Rutgers (Part I)

I originally started this blog a couple weeks ago 30 minutes before my second to last exam as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. I decided to start a new five part series, one for each year, about some of my favorite memories at the state university of New Jersey. I hope you enjoy it.

Freshman year...

Taco Night
Mondays at the Busch dining hall was taco night. It was the only thing to look forward to on that first day back to class ever week. I always made myself a taco salad because I was always too lazy to make real tacos. My choice in beverages, which was standard at every meal, was at least two glasses of chocolate milk and at least two glasses of cranberry juice. I am salivating as I type. One taco night, after eating at the dining hall my friend Benedict and I were walking back to our dorm through a snow covered parking lot. I suddenly felt something welling up inside me. I stopped and threw up into the snow in the middle of an empty parking spot. I'm guessing it was all my taco night items of consumption turned scarlet red from the cranberry juice. All I did was laugh and walk back to the dorm. Soon after that I was feeling hungry again since I just lost my dinner and I thought about going back to the dining hall to get some more tacos, chocolate milk and cranberry juice.

All-nighter

I love and require a lot of sleep every night, so it's not often one can find me lacking it. Many college students can be found night after night with little to no sleep because they're study for a big exam the next day or working on a project that's due in a couple hours. I've only experienced one all night and here is my story. A bunch of my friends and myself were just hanging out and talking till around 5-6am. One of my friends, Bond, decided to just stay up till his class at 8am since by then sleeping would be almost pointless. The most logical thing for all of us to do at this point was to stay up with him. At 7am, we headed to the dining hall for a rare eating of breakfast. I love breakfast, but I love sleep more so I don't eat it that often. Afterward, we watched a chain of Saved by the Bell episodes until one-by-one we left for our class or fell asleep from exhaustion. I remember coming back from class feeling like a zombie and walking past my friend's rooms to find them out cold. I proceeded to my own room where I checked out for the rest of the afternoon. I never pulled an all-nighter again, but I have to say the one time I did pull one was a memorable one. I hadn't watched Saved by the Bell in years and I didn't study one bit either, which is fun all by itself.

The lockpick
I don't know why, but myself and a few friends got ourselves some really simple lockpicks during our freshman year. They had many applicable uses but most importantly we used them to open people's dorm rooms when they've locked themselves out. My friend, Amanda, lost her key somewhere between our dorm and the gym. She was determined to find the key and not have to pay the unreasonable fee to re-key her room door. Until then, she asked to use my lockpick as her "key" so she can at least get in her room. Eventually she became a pro at opening her door with the pick. Usually it takes me a couple minutes to get it right and get the cylinder to turn, but she was so good she could have her door open in seconds. I expected her to never find her key and end up having to pay for a re-keying at the end of the year, but about a month after she lost her key someone found it and turned it into the university housing. She got her key back, returned my lockpick and never paid a cent. The determination to not pay fees at its finest.