Seven days ago, I was whisked away from the smelly yet comfortable confines of my third floor Dogwood suite and into a luxurious ground floor single at the Best Western Plus. This has coalesced into a life of leisure with brief forays into my linguistics homework. I suppose that’s about all someone really needs to know about my experience, but for the poor souls who are unable to experience the world exactly as I do, I will micro analyze a shockingly uneventful week.

A topic that always piqued my interest is control, in the baseball sense of the term. It describes to a pitcher’s ability to throw the ball where he wants it. I have gravitated towards what I can quantifiably control and control well. In the pursuit of a controlled environment in my new home, I conducted a fact-finding mission about those who live around me.

Luckily, the girl next door has made it almost impossible for me to know nothing about her. She speaks noisily with long, raspy, breaths interspersing her sentences; the deafening FaceTime calls to her roommates, her daddy, her sorority sisters, her high school friends, and her father are usually the highlights of day. Somewhat unintentionally, I believe to have curated a somewhat thorough psychological profile on her. I believe her to be a sophomore, Caucasian, from either suburban Connecticut or Westchester County (she’s spending Christmas in Fort Lauderdale), majoring in either Anthropology, Sociology or Psychology, and a proud member of either Kappa Delta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, or Chi Omega (I’ve heard her rag on all the other sororities).

I attempted to reach out and establish a rapport early on – the note I slipped under the connecting door asking if she had anything to boil water in was received but not returned. Although living vicariously through my new best-friend was fun, transcribing her 6-hour FaceTime calls can get a bit dry. Luckily, I did bring my Xbox 360 and College Hoops 2k7, where I’m running train through an admittedly depleted Patriot League with my Colgate Raiders – a year removed from a crushing NIT Quarterfinal loss to St. Bonaventure.

Each morning you wake up to a frighteningly loud knock of breakfast being dropped off outside your room (at this point if you just ding-dong-ditched me, I’m pretty sure my salivary glands would kick it into gear) and an email to sign up for outside time. Now the email says that due to current capacity, you should only sign-up for one 30-minute time period every other two days, but I’ve signed up for one every day. I’m a bad boy. Yard time is a neat blend of mind-numbing banality and thrilling exuberance. One day, the staff duct-taped hula hoops to the streetlight and provided frisbees for some target practice; that was fun. Another time they offered you both puppies and cookies (I abstained from the former and indulged in the latter), and today they just played Coldplay on loop or what seemed like three hours.

I’ve formed strong opinions and solidified my worldview during my vacation to 3050 University Parkway. However, my newfound goal in life is to acquire enough currency to hire an entire migrant workforce to systematically search for and destroy all existing recipes of potato salad. I will then burn them (the recipes, not the migrant workers) and pay Wake Forest enough money to display the ashes in a new wing of Scales named after me. I’ll admit potato salad and I had somewhat of a tenuous relationship before my time here, but the frequency with which I have been supplied it for lunch is enough to make even the most diehard potato salad fan a little queasy. 

Another one of my fine ideas has to deal with inflation. I wonder if I can fix inflation by collecting so many state quarters that a significant amount of money is removed from circulation. Would I have to list that on my tax statement, or could I squirrel them away in Trinidad and Tobago?

This last part is dedicated to my newest conspiracy theory, dear reader. It came to me in a dream of the Old Gold & Black. For two years now I have been bleeding the beast from the inside. For two years I’ve had my cake and eaten it too. I’ll tell you the only thing I am sure of; world peace is possible, and the Old Gold & Black is integral to it.