Under Covers with Amanda D.

Amanda Dolasinski

Hello, freshman. Welcome to the best four or five years of your lives. Look around. You're on America's largest college campus. There are thousands of you, plus thousands of upperclassmen waiting to meet, greet and fornicate.

Some of you may have read our former president's statements about student behavior. She was interviewing for a position at a school in Florida and said something along the lines of Ohio State students look for reasons to riot and to participate in drunken orgies.

I'm not sure where Karen A. Holbrook was kickin' it when she was here, but someone please let me know. I'm always in the mood for rioting for no apparent reason and then catching an STD during a crazy drunken orgy, or at least that's what Holbrook thinks.

The truth is: sex happens. As freshman with newfound freedom, the best advice I can give you is to talk to your roommate about sex rules before you find yourself sexiled at 4 a.m. on a Wednesday with a calculus exam at 8 a.m.

What's 'sexiled'? That's when your roommate locks you out so they can get busy.

I remember my first day on OSU's campus. My roommate was an OWL, so she moved in early and already had friends. When I moved in on Sunday, she invited me out with her new friends, the girls next door. We went to the always-classy bar, 4 Kegs. After she got drunk off one watered-down beer and fell for the first boy who talked to her, we left to check out his place off campus.

Beer bottle caps littered the ripped-up carpeted floor in his piss-scented house. He introduced the girls we were with to his roommates. I got bored and went back to Stradley early. My roommate never came home. Neither did one of the girls next door.

Stradley was my amazing freshman year experience. A lot of sex was had there by me, by my neighbors, but mostly by my roommate.

She would randomly bring boys back and sometimes have dirty conversations on her phone when she thought I was sleeping. I tolerated it until a boy from down the hall walked in our room at 3 a.m. on a weekday and they started going at it. The next day I put a green flowered tapestry up between our beds. She got the hint and moved out.

The girls next door had similar problems. After coming home from a party, I saw one of the roommates sitting on the floor outside of her room. I asked her what was going on and she said her room was "occupied."

Before this girl even moved in with her new Stradley roommate, she lived in another dorm but chose to leave because of the actions of her former roommate's boyfriend. She walked in on him masturbating.

Dorm rooms are a great way to make friends, but are problematic for hooking up. You'll notice sex is not addressed on your roommate agreements when you fill them out. Make sure you come up with some kind of plan. Whether it's abstinence or putting a rubber band around the doorknob, talking about it will prevent future embarrassing situations and even possible fights.

I haven't talked to my freshman roommate since and although I don't regret it, I have to wonder: who is she hooking up with now?

This probably is not the best way to be remembered.

Amanda Dolasinski, Lantern Managing Editor, can be reached at dolasinski.1@osu.edu.