My Dad drove me back to Atlanta in early January in the family Volkswagen bus. I remember being cold and anxious. Throughout freshman year I'd lived in the same dorm room (with the same roommate) and hung out with a regular coterie, but the intervening six months seemed like an eternity - I almost felt like I was starting from scratch. Would I be able to adjust to new living quarters? Reconnect with old friends? Pick up where I'd left off, academically?
To distract myself from this worry spiral, I turned on the radio and landed on a broadcast of Martin Mull doing stand-up comedy. Hearing his hilarious routine was exactly what I needed; although no food was involved, the result was something like this scene from Freaks & Geeks:
Bill watches Garry Shandling (YouTube)
My home for this quarter was a room on the top floor of Brown dorm (next to Smith, where I lived as a freshman). My roommate (Pete) and I weren't chummy - he seemed to prefer it when I was away from the room (so he could be alone with his girlfriend), and I found him to be kind of basic, exemplified by his beer & babes wall decorations, which are visible in this composite image (comprising photos I took to document the room). The stuff in the lower right corner is mine, as is the Nerfoop above the window. This amalgamation of images turned out kind of cubist, but the complementary view of the other half of the room is even crazier...
Please enjoy this insane composite of twelve photos I took while documenting my room in Brown dorm. At top center we see a televised SCTV rerun (that's Catherine O'Hara on-screen), bracketed by my roommate's beer posters and Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar pinups. The left side shows my personal effects (including Gary Larson's bovine Mona Lisa poster as an ironic counterpoint to the bikini babes). On the right side you'll see my blue sleeping bag in the lower bunk, along with my space-saving shoe storage method. In the center is the exit door, with me (wearing a Pistol Pete Shootout T-shirt) reflected in its mirror.
My textbooks for Computer Applications, Statics, Macroeconomics, Social Psychology, and Differential Equations:
One of my strongest memories from this quarter is of a feat of willpower - on an icy weekend when I had a really bad cold, I rousted myself from my sick bed, trudged past the stadium and across the quad to the computer lab in the Mechanical Engineering building, and completed a programming assignment for the Computer Applications class.
My favorite class was Statics - "the study of equilibrium interactions of a body with its surroundings" (basically, forces associated with things that don't move). My aptitude for the subject matter meshed well with a prof I liked, a young guy in his first year as a faculty member - he was funny and a good teacher. Googling reveals that he stayed at Georgia Tech and is now Senior Vice Provost for Education and Learning, which is pretty cool.