So sorry I haven’t written much lately, I’m extremely busy now running in between training sessions and Joseph rehearsals. So I am pretty much busy most of the day, and when I am not officially in training I have to make door decs (just finished about an hour ago!) room check reports, and a bul board.

Not to mention laundry, cleaning, and getting ready for the school year.

Training has been pretty intense, we have had sessions all the way from meeting the monks, to disability, to discrimination, to LGBTQ, to Programming to–you name it.

Oh, and my favorite? Assigning duty.

We did it in a really stressful fashion, going in order from 1-7 and then 7-1 in two different groups, and it took FOREVER. I was about ready to punch somebodies lights out too. Oh well.

Last night I spent about 2 and 1/2 hours cutting out and pasting the back of my door decorations. (The things on your door that have your name on them.)

The theme for my floor is “Jetting off to a bright new future…” and on my board I will have a big jet plane with everyone’s pictures in the window.

In order to coordinate I drew three different pictures of girls carrying suitcases (I have all Freshmen girls on my floor) and then I photocopied ten copies of each (I have 30 girls).  The background I worked on last night was a boarding pass with their names on it.

Then–today I tackled the tedious part.

I painted in all of the copies of the girls individually.

It seemed like a good idea at the start…

Six hours later, it was just a pain. I finished around 7 pm…and promptly taped them up. They looked really good, but they sure were a lot of work. It feels good to have them finished though.

Two irritating things today–

One, while I was working on the Door Decs, after about two hours of working on them and starting to get tired and frustrated, my friend J came in (who works at the school) and you could tell he was cranky. He had two AIE students with him, and he was like “I’m letting these students into their rooms.” Sp I was like….”ok?” and he kind of huffed off.

Then, when he came back through he looked at the group of RAs working on their door decs (there were four of us) and he was like “Well, have fun watching tv while I’m helping students, RAs.”

First of all, none of us were even watching the tv, we were all working hard on our JOBS. Second, the AIE kids didn’t go to us to ask to be let into their rooms, if they had we would have helped. THIRD we were not on duty or training, we were taking our sparse free time to work on more RA stuff and he was getting paid to let those students in and I don’t care how bad of a day he was having he had no right to treat us that way.

I was (and am) to put it frankly quite pissed. What’s annoying is that he usually wouldn’t treat me that way.

Second run-in:

So also while I was working on Door Decs (a little bit later) One of our Deans came in and demanded that one of the other RA’s show her their room, because she wanted to see what one looked like. So A took her because she had a little less work to do. Then, Dean R started to ask  her who lived in every room adn what community they were in, and when A told her the truth (that we haven’t been told yet) Dean R told A that she needed a tour of the building.

To add to that, when she came back downstairs she looked at our work, smiled and said it looked good, started to walk out, and then came back. She got about two inches from my face, bent down, and was like,

“Now I am going to be the _mother_ here and tell you what your mother would. You shouldn’t be painting here on the _brand new table_ over the _brand new carpet_”

I said “I am not spilling, I’m being very careful, I have mats laid down to prevent any accidental spillage.”

She says “Well, I know you wouldn’t _want_ to spill, but I think that somewhere else would be  a better place.”

I wanted to say “Oh yeah, like where? In my BRAND NEW ROOM with the BRAND NEW CARPET everywhere, or over in the other BRAND NEW LOBBY or anywhere in the entire BRAND NEW BUILDING? Where would be a better place?!!”

Instead I said

“MmmHmmm”

and I kind of stared at her for a while.

Then she left, probably assuming I would move.

I didn’t, since there was nowhere that wasn’t new in the building.

Also, she’s not my mother, she’s never met my mother, she has no idea what my mother would say and quite frankly I didn’t come to college to be bossed around by my mother. Quite the opposite in fact.

When a couple of other RAs heard the story they were just like, “Yeah, she’s always like that, avoid her at all costs.”

For the next couple of hours every time the front door opened I was a little afraid it was her coming to check to make sure I moved.

Well, I’m exhausted (as you can probably tell from the deteriorating quality and quantity of my writing) so have a great evening and hopefully I will be able to see you sometime in the nearish future.

Sincerely,

Emilie