Opinion
Dorms require proper Feng Shui for lifestyle
March 26, 2009
I hope everyone’s spring break was as riveting as mine. It’s been two weeks since my fingers tapped away at my crap-ass laptop, golly. Anyway. It’s been almost a year since my last night in my McMillan dorm room, number 127, first floor, the most rockin’ floor in the entire world of dormitories.
Having housed some of brightest, wildest and most awesome people I know, McMillan has received new furniture, as well as other furnishings that supposedly allow for better sleeping arrangements and comfort. While I don’t disagree with these new offerings, I’d like to take a little time to share some of my ideas that’ll allow you folks still living in the residence halls to pimp out your room.
I spent my first semester in extended housing in McMillan with one other roommate. It was in my fortune that he was older, new and had a sense of humor, as well as a storage shed in Hudson that he shared with his brother and cousin, also UW-River Falls students. In essence, we turned our massive, blinding white walled, numbing office-room into a pad fit for a king.
Andy, my roommate at the time, brought in his queen size bed for himself, which allows us to convert the third sliver of a bed Residence Life provides us with into a couch. The couch sat across a campy, yet massive television that I enjoyed wasting zombies with a rusty shotgun on during skirmishes in Resident Evil 4.
You might be thinking, “but Brad, not all of us live in extended housing!”
True dat. My second year in a real dorm room provided my new roommate Alex and myself the opportunity to severely revamp the whole dorm room life. We brought in a thoroughly intricate loft system that pinned our beds to the ceiling with no protruding rails to stub our frozen toes on. My head was literally eight to 10 inches from the cheese grater of a ceiling thanks to the wicked, sharp moguls of plaster pattern. I enjoyed the close proximity of my resting place because it allowed for extreme, maximum air flow throughout the rest of the room.
We brought in a tailored carpeting system that was padded and more than comfortable under socks and shoes. Keep in mind that these methods of feng shui were more than worth the little extra cost. With our beds soaring in the sky, and thick carpet under our noses, what better way to relax than a full blown action movie? With a 13 inch base, 5.1 surround sound and a kick-ass HDTV, “Black Hawk Down” and “The Last Samurai’ brought my senses to their knees as helicopters whizzed by the back of my skull and Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise.
Now on to the existential, the surreal, the hypothesized and theorized section with some of my ideas that have only made it to my drawing board. First and foremost, a giant green screen placed on the outside of the dorm window. This high resolution plasma screen can both show colors that don’t exist on any lighting spectrum and or haven’t been invented yet. With this rather pricy gem I can display any sort of outdoor event I want. Whether it be a tequila sunrise over the edge of a Mexican coast, or displaying a black outside darker than night (or black itself), I can wake up to whatever I want.
Next: an elaborate pulley system. Don’t stop now, just hang on; it’ll make sense in a second. I spent many nights of my freshman year developing this idea with Alex, and I’ll fly him up here from New Mexico to back me up. The pulley system is build with steel and hugs the ceiling. The user, in this case the resident, wears a vest that’s connected to the ceiling pulley system.
At the mere roll of the shoulders, the user can whisk his or her studying self from desk to bed in one smooth sail. Think about how awesome it would be if you were carrying on an awkward conversation with your next door neighbor (who you really would rather never exchange words with anyway, they smell and cake their dorm room walls with Shasta pop cans). Rather than have to continue the conversation long into the night, you clap your hands and launch back into the dark room, landing safely in your bed.
Your neighbor will have no choice by to gasp, lean into the blackness of your room, clear his or her throat and then slip your door closed. They redeem themselves by tucking you in bed from a mile away. Done and done. These ideas are free. I encourage you dorm residents to increase the level of pimpage and awesomeness of your rooms. Think outside the box. Work it out with the folks who live above you, knock out the ceiling or add a staircase. Add a swimming pool, hot tub, back yard, putting green, or hell, even grass and some trees. There’s nothing more comforting that waking up in the forest. If you have any stunning ideas, let me know. I wanna help construct.
Brad Brookins is a graduate of UW-River Falls.