Sundays in College

I was almost always the first one to wake up. I rose quietly, showered, dressed, and ate breakfast by myself in the typically cold main room of our apartment. My roommates were sleeping in from a late night of sex, drinking, doing nothing, watching movies, or playing video games.

I would usually get a call from Kate when she was five minutes from picking me up. We went to a great church every Sunday called Emmaus Road. It still meets. I am sure it still rocks too.

Depending on how much work I had to do that Sunday, and there was always work, I had a hard time relaxing at church. Often I was so exhausted and dreadful of the long day of studying or writing ahead of me that I couldn’t bring anything to worship. I had very high expectations of this church to give me something, to feed me some thought, God, or something else. I came empty handed every Sunday with a just as exhausted Kate. We loved it.

Kate would drop me off at the apartment. We would say our goodbyes and wish each other good luck with our work. We preferred to get it done and have some time to relax later that night. We usually split at 12:30. I would walk in to find my roommates having a very late breakfast, or for them, an early lunch. The TV would always be on and it was always football. I didn’t mind. I like football.

I would wolf my lunch down and reluctantly take to my room to tackle whatever paper was waiting to be written. Sometimes it was a paper that needed to be finished. Sometimes it was studying. Most of the time it was a paper not even started that was due the next day. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be in my room from 1 to 7:30 working the whole time on a paper.

I would usually come out of the room twice to relieve myself or grab something from the kitchen. Curiously, the TV in the main room would still be on, but my roommates had long retired to their respective corners of the apartment. I would switch the TV off. I sometimes peeked into my roommates’ rooms. On occasion they were studying. More often than not though, they were IM-ing, watching TV, or doing both.

Returning to my room I often was full of rage. I had eight more pages to write and from the looks of it my roommates don’t go to college because they study as much as I did in high school and I didn’t even challenge myself in high school. I really never understood it. I did my best to hide my frustration from them, to refrain from saying something like, “Go study”, “Go read something”, “Are you going to graduate?”, and so on. I had to vent to someone, so Kate got the brunt of my frustration.

Hours later I would emerge victorious, having found a huge string of BS running through “The Cask of Amontillado”. I had woven 15 pages of arguments, persuasion, theory, and reference into an A paper. In these years, my last two at UW, I pretty much left the room every Sunday knowing that I had just written an A paper. After a few weeks of this it was automatic. Breakfast. Church. Lunch. Write. Rage. A lot more writing. Read. Edit. Re-read. Print. Staple. Put paper nicely into a folder for delivery the next morning. Triumphant exit from the room. A quick dinner. A nod to the roomies at their desks or on the couch and out the door to Kate’s apartment. I was a robot, a slightly tormented but efficient, robot.

*My roommates got their degrees and are both very successful in their respective fields. One of my roommates during my last year was much younger than me. He is now a stand out swimmer and will graduate next year.

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