August 16, 2003

Day of Reckoning

I met one of my future residents last night. Today I met another resident. It was pretty weird, considering I had been living in isolation (or at least with random people) for the last few weeks, so interaction with actual residents was kind of weird. We also did room checks and welcome kits today, which was a tiring task. As I walked through the halls of empty rooms, I realized that in about 12 hours, all the rooms would be packed full of fresh and energetic freshman, all excited about college and being away from home. EW! What the hell am I doing here?! How will I be able to live with freshman again, especially now that I am not one!? I also ran into about five people in the course of the day who were in my CalSO groups over the summer. "Hey Rohit! How's it going?" For the most part, I didn't even remember their names. The faces were vaguely familiar, but that's about it. It's probably only going to get worse. I did a quick survey of all my resident's names, and none ring a bell from CalSO, but what's worse is that some probably were in my group or in my co-facs and I have no idea, so when I meet them, they will know me and I won't know them.

This seems to be a perpetual problem that I encounter. My name is pretty hard to pronounce for some people, but most people remember it once they get it. I have run into people six or seven years after last contact, and they still recognize my name. On the other hand, if I meet a David or Robert or Timothy briefly, what are the chances of me remembering his name? Slim to none, at best. So I'm always confronted with this awkward silence after someone says "Hey Rohit! What's up?" "Not too bad, person I don't know but who knows me. How about you?"

In any case, it seems that my entire life has been consumed with Move In Day preparation for the last few weeks. I haven't been in my room for more than 10 minutes today ever since I woke up. It's really an exhausting process. And we got lucky - we didn't even have to draw most of our decorations. They were done by my RD's clerks during the summer, so all we had to do was take down the old decorations, re-paper all the bulletin boards, and then put up the decorations. As it is, this took the entire staff the better part of two days to do, but I can only imagine the amount of work that would be required had we had to do the extra decorations! And now, here I am, looking at another day that will begin at 6am and not end until who knows when, considering duty starts tomorrow night. DUYT?! I say again, what the HELL am I doing here?! And more importantly, why didn't I realize before that an integral component of being a RA is carrying around a pager that so people can reach you at all hours of the night! All I can say is, if some goddamn moron gets locked out after 1am tomorrow night, I'm going to be very, very grumpy!

So this brings me to the concept of the Day of Reckoning, which sounds very ominous, and completely captures what Move In Day has become for me. It really is a day of reckoning for me, but not in a way that you might think. It is not a question of whether I will succeed or fail at my job as a Resident Assistant. Rather, it is a question of whether or not I will remain sane enough to survive the year living with freshman! I guess we will all find out in about seven hours!