Dear Decorator of This Room,

Can you decorate my room, too?

Thanks,

Amin

P.S. Actually, I’m just kidding.

Let me explain. I take perverse pride in the fact that my rooms since freshman year have been, without question, the most boring rooms in the history of Columbia University. And so I sublimate my spatial inferiority complex into a belief that my room reifies my me-ness and allows me to participate in room discourses by representing me in my own terms and in defiance of the hegemony constructed by the well decorated-room Other.

Look at your room. It’s beautiful. It really is. Look at that poster of a fireplace! Who would’ve thought of putting that there? That’s genius.

I mean, I’ve always thought there’s nothing like walking into an empty dorm room on your first day (back) at Columbia. There’s 100 square feet of endless possibility. Where are you going to put your bed? Your desk? Your chest of drawers? Your movable steel shelf things?

You, clearly, have made the most of your little world of possibilities.

I, on the other hand, never do. The first thing I do is put my desk facing the window (assuming I have a good view). The layout of the rest of my room then becomes a matter of fitting in the rest of the furniture in such a way that works. I then arrange my books on the shelves, dump my clothes in the closet, throw other essentials in random places, put up a Japanese flag, and voilà! My room is fully decorated.

I guess I could do a better job with decorating my room, but I have several reasons not to:

1. Owning decorations means that I’ll have more stuff to haul down Amsterdam in blue buckets every May. And then, once I make it to my summer storage place, I’ll realize that I can’t actually fit everything into my storage box. And I will not be a happy camper.
2. I am genuinely too lazy to decorate.
3. I have no design ability whatsoever.

And so I pretend that my life is actually better off when it takes place a bare, boring dorm room.

But still, a pang of sadness reverberated through heart when I saw the joyous prettiness of your room. And the sad ugliness of mine.

Nevertheless, I’ll stay me.

P.S. And yes, glitter is, without question, mankind’s worst invention. So while we’re talking about banning things on campus, can we please also ban glitter?