The Finite

Finally, I leave the dorms. No more N64 fanatic RAs. No more futilely attempting to stop my randomly assigned roommate from judging me in the first five minutes of meeting them. We’re in an apartment now.

I’ve been planning this for months now. I spent all my spare hours accumulating supplies over the summer because, hey, I hated my summer job and looked forward to going back to Purdue. I’ve been trying to pick up as much cheap food as I can. Mom helps when she can. She bought some soy sauce and handed me a SoCo sized glass bottle of “the good stuff”. I reached for the smaller pint-size bottle. She asked, “But how will you eat?” I brought chopsticks just to appease her, as well as a remarkable quantity of utensils she never found a use for. (Mostly pasta-related.) I also brought about 100 lbs of dry or canned foods that we got cheap on sale: cereal, soups, Tuna Helper, granola bars, and ramen. Sadly, I forgot the rice. (Please comment on my fail below.)

It’s a small three-bedroom condo about a mile from the engineering mall, part of a complex located next to a busy interchange next to a bridge. Well, it’s not right next to the highway. There’s a thicketed ditch between the highway and our two balconies. The front is right behind two laundrymats/tanning salon/gym and a bar. Aren’t I afraid of drunken guido attacks? Of course I am, who wouldn’t be? It’s why I carry mace and a New England Journal of Medicine article on the dangers of tanning bed overuse.

We have a shoe rack to keep dirt off the carpet and a foosball table to make the place less gay, but also to serve as a visual centerpiece that ties the room together with contrasting hues and directs the eye towards the TRON poster on the far wall.

However, in order to keep this place affordable, we’ve had to undergo certain cost-shaving measures:

• pantsless Saturdays
• shirtless dinners
• cold showers on days containing S
• buying our soap from a lady named Strawberry out by the river
• illegal recycling
• brushing our teeth in the dark
• saving on the electrical bill by running cold water through a dynamo
• turning tricks at the bus station (juggling mostly)

No more brand name foods either. If it is a family name, it’s out of our price range. If, however, the brand name was thought up by some underpaid marketing intern in a basement cubicle in Fort Worth and lacks one or more vowels that would ordinarily place it among words in the English language, we’ll buy it (if it’s on sale). So right now our pantry is a library of Kroger, Valu-time and Safeway products all teetering on the edge of expiration.

Dylan is the shower curtain nazi and I’m the shirt nazi. Dylan makes sure the shower curtain is always unfurled so it dries completely and never gets mildew. I, the shirt nazi, always ask, “Why turn the AC on when you can just remove an article of clothing?” Chris is Austria. He appeases the nazis, then goes back to whatever he was doing.

The neighbors are loud and hard-drinking, but they are pretty much the same as any hall full of freshmen. Some of them started smoking and laughing on the balcony below us and the second hand cloud filled up my room before I could shut off my window fan. I was pissed at first because I had morning class the next day but then I relaxed. It turned out to be easy to get to sleep because I felt like I was floating.

The first day of classes this year, and I’m not in any classes. It’s 7:30 Sunday morning and I’m sitting in a giant conference room, yawning a lot, picking at my name tag and looking around grouchily. The very accomplished speaker stands at his podium and goes on about how I and those sitting with me are like family now, and we should get to know each other sooner rather than later. He shuffles us. He goes on about how close we’ll get in the next couple of semesters. I look around and find I’m literally surrounded by people who I’ve TA’d last year.

I know their names well enough. I’ve graded their homework and collected their quizzes. I just don’t know their faces.

But today, I shook hands and recited names to myself as I mingled among friends who had already formed their own cliques in the past two years. I guess I’ll join one eventually once my acquaintances in a given clique reaches some critical mass. But for right now, I’m only up to one or two people here and there.

And frankly, I’m not sure how they’re feeling. From what I hear, they were at each other’s throats three months ago. But now we’re all in the special club and can finally let our guard down.

After more speakers, some freshmen year-esque ice breakers, there was a catered lunch with faculty where the food wasn’t actually that bad. Now that we’re sorta-almost-technically grad students they’re not gonna cut corners and assume we’ll eat freshmen-level food.

After lunch my group was herded into buses and taken into the woods next to the airport by a wildlife major. That sounds very scary now that I look back on it, but it was just more team-building. To people I went to middle school with, I’ll can just say: Lorado Taft. To everyone else, I will say: cliched summer camp activities.

Fast forward to the second day. They make us come in formal dress for no other reason than that we’re going to have to dress up a lot in the future. I sit there in another giant conference room, yawning a lot, picking at my name tag and playing with my tie. More speakers; more faculty who sincerely hope to be our mentors. An old R.Ph with a J.D. (who I will call “Dad”) rails on about how people who drink to make themselves stupid are stupid. I was muttering that people also drink for the euphoria. But considering how we are all wearing either ties or heels, I’m guessing euphoria is not on the itinerary today.

I did perk my ears at the curriculum overview. Dosage forms and patient counseling.

The orientation closed with a solemn divulgement that the amount of pharmacy jobs in the state has dropped precipitously in the past twelve months as the supply of PharmD graduates has increased thanks to the 25 pharmacy schools opening in the last ten years. So much for the competition being over.

As I sit there, surrounded by 159 excited PharmD students, I can’t help but continue to feel such gnawing, persisting guilt. My spot in 160 means someone else couldn’t be here. I don’t want to become a pharmacist; I never wanted to become a pharmacist. Others did. Others who weren’t so welcome from the waiting list. I only applied because I was too afraid of failing at pre-med. I didn’t have the confidence I have now.

But I’m here now. And I can’t cede this spot to anyone else. But I can go to med school and become a kick-ass MD with a PharmD.

And I will.