You can't judge a man by his French press

My roommate walked in wearing a wife beater and a pair of worn jeans. He was carrying a bike over his shoulders, and as I got up and introduced myself, I thought he was somewhat unlike how I had pictured him before we’d met.

Thinking back to our phone conversation roughly a week before college, I distinctly remember two things: First off, he spoke in such a proper manner that it made me ashamed of my own vernacular. The other, more important topic in our short exchange was that he was bringing a French press coffee maker.

With the French press coffee maker in mind, I crafted a caricature of my roommate in my head before our first meeting. He was probably a scrawny white kid from Colorado. He probably wore polo shirts two sizes too small and faded, waist-hugging, Hollister jeans, most likely complemented by a white belt.

He was probably someone who had been sheltered by his parents for most of his teenage life. I would probably have to mount a television somewhere in our dorm room, because, as I pictured it, my roommate’s time would be equally partitioned between making sure his hair was that “just got out of bed look which I actually spent two hours on” and watching MTV’s The Real World.
First assumptions are always hilarious.

The first week, I learned that my roommate didn’t watch TV. He listened to Tom Waits. He loves buying clothes from thrift stores. He enjoys street art; he shaved his head on the first day of college; he was completely independent (more than I could hope to become in the next two years), and despite receiving a full out-of-state scholarship, his major is “undecided,” because he hadn’t even planned on going to college.

Last weekend, he took a bus from Albuquerque to Taos and then caught the Rail Runner, despite having been in New Mexico for only a week. And when I asked him about Hollister, he replied, “I walked by a Hollister store once in the mall, and then I smelled it. I never went in.”
He did, however, drink an ungodly amount of coffee.

In college, no one fits into any one clique neatly. Unlike high school, where the kids who liked theater usually hung around other kids who liked theater, college seems to be all about individuality, with the exception of that convocation ceremony where all freshmen are required to attend dressed in red UNM T-shirts.

I see few of my classmates from high school walking around main campus, and, more often than not, they are with the same friends they were with back in the land of eight-hour school days and mandatory physical education.

But I think now is as good a time as any to diversify. I have no sense of balance, so I get on a new friend’s longboard and learn, injuring my leg in the process. I am skinny, so I go to the gym. I don’t know how to swing dance, so I take advantage of the free dance lessons at the Johnson Center.

A final thought: College life is about education, but it also molds and shapes you into the adult you will be once you get that bachelor’s degree. Try everything in order to find your place. As the Brazilian exchange students who live across the hall from me would say, “It’s pretty much good, yes?”