Clutter: Use it or lose it
I’ve got nothing against NDSU residence hall rooms. The campus halls are clean, well lit and well heated. They provide cable TV, adequate power outlets and Ethernet connections. You’ll find everything you would need besides an indoor pool. But the fact remains that each room is a single room to itself. Each student is allotted one room and possibly a roommate or suitemates.
Over the course of the school year, students accumulate much junk.
Gifts from family, small furniture and large piles of dirty clothes account for much of the free space in many dorm rooms. And not all rooms are created equal.
Some rooms are larger than others. Students living in Stockbridge or Churchill halls have a few more square feet to work with than other slobs on campus, but the lack of space remains.
Students with nearby hometowns have a slight advantage in that they can simply load up their cars with clothes, an extra stereo, random gifts and raffle prizes and dump the contents at their parents’ house.
Many out-of-state students, myself included, don’t have that luxury. I can’t just hop in the Taurus and haul a bunch of stuff back to Apple Valley, Calif., unless I want to spend 59 hours and $440 in gas money.
So I live like a pack rat. I take in boxes, paper materials, food items, textbooks and school supplies faster than I can use them or get rid of them.
The result is piles and heaps everywhere: in drawers, on the bed, under the bed, on shelves, on the refrigerator and any other flat surface available.
Clothes, papers, pictures, newspapers, textbooks, plastic bags and various personal articles accumulate over the course of days until I require sonar just to walk across the room.
Even my workspace is invaded. While typing this piece, my elbows rest on piles of unused room registration information, some resident assistant brochures and graded homework. It’s a preposterous situation.
Since last semester, the tangle of cords underneath my desk has managed to trap dust bunnies the size of jawbreakers.
My closet appears to have exploded. I’m afraid to look behind the TV.
If only there was an alternate dimension I could pitch random crap into and then withdraw it again at my leisure. Or maybe a magic box that would never fill up — Jesus’ Reverse Picnic Basket, or something of that nature.
But nothing like this exists, so I’ll have to make due. For students who live 2,000 miles away from college, I offer one piece of advice in regards to clutter: Use it or lose it.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum