Breakfast with Amber

August 2019: Breakfast with Amber

I'm writing this to you from the couch in my apartment in San Antonio. It's a Satuday afternoon near the end of August, and it's way too hot outside. I'm cooking some barbecue pork and peppers in the Crock Pot, filling the place with the smell of barbecue-y goodness. I'm currently uploading a video to YouTube scheduled on Sunday. "But Daphne, don't you have Sunday off?" Well, yes, but that's when I film Thursday's video.

I bet you're wondering why I'm writing down what I'm doing right now. Well, do you ever just wonder to yourself how the heck you got to your position in life, why your apartment is in San Antonio and not Houston, what you're doing with a Crock Pot or a recipe for barbecue pork and peppers, why you've got to film all your YouTube videos over the weekend and then schedule them?

I mean, I have the answers to all of those. I'm in San Antonio because that's where my first job is. The Crock Pot is a hand-me-down from my mom, and she found me some easy-to-make recipes so I can cook three or four servings over the weekend and eat them as leftovers on the weekdays. I'm filming all my YouTube videos over the weekend because I work 10-hour shifts and don't have the time or energy to make videos on the weekdays.

But I was thinking deeper than that. I don't think I would have looked for a job in San Antonio if I had never gone to Trinity. I mean, think about it. People tend to stick around the places they know. If I had gone to Austin College, I might have gotten a job in Dallas. If I had gone to Southwestern, I might have put down roots in the Austin area. I looked for jobs in my hometown of Houston, too, but it was at Trinity University that I met a recruiter for this nonprofit organization called City Year that works in economically disadvantaged schools. I decided to apply because teaching was on my career radar, and I thought it would give me some much-needed classroom experience considering I had just started thinking about teaching three months ago and was not on track for any certification whatsoever. They were the first to give me an offer, and I, being tired of this whole "job search" thing, accepted. (Not to say anything bad about City Year. I just really really wanted a job already.)

The important part, however, was that my journey to City Year started at Trinity University, where so many other things started, such as my television experience, my D&D career, and my knowledge of both the Japanese and German languages. Trinity is also what you also came here to read about, so I should quit rambling in order to reach my word goal and get to telling you about my first month of college.

It's hard to remember just what was going on when I first moved into college considering it was almost exactly four years ago. In fact, it was August 15, 2019 when we hit the road for San Antonio once and for all. We stayed at a hotel for the night (the Hampton Inn on Jones Maltsberger Road–my parents' go-to hotel for San Antonio visits for years to come). It was on the 16th that we finally got me moved into my dorm. I remember sitting in the passenger's seat of my mom's van as part of the backup of cars on the highway leading into McLean Residence Hall. I spent the wait to pull up to the dorm reading through the move-in day brochure we had gotten. I don't even remember what was in it. Maybe there was a map.

Eventually, we made it to the dorm, where my stuff was taken to McLean 345 by the move-in team, which was made up of upperclassmen. When I got there, I saw that my roommate, Trinity, had already arrived and had called dibs on the bed closer to the door. That meant mine was in the back of the room. (Yes, my roommate was also named Trinity. I will refer to her as Trinity the Roommate and refrain from using her last name as much as I'd like to dox her–more on that later.) My parents stayed an extra day and left me on my own after convocation on August 17.

August 17 was also my first day waking up in my new dorm...to the loudest fucking alarm in goddamn history, which Trinity had set for 6:45 that morning. After that, I decided that when classes started, I would set my alarm for 6:40 so that I'd be up before the oncoming heart attack. In fact, 6:40 would become my usual alarm time for the next four years. These days, I'd be happy to wake up at 6:40 since I have to be at work at 7:30, and my coworker usually arrives to pick me up by 7:00, requiring me to be up at 6:00. The funniest part is that Trinity would never again set an alarm that loud for that early, so I developed a habit of waking up at 6:40 for nothing.