Word: roomful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dominated the floor in spirit by virtue of their loud, inane squels of girlish fun. They raced around in shorty nightgowns, short-sheeted beds, watched TV, hung out their windows and flirtatiously called down to men, and played cute little pranks like getting some guy to burst into my room at 3 a.m. and jump on my bed while they laughed maniacally outside. Welcome to summer camp. One of them, Lori, was a real space shot; she babbled in a soft, coy voice and wandered about in heavy makeup, glassy eyed. The other, Tamara, was an aggressive, competitive overachiever...
...Foundering, I decided to take my proctor's advice and fulfill my requirements first. I groped for some sense of direction and settled on the survey courses--I'll read everything from Plato to Marx, I thought excitedly. Then I went to my first class, and fought for standing room with hundreds of other people. I listened (there were too many people to see) as the professor told us to fill out index cards; she would select and admit to the course a fraction of those assembled...
BACK AT THE ROOM, things went from bad to worse. Ellen had grown increasingly resentful of my large group of old cronies and had developed a habit of throwing the telephone at me and snarling, "It's for you." I wasn't getting any sleep because she plodded around so early in the morning. When I came in late, she would wake up and make me feel guilty. Ellen best expressed her hostility at the one and only party I threw, when, dressed in the orange pajamas, she sat outside our door glaring at everyone who entered...
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...
...shaped public opinion on China, and I threw myself into research. I chose a famous Harvard professor active in public policy and spent hours in the Yenching library, digging up old correspondence, reading everything my subject had written, interviewing him and his colleagues. I would return to my room after the libraries closed and prattle on about my newest theory or the latest letter I had discovered to anyone who would listen. I ignored all my unrelievedly boring coursework and wrote the paper for weeks, finishing just before Christmas vacation. I gladly fled Harvard for home, where I spent...