|
From the Walnut Grove: Interior Decorating |
|
|
|
|
Written by Aurieth Mynonys
|
|
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 |
A Student’s Life in College
By Aurieth Mynonys
Dorm rooms are scary places when unoccupied. By “scary” I suppose what I really mean is “empty,” almost cubicle-like. The floors are made out of big square tiles you might see in public schools. The ceilings have the same type of panels; the walls are all industrial white.
Dorm rooms are scary places when unoccupied. By “scary” I suppose what I really mean is “empty,” almost cubicle-like. The floors are made out of big square tiles you might see in public schools. The ceilings have the same type of panels; the walls are all industrial white. The only way to tell that a dorm room is actually someone’s bedroom are the beds, closets, and desks – and when they’re empty, they look very out of place.
It’s always a little strange to walk into one of these rooms at the beginning of the school year. It takes a minute before it sinks in that this is your home for the year. For me, this realization creates an immediate desire to unload everything and find the proper place for it – I want to make the room my own at once, so it doesn’t seem so cold and lonely and – well – office-like.
There are lots of different ways to decorate a dorm room. You can buy cute little rugs for the cold tile floor and exciting curtains for your windows; you can get an extra lamp (usually a necessity, because dorm lights are scanty) to brighten up the room. Your comforter and sheets should be interesting, because they’ll immediately make a room brighter. Your books and jewelry, video games and DVDs, your fridge and microwave and computer – all of it makes the room distinctly yours.
But the biggest dorm decoration – the biggest decoration for teen and twenty-somethings everywhere – is posters. It doesn’t really matter what the posters have on them; what matters is that you have some posters, something that announces clearly, “This is so-and-so’s room.” And my room, at this moment, is barren of posters.
One of my friends bought nearly ten posters last month to remedy this problem for his own room. He’s into darker things, so his posters are mostly from the bleak movies and video games he favors. He has a large poster from The Exorcist; a movie poster from The Nightmare Before Christmas; another from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. He also has a poster for the film version of Silent Hill, an extremely creepy video game, and a poster from the new movie Coraline.
My other friends are into anime and fantasy/science fiction movies, so their walls are covered with pictures of their favorite anime characters and sci-fi movies. One friend has dragons and fairies all over her walls as well.
My walls are still plain white, because no shop I’ve gone to – even online shops – has had the posters I want for my room. But I’ve finally found a few to put on the walls – a Star Wars poster meant to span the length of a door, and a big Lord of the Rings poster to hang next to my bed. I’ve also been printing out some pictures of my favorite characters from movies to hang up. These are the final touches that will make me feel that my dorm room truly belongs to me.
Eureka College began its long life as an academy when Eureka was still called Walnut Grove. Our student-writer offers her observations on her life there as a college student. --Editor
|
