Monday, November 15, 2004

Life in a college town

I'm trying to talk as little about politics for now as possible. It's like the week after Thanksgiving or Christmas. You've just spent so much time being stuff constantly, once the events are over, you just want to lay low and eat some celery for a while.

With that in mind, some interesting occurrences from this past weekend:

I must say that I'm frustrated with the location of my house. Don't get me wrong, being close to campus is great. The problem is that there is a parking lot right outside my house and it is directly in the path between campus and a large clustering of fraternity houses (a veritable "party central").

Friday night I was up reviewing material for the Chemistry GRE Saturday morning. I knew I needed to get a decent night's sleep, so I went to bed as soon as I thought I could, which ended up being about midnight. No sooner had I laid down than a group of people on their way back from "party central" decided to congregate on the parking lot. This is not an unusual occurrence. What was unusual was 1)The early hour at which they were returning, 2)The length of time they stayed compared to the air temperature outside, and 3) Their overall noise level. I'm used to drunk people being noisy, but for some reason these guys were just really loud. I could hear their conversations outside from my room, laying in bed. It didn't help when they started hootin' and hollerin'. Ugh. I waited them out, but they stayed for half an hour. Who stands around outisde in 30ºF weather for that long with only light jackets on? Yeesh.

Saturday night was no better. I had just fallen asleep Saturday night when a couple of guys started arguing outside. Now, this wasn't like the folks before. These guys were right outside my window. I could clearly hear every word they said, and it was really disconcerting that they would get right up next to the house when they have no business walking there. From the sounds of their conversation, they had just come from a party, and had been drinking. How much, I'm not sure. One tends to be fuzzy on details when one is woken up by conversation at 1AM. In any case, at one point they started hitting on the wall to emphasize their points to each other. That was that. I pounded on the wall knowing they could hear it. They took the cue to move out into the parking lot where I could still hear them. Yeesh! I ended up calling the cops to get them out of there, but I have no idea how well that worked out. The cops showed up almost immediately after I had called, but spent a good deal of time just talking with the guys. What they were saying, I have no idea. It's bizarre how I could hear drunk people in the lot talking, but when the cops pulled up, I couldn't hear their conversations. In any case, they left, and nobody threw rocks through my windows or anything, so it was all well and good, but man! What a pain!

Anyhow . . . enough about that hooey.

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