Erdman is my dorm. I wake up here every day with the utmost consistency. Here’s how it happened today:
“BAng ! Bang !” One fast rapping series of knuckle bumps from the bottom to the top and a “Joe!” from my friend later, and I had reached the other side of the dorm room and swung the heavy white panel out. “It is Saturday!” she said, “This is the day you think about during the week.. so remember that right here when you wake up!”
Boy is that true! Dorms are neat places on Saturdays. The doors are often open, and the sound from a clarinet from the first floor finds its way all the way up here, presumably from the stairwell. That would be Jacob, I met him three days ago and he composes music. We talked about how no one can really be sure of anything and math, for like three hours the other night.
There is other music also; the long-haired types have their guitars out, usually accompanied by other appreciative souls in circles, bobbing their heads. Looking in every once in a while, there are maybe four or five people an hour walking to the laundry room with overfilled laundry bags and baskets. Some, awkwardly bending over to pick up the rebellious sock that found its way in at the last minute, get a wink from the guitarist. More often than not, they’ll be back in a couple minutes with the same cargo; there are only two machines and the week is just too busy for laundry.
Then the other kids, the kinds who leave three pairs of smelly Nikes and some Sperry’s in the hallways, have their speakers’ volume all the way up, and doors closed. For them, it is always the weekend. It’d be easy to call them obnoxious, but they are too friendly to speak ill of. Once one explained it to me like this, “I’m never satisfied with the weekend, so I keep trying to get it during the week.” Worse, there are three rooms of these Sperry-wearers competing for the alpha here with their enormous speakers. On Thursday nights, they are all the way up in a subconscious competition with one another. When do they do their homework ?
Saturday means the day to do that reading that just didn’t fit in between class, my job, and forging for coffee at 1:30 a.m. because I was talking to Jacob the Clarinetist; it doesn’t feel like the obligatory and pressured week. After all, there is always Sunday, and anyone can do absolutely anything on Sunday.
-Joe