Moving in is much like what my mother once said about giving birth. Immediately following the event, you cannot believe how painful it was and vow to never go through it again. Time dulls the miserable memory. Eventually, delusions take over, and you think, yeah, it was tough, but sure, I could go through it again. Then you do go through it again and you realize how wrong you were.
Immediately after flying in to Providence, my friend and I were forced to lug suitcases, storage boxes, and furniture up two flights of stairs.
Three steps from the top, I stopped.
"Leave me here," I said. "I can't go on."
"But there are only two more steps!" she said.
"Just leave me to die."
Ten minutes later, we looked at what we had been told was our suite, but we didn't buy it. The furniture, dust and cardboard boxes were packed so closely together within the narrow green rooms that walking in felt like entering the trash compactor in "Star Wars."
"Maybe we should rope it off and have it investigated for hazardous waste," I said.
"Oh my God, what did I just step on?" asked my friend, kicking at a small furry animal that turned out to be someone's underwear.
But we were Brown students, and soon we had things well in hand. We began excavating, aided only by a bag of rapidly disappearing pretzels. Soon, the pretzels were gone, but clothes, boxes and furniture still remained.
"Well, at least we've made some progress," I said, looking at the empty pretzel bag. We pretended to move furniture and unpack. Furniture lay on its back, deceptively innocent as it blocked doorways and punched us, teaching a hard-learned lesson about how deeply furniture violence has penetrated modern culture.
Unfortunately, moving the furniture was imperative in order to cross from one end of the room to the other. Otherwise, climbing into our beds without a stepladder would be difficult, and opening and closing window shades would be impossible.
"Shall we move the dresser?" sighed my friend.
"Absolutely," I said.
Moan. Grunt. Yell. Pant. We managed to shove the dresser out of the doorway, chipping minimal paint, and wedged it into the closet. High-fiving, we saw that now it would open only three inches. We stared at each other in dawning horror.
"Screw it," said my friend. "I'm taking my shirt off before we push this thing back into the bedroom." She whipped her shirt across the room and stood in her bra, to the delight of some first years and their parents outside.
"Me too," I said. Panting in our underclothes, we saw that the windows behind us were open too. We were beyond caring.
I glared at the dresser. It glared back, giggling maniacally.
Grunting ensued.
"Push!"
"No, go slowly! Are you trying to kill me?"
"Hmm, maybe if we tried it in a different position..."
We tugged at it and lurched back into the bedroom, kicking over boxes containing property that last year had seemed desperately important but now we wished would rot in hell.
Strength waning, we shoved the dresser at the wall, where the top of it hit the wall but the bottom of it stood stolidly on the barf-colored carpeting. Grunting, we pushed, while a neighbor in the next suite over hammered a nail. We got a nice rhythm going.
"Arrgh!"
"Bang!"
"Don't force it! My back!"
"Bang!"
"Yes! Yes! Oh, yes! Push! Just a little further ... almost there..."
"AAAAAHHH!!!"
Bright red with sweat streaming down our faces, we smiled proudly. The dresser was now placed successfully six inches from where it had originally stood when we moved it in the first place. Against our wills, our eyes swiveled with guilt and apprehension toward the desk, the cardboard boxes and the half-open suitcases.
On second thought, maybe living in a trash compactor wouldn't be so bad.
After moving her dresser, Alexandra Toumanoff '06 promptly took a nap.
