Here is how to turn a bad dorm into a good dorm:
- Make the Room Come Alive: A dead room is unwelcoming. Find potted plants and place them on the sill. They are living. Hang paintings of living people on the walls. Living things will make your room feel alive.
- Silence Them: The fingers are a problem. Clawing, picking, poking you in your soul – they’re noisy, and they keep you up at night, fiddling on a guitar, strumming deep in your cranium. They must be eliminated. Cuff them to the bedposts and saw at them. When the night is falling, the fingers must not be moving.
- Sanitize: Everyone is shedding. Small traces of roommate are contaminating your living space. The door handle is covered in their dead skin. Their bacteria swims between your toes when you shower. Collect trace amounts in jars and store them on the windowsill in shame. They will see it and wonder why they are a creature who sheds.
- Only the Essentials: Their mattresses are tauntingly gargantuan. Fold them up and put them in the closet. They’ll say, “where are our mattresses?” and you’ll say, “I put them in the closet because they are large.”
- Make Arts and Crafts: You don’t need their cooperation. Staple bits of your beautiful, shiny hair to the wall. See? Everywhere there is a piece of you. You are always looking at yourself and your roommates are always looking at you looking at yourself on the walls.
- Make a Joke: Who doesn’t love a good knock knock joke? Their rooms have doors, so you should be a funny man knock on them. Their screams of laughter will be loudest at 4 in the morning.
- Be a Fratty Person: Funnels, Beer and a Kiddy Pool are all fratty, like you. Fill the kiddy pool with vomit and fecal matter and tell them that the frattiness is unfolding. We are men. We are fratty, and the frattiness is in the kiddy pool!
–MT ’18