If there’s one thing that I will take away from my college experience, it is how to live with people. Living in a shared community, whether it be your residence hall, fraternity or sorority house, or even apartment or house, we all, at some point, encounter situations that alter our way of living.

Living with a large community of people has the good, the bad and the just downright ugly. Upon coming to college, I discovered pet peeves that I never even knew I had. When you spend most of your life living in the same environment, you find yourself repulsed, disturbed and annoyed by habits and quirks you didn’t even know people possessed.

Take for instance, in my current living environment people find it entirely necessary to shut the hall light off because they can’t sleep with the stream of light coming in from under the door. Once the sun sets behind the horizon, and the lights go off in my house, the hallways become exceptionally dark. The other night, around 11 p.m., I have to leave my room and I am struggling to find my way down the hallway in the dark. There is next to no lighting when all of sudden the wall jumps out at me.

I would promise that as I am trying to make the 90 degree turn down a new hallway, the wall, which wasn’t there moments ago, jumped in front of me. My face made a sudden discovery. Instantly, the wall and I went from not being acquainted to intimate friends. My whole head went reeling and my glasses were dislodged from my head. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. The wall assaulted me in my own home. Once I was no longer disoriented from smacking my cranium into the drywall at a brisk walking pace, I mumbled curses under my breath. I am ashamed to say that there was a genuine moment when I was mad at the wall, as though it had actually had some control in my decision to head-butt it.

Quickly though, that anger filtered through the proper mental faculties, and I began to wonder who the evil person was that decided it was time for the lights to be off in the hallway. Had there been a fire, I could have rendered myself unconscious if I hit the wall at a panicked pace. Knocking myself out by running into a wall and then not escaping a house fire is not how I want to go. Or worse, I could have crushed my glasses to pieces. What then, I ask myself. Without my glasses, I will surely be walking into walls at a greatly increased rate. My depth perception and vision are already horrendous, if I were to break my glasses in a wall collision there would be no hope for me.

Who turned out the lights anyways? Were they bothering you that much? My nose and my pride would really appreciate an apology, please. Until someone comes forward, I am going to resume my earlier defense and say that the wall got in my way. Somehow it relocated, and that location just happened to be the exact same space my face decided it needed to occupy. Is there drywall in my nose?