Word: got
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cavernous one-room double and stared at my roommate with the calculator looped around her belt. I had worried about the place when I met the guy downstairs who bleached his hair ash blond and posted death poetry, embellished by skull and crossbones, on his door. I got nervous when I heard the strains of opera punctuated by very loud and horrifyingly off-key singing in the room next door. But I knew I was in serious trouble when I heard that question...
...Ellen convinced me that some joker in the housing office had read my thorough, if slightly arrogant, application and gleefully selected someone with every trait I detested. In our brief, mutually wary encounter, I discovered that she was a chemistry fanatic who went to bed at 10 p.m. and got up at 6 a.m. (I never go to bed before 3 a.m. and I never get up before 10 a.m.), loved Celtic harp music and Gregorian chants, and belonged to the Spartacus Youth League, a group of rhetoric-spouting Trotskyites who have done much to discredit leftist politics. "Chemistry...
...instant friends. The nauseatingly sweet smell of incense (burned to cover the odor of dope) and the stench of old beer permeated the dorm. Music blared from every corner of the Yard, while huge groups of drunken men huddled and leered at women going from party to party. I got asked the big four questions--name, school, career plans, SAT scores--so often I could recite them in seconds (although I refused, as a matter of principle, to talk scores). After one night of parties, I'd had enough. I didn't want to meet any more people...
After that, I stayed out of the room. I auditioned in vain for plays, trying to regain the cameraderie of my old theater group. But I got rejected again and again, and I finally took refuge in libraries, trying to study my way out of my depression and loneliness. In this morass, I clung to the one human and intellectual contact of that first semester: a freshman seminar on China taught by a man who honestly cared not only about our intellectual development, but also about our personal adjustments to Harvard...
None of these insights came quickly or easily, but I did make an important decision--to find a place for myself at Harvard, an activity or group that would rekindle my enthusiasm. In quick succession, I got into a play and found a boyfriend. The former was unquestionably the worst play I have ever seen or acted in, a pitiful attempt to set Antigone in a Latin American dictatorship. The bumbling, pretentious director and the egomaniacal cast ensured the failure of the production. The boyfriend was even worse, a deceptively suave manipulator who enjoyed hurting people and watching them squirm...