In International House, my sanctuary was my room. Living in a residential college with many other students sharing facilities does not provide one with the privacy that those who live in apartments outside get. We eat together, we play together, we work together, and in some cases, shower together. It's not like I totally hate the lifestyle. Living together means making friends. Having someone near by. Friends that are only a few rooms away. Events that we work together to accomplish. But even so, sometimes we want our privacy. Somewhere to retreat when we're tired of keeping up with the crowd. And that is the room we have been allocated to.
In Room 135, Ground Floor, Scheps building, I slowly build my sanctuary. On my first day in Melbourne, I washed and cleaned the room. From the huge suitcase which held my 30kg of stuff I took out my clothes, toiletries, stationery and other miscellaneous items. I went out the same day and bought myself a table fan. I set up my laptop on the huge study table. The room was beautifully simple and clean. Minimalisation, I realised, was the key to simplicity and cleanliness.
My sanctuary wasn't the same after that first day. In the next two weeks I accumulated a stack of papers from Unimelb. Brochures, ads and advices from goodie bags to help me adjust to my new lifestyle. Free stuff, like cds and hairbands and condoms. Receipts littered my desk from my purchases. Foodstuff tossed into the cupboard for my late-night snacks. Bags of plastic and fibre lay around the floor.
I did not have the time nor energy to clean my room, so it gradually became a mess. Then from the roiling activities of O-week I passed into the start of the semester. Life slowed a little (Oweek timetable, was basically 17 hours of non-stop activities and 7 hours of sleep, if you're lucky). I still did not have time to clean my room. Instead, I went on outings, to Philip Island, to the Moomba festival. And I brought back even more things. Namely, soft toys. Small, little toys from Philip Island. A huge Husky won from Moomba took up a corner of my room. The huge study table disappeared from sight under a mountain of papers.
Did I finally get the time/energy/spirit to clean it? Yes, I did. I did the whole works: Filing my notes, packing unwanted papers into a bag, doing my laundry AND keeping it away, changing my bedsheets, wiping and vacuuming and polishing. The room was once again clean. It did not stay that way for long. Soon after, things started piling up again. And of course, I couldn't be bothered to clean until weeks later. Thank god the toilets and showers were not cleaned by me but by the cleaning staff everyday.
In second semester I came back with more stuff. More clothes, more food, more things. And the whole fight between cleanliness and messiness started again.
It was compulsory that at the end of the year we would have to pack all our belongings up into boxes or bags and store it in the college basement until our return next year. My stuff went into four boxes and a small bag. I packed my huge suitcase (the one from the beginning of the year) with food and some clothes to bring back home. It's amazing how much one can accumulate over a year. From one huge suitcase filled with clothes I ended up with boxes full of textbooks, files, toiletries, shoes, clothes and toys. Not to mention all the things that made a transit through my room, like food and papers and all sorts of things students use.
Ever heard of 'one man's meat is another man's poison'? While I consider my room to be messy and cluttered, to others it was homey and tidy. And, peeking into some other students' rooms, I can see why.
At least I never had clothes littering the floor and have less than eight boxes of stuff at the end of the day.
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