about it, but of course, when something like that hits you, there’s no turning back.

I stood up on my bed, and devised a plan to jump, Batman style, from my desk, to a chair, to a small table and out the door to toilet heaven. Shockingly, my plan worked, as somehow I got from my bed to the bathroom door. Finally! I could spend hours, upon hours, releasing my bladder, and then fall back asleep in peace. The bathroom was mine for the night, and nothing was going to stop me. I opened the door like there were gold bars awaiting me and ran in, to find that someone had thrown up all over the place-from the sinks where I brush my teeth to the toilets I imagined would be sparkly and clean. That’s when I realized-I’m not home anymore.