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In This Issue

• I'm the Man in the Glass Box
• A Beginner's Guide to Smoking Cigarettes
• The Epic Drunken Email
• Letter From Some Dude
• 5 Easy Steps to Becoming a Barnard Girl
• The Cold, Harsh Reality that is SEAS
• Fun With Freshman Housing
• F.E.D.S. vs. The Fed
• First Year Friendships
• The Fed Guide to What's What: Points of Interest on Campus
• The Fed Guide to What's What: Where to Shop
• The Fed Guide to What's What: Where to Drink
• A Campus Club Wish List
• How to Win Friends and Alienate Your Parents
• Legalized Speed a Huge Hit in NYC
• Fed / Counterfed
• GLAAD vs. Kevin Smith
• Horoscopes
• News Briefs
• Wacky Fun Whitey
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 17.1

So you are finally living away from home. Can you taste the freedom? Can you feel the rush? Can you smell that? What the hell is that anyway? Oh great, not only did your roommate get the better side of the room but he smells funny too. Welcome to Columbia Housing.

Like most institutional housing, Columbia's dorms are not designed for your comfort. In this jolly week of orientation joy, some of you might disagree with me. "But I love my John Jay single," you say while your new friend from the orientation group thinks to himself "My roommate is the best one in Carman!" Suffice it to say that, by the end of the semester, most of you will change your minds. Those of you who don't are probably living in Furnald singles and should roast in the fiery pits of Hades, but more on that later. What follows is a brief guide to the various freshman-housing situations and a little foreshadowing of what you can expect from Columbia Housing for the rest of your tenure here.

Carman: The key word that comes up in any discussion of Carman is "social" because of its cozy 4-person "suite" setup and the long straight hallways, which make running into floormates inevitable. Beware. The chances of you becoming friends with your roommate are only slightly higher than those of hitting a 15-ounce wallaby at twelve paces. More then likely you will actively dislike half of your floor by the end of the year and will be plotting to kill your roommate and make ii look like an accident. For those of you who are interested, I would recommend burying them in Morningside Park at around 3 am. Avoid Riverside Park for burials, its proximity to the river causes the corpses to emit a pungent Jersey-esque odor, although it makes a great spot for watching the sunrise over water. Really, trust me. Despite the annoyance of people, the great bathroom distribution and the high probability that you will find at least one friend in the building make Carman my personal choice for general freshmen housing.

Furnald: This is the first year that Furnald has been offered as freshmen housing. Recently, the administration decided to locate all the freshmen around South Lawn for easier target practice. To accomplish this end, they proclaimed that Furnald, the traditionally upperclassmen dorm, would become underclassmen housing. This was not the most popular move that URH has made and many a junior who will be living in Wein this fall are not happy about freshmen living in Furnald singles. If you are a freshman living in Furnald, be advised: DO NOT TELL UPPER CLASSMEN THAT YOU ARE LIVING IN FURNALD. Violators of this simple rule deserve their fate.

Hartley/Wallach: Welcome to the Living and Learning Center, home of free pizza in the name of education. If any of you are worried about the LLC- regulated activities taking up a lot of your time, you can stop. At some point, you will run a fully-funded event under the thin pretense of community, and it will be well attended by people who value sustenance over personal shame. As far as the actual rooms go, the LLC is a mixed bag: the singles are nicer than John Jay's because of the bathroom setup while the doubles are worse than Carman's for the same reason. Generally be happy if you got a single, and don't believe them when they say it's a dry dorm.

John Jay: Home of recluses so terrified of sharing rooms that they endure JJ's horrible twenty something to one student/bathroom ratio. While the rooms themselves may not be that bad, the building could do with some improvements. Most notable at the beginning of the year is the lack of air conditioning. Luckily this warmth does allow the residents of the building to cook things on their windowsills and avoid the revolting food served by the meal plan. If you are seeking solitude, you are in luck; it is possible to go an entire year in Jay and not talk to a single person on your floor. Always remember, Carman forces lots of people to socialize but you have a single and can always do whatever you want, alone, at night, in the dark. You pervert.

Freshmen housing is mostly a game of chance, but nothing compared to what happens in spring. People expend a lot of effort to remedy the lack of information and strategy that is the Housing Lottery. As this bastion of CU mythology draws near, most of your classmates will turn into the housing possessed. The signs of housing possession are easy enough to spot. A few of your friends will inevitably start spending increasing amounts of time on URH's website as the sounds of laughter and fun seep through their walls. Far too much time is spent delving into URH Materials and far too little time is spent delving into fellow students. It is a truly horrible sight when one of these plague-carriers passes by you, their eyes vacant, trying to determine which size suite will be most advantageous, their speech filled with unintelligible phrases like "EC Exclusion" and "Rob Lutomski." This possession, this plague, this twisted housing cult will, for a few weeks, become the most prominent religion on campus. You can only try your best not to get sucked in when the fuzzy philosophy major sitting next to you in Lit Hum becomes a madman trying to determine what he is mathematically guaranteed by his lottery number of 2995. In the months ahead, you may find yourself feeling superior to your friends based on which side of Butler you can see from your window or the fact that you are 2 floors closer to Koronets. With such thoughts you will have begun your slide into darkness. Welcome to New York.