#1: Communal Bathrooms

So here I am, moved in and cozy. My room even has a window! This is the view from it, to your left! Do you like it? It is high up!

And I love my dorm. The people on it are kind of a herd of buffalo: good-natured, amiable, and they can consume several tons of food in a single meal.

And my classes don't suck. Kind of. I mean, this one teacher speaks like he's hoping he'll grow old and die before the end of the sentence, and this other lady wears clothes that are so trendy they make me uncomfortable and cranky, and I'm pretty sure that TA sitting beside me was the one wafting French fry fumes for a full seventy-five minutes. But seriously. They're not that bad.

Yeah. Basically, I'm living on Easy Street in the suburb of Collegeville, which is right off the highway from My Youth Is Slowly Slipping Away City.

But then...this.

The bathrooms. A room in which there is not only no bath, but also no hope.

And sometimes no toilet paper.

Seriously. This place is not okay. The shower floors appear to have sagged slightly from years of hormone-soaked freshmen washing off the sweat of parties and fear. The lowest topographical point is tinged with black, which I can only assume is either fungus or the eggs of some opportunistic parasite. The showers themselves are like those cubicles they spray-tan you in, except those cubicles are shiny and filled with chrome and they do their job very well. In JJ showers, you have two choices: cringe like an animal in the corner as you lather your shampoo, or stick whatever limb you're cleaning out past the (blood?-stained curtain) and acquire localized frostbite as you soap up.

The toilets themselves are not awful. They don't eat you, basically. The window has a lovely set of bars over it, because we all know that when the RA comes a-knockin', out the bathroom window we're a-droppin'! The sinks are usually wet everywhere but in the basin, so put your personal belongings on the bank of sinks at your own peril.

And lastly, the capital W in the Why Me:


If my room is the Shire, the bathroom is Mordor. And the eagles are not coming, my friends. The eagles are not coming.