beyond the wide world&#39;s end

Good advice! Thank you. (Staplers are very important. The first things I bought at my summer program at Brown last summer were Junior Mints and a stapler. I may bring two -- I have the cute little ones that nevertheless have some mean stapling power.)

I should probably not pack all the clothes that have college names other than "Tulane" on them. Which is, uh, all my sweatshirts and a fairly large number of my T-shirts.

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why wouldn't you pack college shirts? everyone here prances around in shirts for colleges their cousin's friend attended/ that they visted when they went to Europe, etc. If you prance around in 'Oxford' sweatshirts as a first year everyone will recognise the poncing, but aside from that, who's going to care?

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I read it in a book/on the Internet somewhere...? (shock of shocks: I bought stuff from every school I visited except the one I'm going to. Um.)

High school shirts y/n?

(Sorry, I can panic too, but I do it on the Internet, instead of in front of my family.)

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*shrug* I dunno, I suspect this is an American Thing. I always meant to get hold of U. Newcastle (my home town) shirts and wear them in Sydney and vice-verse, just to piss people off, but never got around to it.

Y. Y, Y, Y. (Especially given that Americans seem to be bigger on this sort of thing than we are.) I wore my high school jersey around for a while (advantage: name on the back), only to realise that a jersey from a tiny school no one's heard of and that I didn't even LIKE that much isn't really worth the bother. But if you LIKED your school, good plan. (Conversely, if you went to a prestigious school, you'll be judged by school shirts, so you might want to leave it off unless you like that sort of thing.) Also, band shirts, team shirts, etc. Good for establishing a vague sort of identity.

Pack any Nerd Shirts you own for filtering out fangirls from the morass. (*snort* now I have an image of you meeting someone, going through the Nerd Identification Process, narrowing down to a common fandom, and having them explode with 'YOU'RE THE ONE WHO KNOCKED UP PETER PEVENSIE!')

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Well, on the bright side, none of my shirts are major rivals of Tulane's.

*snort* I'm one of nine incoming freshmen from my state; I don't anyone's heard of my high school. Band sweatshirts and creative writing club t-shirts, though!

Alas, the only nerd shirts I own are my NaNoWriMo shirts, because yes, I am THAT much of a nerd.

(Oh, God, that would happen to me. Although I haven't met anyone in RL who's found my fic through LJ...)

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Then you should be fine, unless Tulane is a giant snob school. That is my estimation.

Bwahaha. NaNoWriMo is pretty nerdy. Take those and see who recognises them :)

I dunno about other Nerd Identification Techniques.

kayloulee and I were identified by mutual friends as having common medieval nerdery and went from there. I believe she found the few other slash fans in her year via a big 'WOLFSTAR FOREVER' scrawled across her pencil case... She's got a badge now that says "I <3 yaoi", and maintains that if people ask what it means they're not worth explaining it to. I apply the same principle to my medieval in-joke t-shirts.

(One day, it probably will. And you will be mortified, and everyone else around will be bemused.)

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I was wearing one of my NaNo shirts in Borders the other day and someone recognized it -- but I was so out of it I didn't recognize that they'd recognized it till afterwards.

I have run into people in RL who are in fandom occasionally -- one of my friends in CWC, who found my fic because I had my LJ linked to my NaNo profile and that was the year I bullied everyone in the CWC into doing NaNo, and she kindly pointed out that maybe I didn't want to let the little freshies know about my SW fic and slash tendencies. And then someone else at Stanford (summer program two years ago), because I was reading fic on the computer next to her.

Alas, my Leather&Libraries sweatshirt from seventh grade is probably outdated five years later. Especially in an LJ-based fandom.

(Or just go, "...what?")

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BAH, why shouldn't the freshies know about slash? (Betcha half of them already know anyway...)

Fandom people are everywhere, I'm gathering, going around disguised as normal students.

My only *really* weird experience with RL-fandom crossovers was

fahye... nice, quiet person, friend of my best friend. Then someone in college decided to host a sex toy party, and I ended up in a corner with her and someone else, in a discussion about teh pron, in which she extolled the virtues of LJ. LJ username aquired, all good. *Eventually* the combined influences of fahye and kayloulee dragged me into fanfic, and I trotted off to read fahye's stuff. It is very disconcerting to sit down at dinner with someone you've known for a while now, and be suddenly thinking 'holy shit this person writes hot pron'.

What is/was Leather and Libraries? Sounds like fun to me!

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Too bad we don't have a secret hand signal where we could distinguish the (sane) fangirls from the crowd.

*cough* Back in the days of the dinosaurs, when Fiction Alley (http://www.fictionalley.org/) was the big thing in HP fandom, all the ships had names. (Some of them are still around -- Harmony, for Harry/Hermione, I think, although there's a possibility they've acquired a reputation for crazy. This is before they started mashing names together.) The S.S. Leather and Libraries was Draco/Hermione, which was my first ship. *fond memory*

And for reference, this was in 2002. Some of my first fic (http://bedlamsbard.livejournal.com/201641.html) was there.

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It is, indeed, a terrible shame. Instead there's a weird sort of nerd mating dance, which reminds me of nothing so much as two blokes each trying to figure out of the other one swings his way. I don't do it much myself- haven't been in fandom long enough- but Kayloulee is expert at it.

Yup, Harmony is still around, I stumbled onto their LJ comm one day and was suitably terrified.

*Giggles* Oh, dear. I should've guessed. You had a t-shirt proclaiming your ship? You win the nerd contest...

