random thoughts of a girl in the middle of nowhere

Right before Christmas break every year Providence College puts on a Banquet, which they have very creatively named, The Christmas Banquet. People here at school go crazy over this banquet. I mean crazy. Unnamed girls in my dorm have been talking about it since I meant them. They bought their dresses months ago. And for at least a month and a half have been talking about how they are going to do their hair.

Why? I am not sure; however, like all things I do not understand about Providence Culture, I have my hypothesis on the subject. The main one has to do with looking good. Christmas Banquet is the one time of the year when it is socially acceptable to dress up and look really hot. All other times if you dress up at all you stand out, or are mistaken for faculty.  

I think it is also because there is excitement over whether you will be asked or not. Maybe that guy you have had your eye on all semester will ask you to sit by him. Because that is really what going with someone to Christmas Banquet means.

Topping all of these reasons though, has to be the food they serve. For some reason, it’s amazing. This has always baffled me, because the same people prepare it. And they have more mouths to feed at the Banquet than in the normal cafeteria…but I will save that for another random ranting blog post.

Anyways, Christmas Banquet. It is this Friday. I still don’t know what I am wearing, or how I am doing my hair. But I am excited, because there will be good food, good company, and the first ever Providence Dance afterwards, and perhaps some ice skating after that. I am expecting an all around good time.

Providence College has a sauna, and girls are not allowed to go in it. They are discriminating based on our sex, and denying us our God given right to both sweat and relax in the sauna. What is up with that? I have nothing further on this topic.

This time of the year is crunch time. The last few weeks are packed full of papers, projects, and other little assignments such as blogging. This is a very stressful time of year, and different students have different ways of handling it. Me, I procrastinate. For instance right now it is 3:20pm on the second to last Thursday of the semester, and I am just starting my homework. It is not that anything has been keeping me from doing my homework. I did not have any classes today. I had no meetings. Really, my whole day has been free. However, I have filled it up rather well with my procrastination tactics.

This morning rather than doing my blog post I decided to take an hour getting ready, which only happens on days when I do not want to do my homework. After that I went to lunch and sat there for two hours talking to people. I the proceeded to the computer lab and library to encourage (distract) others in their homework. Finally about thirty minutes ago I left the school and headed back to dorm in order to begin my homework.

Of course before I could start my homework I needed to change the pictures on my myspace, since I haven’t done that all semester. And now here I am, starting my homework.

We will see how long this last though, as my room looks like it needs to be clean, and I have dishes to do, and laundry to wash. When I finish that I imagine it will be supper time, and then I have to work. Oh well, at least I accomplished one blog post.

Photo By Brenda Peters

Well, winter finally came here in the flatlands, and oh boy did it ever come with a vengeance. It has been -25 with wind chill the past few days, and yesterday we had a nice dumping of snow.

Normally I dread the snow, because it stays for so long, however, this year it came at a good time and I am excited for all of the fun leisure activities that are now possible. Here is a list of my favorite things that are now possible.

1. Ice Skating. They do not have the rink up yet, but when they do oh boy it is going to be GREAT!
2. Snow wrestling. The snow here is too cold/dry to make into snow balls, so you have to just wrestle around in it.
3. Go sledding. Of course there are no hills here, but there is a sweet manmade ramp.  
4. Build an Igloo.
5. Go Snowboarding. Behind cars, you can sled behind them too, that is also fun.
6. Make a fire. Either inside or out, both are fun, and good ways to warm up.
7. Walk on the river.
8. See how far you can make it in a blizzard.
9. Make hot chocolate and watch a movie or play cards while drinking it.
10. Walk to the post office. Once there sit for an hour while you warm up enough to walk back.

Everyone at school tends to leave all of their stuff sitting around. Campus becomes like one big living room for most students here.  However, I have a feeling that the school frowns upon this fact, as they have begun to leave signs up outside of the cafeteria telling students to put their things only in the coatroom.

And they are serious about this. If you try to defy the signs and leave your bag outside of the cafeteria they will move it to the coatroom. I know this from first hand experience. It is almost like they are trying to train us or something.

I don’t think that it is going to work though. Students will give the administration a false sense of security about the clutter situation. We will allow them to think that they have taught us how to put our stuff only in the coatroom. As soon as they move those signs though, BAM, the bags and clutter are going to be back outside of the caf.  

At the end of last year I decided to take on the role of being a Resident Assistant (RA) in dorm this year. Among many other things, one of my tasks is to plan Care Groups every week.

Care Group is a time when the whole dorm comes together. Many RAs will have bible studies, prayer times, or something else really spiritual. To break up the spiritual Care Groups they will often have something mindless and fun like a movie.

I do not run my Care Groups like that at all. In fact I believe that when it comes to Care Group I tend to be very unconventional, as I have not planed one yet this year. And I think that we can count the number of times on one hand that we have intentionally talked about God. Heck, I did not even pray until the third week in.

Most of the time when it comes to the planning of Care Group, I spend about two minutes brainstorming with my Bathroommate about what she thinks we should do. Normally this takes place on a Monday, (Monday night is Care Group). After I have it all planned out I then need to let the girls know what is going on.

