College Dorm Life

Let me start by saying we all know that kids don't study all the time in college. That first year, kids are away from home for the first time, no supervision, and basically left to run wild in the dorms. Our parents felt secure that we would be safe in the dorms with the "RA's" overseeing our behavior. Of course, anybody that is anybody knows be-friending the more experienced RA's was the best way to get beer because they were all of 19 or 20 years old themselves but they had been in college for at least a year so they had fake ID's! Plus, if you were doing something illegal with the RA's, you couldn't get in trouble yourself could you!?

It would seem that John Belushi, as "Flounder," in Animal House really set the bar for how a drunken college student should act. Of course that's the movies and that stuff doesn't happen in real life. The pranks that one pulls are generally not quite as big as those in Animal House and they rarely work out exactly as planned. I have a couple of examples to share. I should start by saying these are NOT tales that I was involved in. Possibly I will share some of my tales another day. However, today I am sharing the stories of a fellow Cossack alum. Yes, he lived to graduate!

Both of these stories were brought to me by a college friend who we will call the Librarian. The Librarian was your typical 18 year old, college freshman, back in the middle 80's. He may have had a little bit more of the hippy vibe going than did the SacTownGuy was but I don't think he was out protesting at nuclear waste rallies or anything like that. Rather, he was just a regular mild-mannered college kid living the dorm life, drinking beer, going to class most days... and just maybe taking a hit or two off a bong on a rare occasion. ;)

The names and exact locations have been changed to protect the guilty....

The first one as told to me by the Librarian: "Lolita and several of her friends were kicked out of the dorms for spraypaint vandalism our first semester. They were drunk and trying to paint "Drop acid not bombs" on the dorms (F building where we lived) but because of their drunkenness, they actually spray painted, "drop acid not bobb" I still have a copy of the SSU newspaper with a picture of that on the front page."


Then, here is another told expertly by the Librarian: "This was the semester I was in the S-dorm. I still spent most of my time at my old dorm. That was room F6. Our bedroom window faced the dorm office and the pool. Over to the right you could see the bedroom windows of the 'B' building that sat perpendicular. There was this one window where the people stacked their beer cans all the way to the top of the window, like they were proud of how much beer they drank. My friends and I thought this was like the ultimate bonehead thing to do, so we got the idea to try to knock down their beer cans. I think it was three of us: Me, Bob and Jill, who decided to do this one night. Our idea was to bang on the window in hopes of knocking them down. So we snuck over there at night around 9 or so and on the count of 3, banged on the window REALLY HARD. The window completely shattered!! We were completely freaked out because this was not our intention. All three of us ran in different directions to avoid getting caught. I ran all the way out to the campus entrance on East Cotati (the entrance nearest the dorms). I then walked west on E. Cotati, made that first right, and walked back to the dorms along the bike path. We all eventually came back to the dorms and were not caught. I guess we lucked out in that respect. I think that was way worse than the spray paint thing. We would have probably been expelled from the whole university, I'm guessing. No one was hurt, fortunately. Man, I'm almost ashamed to tell that story. Anyway, that's what happened."

For those that don't know the Librarian probably walked/ran a mile and a half to avoid being caught after the above episode... on a dark and pretty busy street. It's really quite amusing because most anybody that spent time in the dorms got into some mischief of their own. Maybe one day I will tell you about the time the Rodent Park po-po gave chase to the SacTownGuy... but until then you will have to wait to find out if the SacTownGuy got away!

peace out.