When you are an english literature major, little things like fascinating words and retellings of ancient stories can just about make your day.
When you are a biblical studies major, little things like word studies and new readings of ancient stories can just about make your day.
So now you see why I became both. This semester, like last semester, is already proving to be incredibly daunting and epically exciting. My days are mostly made up of studying intense literature and scripture, dappled with hebrew here and there. And I really could care less what anyone calls me coughnerdcough, I love it. I love school. And any of my readers know that.
But beyond school *I know…. I didn’t quite believe such a thing could exist EITHER!*, I love my home, here at Azusa Pacific University. Way back in my first or second post on this blog, I made a little film showing my roommates. My good friend and last-semester roommate, Rachel, decided that for her the best route was to transfer to another school in order to be educated in a very specific branch of academic: sign language linguistics. So Stephanie and I were curious to see if we’d be getting to get another roommate, and what she’d be like and all that jazz. Turns out we got one! Her name is Michelle and she’s a brilliant theatre major wanting to go into psychology. So our little home is complete again.
And when the days are long (as being a double major, they can often be despite loving what I’m studying), I love love love to just come home to my little apartment and be with my amazing roommates. Living with someone who you wouldn’t, especially when we decided last year to room together, name as your best friend, but a person that you get along with and you just enjoy their company, has been so so so good.
Stephanie and I have grown close in a very different way this past year, and even now I almost feel like our relationship encompasses more than a friendship, because when we meet together in our home there is no pressure to be anything, no need to plan fun activities, or anything. It is just being, studying, cooking, living around each other. We’ve gotten to know the littlest quirks of our personalities and how to laugh about them. We have learned together how we work best, what we need from each other on good and bad days, how to care for one another deeply, but also have our ‘own’ lives. Unspokenly we miss each other, need each other, and actually despite all the little random arguments and frustrations that crop up when you are living in tight quarters with another person, we really like being together. There is no pressure to go out of our way to hang out, but we want to. And that’s just a kind of joy that I’ve never really experienced before.
So some of you may be worried about your dorm assignments for your freshman year, and I’m not going to say that it is perfect. But I can say that you will find your way, that even if your roommate freshman year and you don’t mesh perfectly, you might find that you learn really important lessons from that experience and that maybe your next-dorm room over neighbor will become what Steph and I have become for eachother (Steph was my next door neighbor freshman year, curiously enough :P). And maybe in your sophomore, junior, or senior year, you’ll find yourself standing in your apartment feeling like, for this moment, there really is no place like home.
