Compared with the forty year old shabby dormitory I am living in now, theone I lived in for three years in high school was heaven: three students sharedone brand new suite with air conditioners and a bathroom.
In three years time we changed it color of the floor turned from brightpink into muddy gray, and the closet a hive of insects proliferating among pilesof rotten fruit.And our masterpiece was the bathroom, a never drying swamp whichserved as the habitat of various kinds of mold, and even rodents, rats wouldoccasionally take the trouble to pay us a visit, and.., all three of us feltlike sobbing when we at last had to say good bye to our lovely filthy dormitory.Maybe it is because that the dormitory had changed us as well as we'd changedit.
The first lesson our dormitory taught us was to look after ourselves.Frankly speaking, we were not good students at all. I still remember theunderwear that was soaked in soapy water for one and a half years before it wasfinally thrown away. Almost each of the boys' dormitories had graduallydeveloped its own unique "fragrance" usually a mixture of rotten fruit, unwashedsocks, stunk towels and some junk food. We could tell one dormitory from anotherby sniffing instead of looking. Our tolerance towards untidiness wasamazing.
However, in spite of all this, we really did make some progress. Bit bybit, we started to wash dirty clothes before they stunk, cleaned the garbage binwhen it could hold no more trash, we even used brushes in a not-sc-successfulattempt to refurbish the floor. The point was that we were not obeying anyorder, we did every bit of the cleaning for ourselves, because we wanted to livein a better place. Though nothing we did could be called an achievement, it wasthe first time we fully bore the consequences of our behavior, and took theresponsibility.
Thus it was not surprising that I often found myself the only one to cleanup my university dormitory which looked no better than a garbage bin when myroommates felt normal of it.
When talking about our dormitory life, and probably all the dormitory life,we should never leave out one thing. This was what we called "bed talks". Thoughit was considered "illegal,"there was nothing to stop us from deliberatelystarting a heated discussion right after lights were out. It was our favoriteand the only way of ending our day, and we were as punctual for it as ourparents are for work. What was the most common topic?Girls, of course! Whatother topics were there for three energetic adolescent males lying comfortablyin bed? We judged them,ranked them, argued over them night after night withoutfeeling the slightest sense of boredom for three whole years. Were we
maniacs? Who is not a maniac at eighteen?