#3 - My Collegiate Life - The Freshman Years - Meeting People

The next day, I woke up pretty early with the thought that my roommate would show up sometime soon. Not a whole lot happened until I got a knock on the door. Not my roommate, but a large group of people saying they were trying to get people from the floor together to play ultimate Frisbee. Ultimate Frisbee? What? This was definitely a foreign concept to me, and certainly sounded extremely hippyish. Frisbees are for throwing back and forth, and FYI, I suck at it! After I explain I have no idea what this ‘Ultimate Frisbee’ is, I decide it would be best to meet these people I would be sharing my life with for a year. They explain that the game is sort of like football rules, and then I had no problem even though there was no tackling…what kind of ‘ultimate’ game is this?


So, a large group of us head to a park nearby, to an area I am not sure I ever visited again even though it had a close proximity to my dorm. It was nice getting to know a group of people. There was Ben, Matt, Luke, Terri, Jean, Liz H., Becky, and some more who I feel bad for not mentioning, Chad maybe as well? I was meeting new people and couldn’t necessarily remember everyone. If I didn’t say your name, and you happen to be reading this, I am sorry and please let me know you were there.

Now this game was actually really fun and I was pretty decent. It was a hot day, and it felt good to be active and work up a bit of a sweat. I was happy to meet people, but while these people were all extremely nice and people I could see myself being friends with, they didn’t seem to fit the match of any other friend I had. I couldn’t see me partying all the time with most of these people, so I knew I still had work to do to meet more and more people. Please don’t get me wrong, this was just an initial thought, and I partied with most everyone there at some point, and I was great friends with all mentioned.

Of this group, I had my eye on Terri, not sure what it was, but something about her caught my attention. Anyways, I decided afterward to have a post-game conversation back in the dorms over in the girl’s wing to get to know Terri, and the others, a little bit better. It is weird how something as new and exciting as college can make you forget that just two nights before I was going through a tearful goodbye and was only a day and a half into being single again and here I am flirting with no thoughts of the past. I really feel kind of bad about this now. Back to the point here! I found out that Terri was from Blue Mounds and went to school in Mt. Horeb. This is what I consider to be in my ‘home territory’, which happens to include most of southwest Wisconsin. I actually happened to work at a cheese factory in Blue Mounds and knew several of Mt. Horeb’s finest citizens. Umm, hello my ‘in’ for conversation! I’ll be fair here, I got to know and talk with the other girls as well.

Terri & I

Back to my room to see if I have a roommate yet. This was sort of nerve-racking. The guy I am supposed to live with for a year in a small space has yet to show, and I just want to get the initial awkwardness of the first meeting over and out of the way. I open my door, and well, good sign, there is a large TV on the floor of my room, but, no roomy. Well, he must be making trips, all good. Well, he doesn’t show up at all the rest of the day. This is really getting me upset, but I’ll survive and I had to get myself ready for our first mandatory floor meeting. Great opportunity to meet everyone on the floor.

The meeting is a typical group meeting. The RA’s, Ben and Tess went over the rules and we all had to introduce ourselves and say something interesting about ourselves. I also believe there was some game we played as an ice breaker. The RA’s seemed to be nice, which is good, because they were the ones I needed to watch out for when I was drinking in the dorms. I believe this was the first time I met people such as Giddee, Cory, and Jacque.

After the meeting I was walking around the hall and stopped in to talk to Ben, the kid who lived in the room directly across from mine, room 209. His roommate had yet to show up also, so, it was good to actually sit down with someone who was in the same boat as me and chat. Turns out Ben was really into music, which I was too. At the time I was into hard rock pretty hardcore. Ben enjoyed the same music, but really, he just loved all music, which was neat. He had a large Dave Matthews Band poster and I explained that was my ex Liz’s favorite band. I didn’t know too much about them except for a few songs that Liz had shared with me, along with ‘Crash’, their big hit. I later would learn to loathe DMB because apparently everyone was obsessed with this band and I like to spite. Plus, the more I listened to the music, the more it just sounded the same, and it got really, really boring to me.

Ben & I

Ben loved going to concerts and recording the shows. He showed me his collection of mini-discs. This was awesome to me, for mini-discs were the obvious wave of the future; CD’s were going to soon fade out into the mini-disc. Well, that was what we all assumed then at least.

The Sony Mini-Disc