I have three ways of doing this. My most common is word of mouth. I tell the girls I see and I tell them to tell the other. This normally works. If I do not have time for that though, then I do the predictable sign on the door (all RAs use this tactic when it comes to getting the word out about Care Group). But I do not actually make the sign myself, instead I “delegate” this task out to Winkler, a girl from my dorm. Really, I haven’t made a sign yet.

If both of these options fail then I resort to convincing Tyler, to making an announcement in the cafeteria for me. However, I have only resorted to this once, and it was costly. I had to give up our dorms old nickname of Lowfo, and I also had to pay him a dollar. I don’t know if I ever did give him that dollar though.

In conclusion, I really suck at being an RA, when it comes to the Care Group aspect. I have yet to have a spiritual one, I never plan them, and I do very little work when it comes to putting them together. The weird thing is that Care Group has been great. I love getting to know the girls. Normally at care group we just share life together, and I really don’t think it can get better than that. So instead of saying I am bad at Care Group I am going to take the positive spin and say, I am really great at training others to be RAs next year.

And who knows, maybe next semester I will plan a bit more. Maybe.

On campus there are not too many comfortable places for both men and women to hang out. There is the Well, which has horrible chairs. The main lounges in Bergen Hall and Eichorst. But hanging out there is awkward because in Eichorst there are always couples hanging out, and in Bergen there are always weird boys around. Then there is the student center, which works, but is not the greatest, as the atmosphere is bad. And then there is the Cafeteria, which for some reason is the favorite among Prov Students.

There is just something comfortable about sharing a meal together with your friends, that seems to spark great talks. Meals at Providence are a great way to get to know people, share life, and just grow together as the body of Christ. I love eating with people; I enjoy the fellowship that goes on around the table. I truly believe that there is something divine about it.

Meals for me and many other here can go hours. I cannot count the number of times I have entered the cafeteria for supper at 5 and left at 7, without even noticing a minute pass by. Trust me, it is not because the food is good that I stay for so long, it is totally the people that make the cafeteria great.

However, today in the daily (an announcement paper that goes out every day) there was a blurb about how we are not to sit and talk in the cafeteria anymore. We must be gone a half an hour after supper ends. This is an outrage. They are stealing away from students their favorite past time, fellowship in the caf. And I do not understand why.

Procrastination is a big problem for me lately, a disease really. I have really done no homework for the past two weeks. And for the next three weeks I am going to be paying for that choice, and paying for it hard.

For some reason I have been having the hardest time getting motivated to do anything in the realm of homework. All I want to do is hang out with people and have fun, or sit in my room and do nothing…mainly I am down with doing anything as long as it is not homework.

I think my defect with homework lately is caused by three things. Number one, laziness, number two a far off due date, and number three an overwhelming feeling whenever I sit down to do anything.

The only cure for this apparent disease of procrastination appears to be the threat of public humiliation. Because I am in the Media and Communications program, practically every project that we do is presented in class. Unfortunately this sucks, because there is a constant competition to do better than everyone else. With this competition comes a threat of public failure. This could mainly be my number one fear. Failing in media is very different than failing on a paper, when you fail on a media project everyone sees, and that is a very unnerving concept. It is not at all a far stretch to say that every media student is most motivated by this fear.  

Anyways I have three projects to work on, all of which will be presented in class, within the next month. So I better get going.

When students drive onto the campus of Providence College it appears as though all sense of personal hygiene is lost.

Starting on October 1^st the boys began this thing called Hairy ‘til January, where they do not shave, trim, or cut any piece of hair from October 1^st until January. I am not sure how many of you out there have seen an unmanaged beard, but it is not a pretty sight, all patchy and gross looking. Then there is their long hair, you would be surprised how fast some boys hair grows.

What theses boy’s motivation is in allowing their hair to grow wildly, I do not know. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that for some odd reason it makes them feel like men. Why it is that looking like a beast makes them feel like men is beyond me, but it appears to be the way it is.

Some girls on campus are violently against the Hairy ‘til January cause. So in order to combat it they have come up with their own. There is no catchy name for what they are doing, but mainly they are not shaving until Christmas Banquet. At the end of the semester there is a lot of very hairy students here on campus. It is almost like Europe.

I personally am not against the Hairy ’til January cause, I just do not quite understand it. Sometimes I wonder if the reasoning for both the male and female lack of shaving has more to do with laziness than anything else.

From what I have seen at Prov, laundry is not a high priority. In my research upon this topic, I have discovered two reasons why this is.

Number one students are both busy and lazy. Doing your laundry can be quite the time consuming task, it can take you a whole afternoon to get it all done. Amidst all the paper writing and social life to be had, no one really has time to do their laundry. Nor do they really have the desire to.

 The next reason I have uncovered is the financial burden of laundry It cost a dollar per load in the washer, and .25 cent per fifteen minutes in the dryer. I know for some of you rich people who are reading this, 2 dollars a load might not seem like a burden. However, when you are a student without a job, it really is.

To cut down on the cost of laundry some students (myself included) have resorted to hang drying their clothes. However, this really just further adds to the burden of laundry as whatever you wash will not be ready to wear again for two days.

I must confess that I only do my laundry once a month, and even then, it is only the things that need to be washed. But don’t worry I have 31 pairs of underwear, so this is not gross. I know a boy who does his laundry even less than me, and he only has seven pairs of underwear. Let me correct that, two weeks ago he upped his collection from four to seven. Yeah, I know sick hey? The weird thing is that he doesn’t smell at all.