Theories of Insanity

7 | What

7 | What

Sunday, September 10, 2017

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Insanity:

Attending a 'floor meeting' at a religious college and thinking it wouldn't be the absolute weirdest thing I've ever experienced.

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"The floor meeting literally starts in two minutes, why are we still in the apartment?"

"It takes thirty seconds to walk down the hall, that's why we're still in the apartment."

A word of advice for anyone who hasn't yet attended college but who plans on it in the future (although I'm not even sure if floor meetings are a thing at every school): do not attend floor meetings unless they're mandatory. Anything related to your living situation that is not mandatory is probably incredibly stupid.

Floor meetings were incredibly, incredibly, (1) stupid.

This would be our second one of the school year, and the last one I would ever attend. They were weekly occurrences: every Sunday for the entire school year, our RA, Rebecca Ender, would knock on every door on the first floor of our building and tell us that the floor meeting was going to start in ten minutes. The first meeting had been about important things: apartment details, rules about keeping the rooms tidy, a heads-up about when cleaning checks would happen. The second one, this one that was about to happen, was advertised to be about bonding with the girls on our floor.

That should have been my first sign to just stay home. I hated bonding. (2)

"I can't make it!" Christina ran out of her bedroom at the end of the hallway as we all prepared to leave, "Tell Rebecca that I'm sorry, but I just have to get started on this project."

"We gotchu." I replied, nodding as Ashley opened the front door for us all to file out, "I'll let you know if you miss anything good."

"Thanks." She grinned before running back into her room. I followed everyone else out of the door, bringing up the rear as we walked to the end of the hall and into the 'activity room,' or the common room at the corner of every floor in the building.

The activity room was a large room, with two walls completely made up of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Mascot Center—where all the home basketball games would be played in the winter—and the gorgeous Utah mountains stretching for miles behind it. I still couldn't get over how beautiful they were; so different from the greenery I was used to back home on the East Coast. Depending on the day though, I liked the mountains more.

There were two tables in the room, each with four chairs around them. I had seen girls already using those to study in the past week since classes had started, and had come in here myself to get some time away from Madison and her constant questions about our American Government and Politics class. (3)

Aside from the tables and chairs, there were three small sofas and a ton of outlets and chairs scattered around the rest of the room. Generally, they were all spaced out nicely, but when we arrived for the floor meeting, they had all been pushed against the walls to create a huge empty space in the middle of the floor.

That should have been my second sign to get up and leave. Space meant we were probably moving around. And I hated moving around.

"Hey girlies!" Rebecca Ender was a small girl, probably about three inches shorter than me and with long, pin-straight brown hair. In all of my limited conversations with her thus far, she seemed friendly to the point of being fake—and she had an incredibly high-pitched voice. I didn't trust people with high-pitched voices, which was something I had always innately felt but couldn't really explain. Maybe it was because my voice resembled that of a thirty-year-old man's, and people tend to trust those who are like them.