Sophomore year came with the stress of lottery numbers and housing selection. Even getting a number less than 100 doesn’t guarantee you anything good. Not only did we have to be those people and drop a roommate last minute to get Complex, but also we got the absolute last room in Complex. My situation is less than ideal, but I’m learning to look on the bright side.

Living in Complex has really gotten me in touch with nature. My favorite game to play is Wasps: Dead or Alive? Just when you’re totally convinced it’s dead, it twitches a little and sends you running and screaming up the stairs. Fun right? Putting a little thrill and excitement into your day has never been better. At least they’ve started vacuuming up the dead ones.

Complex has also given me a really interesting perspective on room sizes. Who knew a hallway could be bigger than your actual bedroom! And cabinets. Endless cabinets. They line the walls, your bed, your desk, your closet; I dare say there are almost too many cabinets. But at the end of the day who doesn’t enjoy having two feet of cabinet-filled space to call their own?

Complex puts numbers in a new perspective for me as well. A room of 6 people comes with 3 bed ladders and 4 “dining” (plastic) chairs. On some planet that makes sense, right? Somewhere that adds up to 6?

I have also dramatically improved my climbing skills while living in Complex. Having no ladder, one must find alternate methods of climbing up to their bed. I’ve worked out a little system; step on chair, step on cabinet, leap to windowsill, and then hope you make the jump to your bed. Can I add that to my resume?

When someone in Hill sends me a picture of them wearing a sweatshirt while I have my face buried in a fan, I can’t help but think that some people might have it better than me! The audacity! I thought everything at Quinnipiac was equal and fair! Have I been mislead this whole time!?

Okay, at the end of the day, I realize that it could be worse. I could be living in a cardboard refrigerator box on the streets begging for a less than ideal dorm room with a beautiful campus. Living in Complex may not be the best conditions, but it gets the job done. We have a decent size common room and a kitchen, which will definitely come in handy on snow days when the café is too far to walk to without slipping and dying.

Now that it is cooling off, Complex is a lot more tolerable overall. It’s just surprising that the dorms have such radical differences in quality. It’s obvious that Complex, Perlroth, Larson, etc. are older dorms, and therefore not as good as New Village, for example. But the newer dorms are just so much better. Living fairly close to school, it makes me question why I don’t just commute, and I think other people from Hamden who live on campus feel the same.