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Oh, college should be interesting. (Although I haven't run across anyone in fandom who's going to Tulane. Wellesley, my second choice, yes -- but Tulane, not yet. I have run across a couple of people on Ravelry, the knitting social networking site, who are at/going to Tulane, but not on LJ yet.)

I was twelve!

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Well, knitting is a good start ;)

Snort. How did you manage to get hold of said T-shirt and explain it to parental units?

If i'd had the means to do so at fifteen I'd have bought- and still be wearing- a Ringbearer.org t-shirt, but the means to buy things online was not mine :(

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They had -- probably still have -- a Cafepress store. My parents bought it for me, but I have no idea how I explained it to them. I don't think I did. I did try to explain it to my friends, but I don't think it went across.

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*Giggle* Very accommodating parents, you have. Mine- I guess we hit the internet about the same time, I would've been fifteen- were all paranoid about me using "chat sites". Try explaining the concept of a message board to people who don't quite understand email yet, and who think you should only need twenty minutes online twice a week to download said emails.

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I was eleven. *sweetly* I have no idea how I got away with all the Internet stuff -- I was never blocked from any sites. I even used to try and explain the concept of fic to them.

Of course, it doesn't help that I never managed to figure out how to use chat sites. Still haven't.

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beh, chat. I tried it once, on RB, and it was full of swooners. Message boards ftw :)

Clearly you were just a reliable and trustworthy sort of preteen! Dunno what my parents were worrying about, I had the worlds most hyperactive self-censoring system. When I was eleven I found some implied sex in a Tamora Pierce book and took it to my mother- made her read the whole book- just to make sure it was ok for me to read!

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I was reading Diana Gabaldon in fifth grade, which is (not that) explicit. I didn't realize it at the time, and I was excitedly telling my sixth grade English teacher when she freaked out and kept telling me to skip over the sex parts. I was just, "But I've already read it."

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I think after that Tamora Pierce incident I took Mum's permission as a blanket permission to read whatever I was comfortable with. I proceeded straight on to Anne McAffrey, with all the throbbing green alien penises and the telepathic dragon sex. Only time this ever came back to bite me was when I was around fifteen and my parents randomly banned me from reading Jean M Auel because of a rape scene. I could hardly protest but I've read that sort of thing before, 'cos that would just end up with unwanted questions.. :s

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there's a weird sort of nerd mating dance, which reminds me of nothing so much as two blokes each trying to figure out of the other one swings his way.
This is a GREAT METAPHOR. <33333

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I'm glad you appreciate it. Kayloulee was mildly horrified when I described her nerd-detecting antics in such terms :P

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I've totally danced that dance. And it's so rewarding when it turns out they do swing your way! Much flailing ensues! My favorite was when it turned out that she's already read my fic and liked it. Oh man, the flailing that followed that.

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That would be... unnerving, but cool :D

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westingturtle.livejournal.com

Sweatshirts I don't think anyone cares about. They are as Switzerland. Well, unless its a rival school, in which case I strongly advise against wearing it on game day. But the T-shirts are wonderful for when you have to do nasty cleaning chores. Or pulling pranks.

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Solidarity!

Four years of my mother turning up to pick me up from college and finding- SURPRISE- that I'm still not packed. :D

Also, another piece of college-related advice: you always have more stuff than you think you do. And it accumulates over time. I arrived with my stuff in the boot of a station wagon; it's now going to take two trips to move me out at the end of the degree...

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As I kindly inform my mother, I'm only going to be gone for four months, and also, hello, I wear the same clothes every week; it's not like I need different clothes for every day, except for how I'm hoping to only have to laundry once every two weeks. And I pretty much amuse myself; as long as I have my computer, an Internet connection, my knitting, DVDs for emergencies, and a notebook and pencil, I'm good. Oh, and books. I'm not one of those people moving my entire room to college. (Because God, the books. I have three bookshelves in my room and random piles of books all over the floor.)

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That's what I said in first year. AND THEN I JUST FILLED UP MY NEW ROOM WITH MORE STUFF.

My college room is four times the size of my one at home (perks of seniority :P), and it's more-or-less full now. AND my room at home is full, mostly with books. Not sure what's going to happen when I try to move back home.

Take a couple of mugs, at least one plate/bowl/cutlerly set, and a LOT of teaspoons. Also take or buy containers for storing snacks in. A good supply of snacks is a) necessary for survival and b) a good way to make friends.

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I am the crazy girl who, while living in a single for four weeks at Brown (summer program, creative writing, lots of fun), never unpacked and lived out of a suitcase the whole time, despite the fact there was a perfectly good dresser RIGHT THERE. The scary thing is that I could and probably would do this for four MONTHS if I didn't happen to have a roommate, who might be kind of alarmed by the whole thing.

Teaspoons? Why teaspoons?

Bring books y/n? And DVDs y/n?

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*snort* OK, point taken.

Well, presuming you use teaspoons for your tea and coffee purposes. You will NEVER ever be able to find them when you need them, so take extra.

Books... depends on your reading habits. My college room traditionally has very little fiction in it, at least at the beginning of the year, because until I hit fandom I was way too obsessed with study.

DVDs... y, this is good for making friends too.

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Granted, one of the reasons I chose Tulane was because its bookstore was, like, five times the size of Wellesley's, and also, there are yarn stores in NOLA, so there's a pretty decent chance I could fill up on stuff too.

Of course, my DVD collection is the most eclectic ever, so this should be interesting...maybe I'll get one of those big CD cases and put them all in there, instead of taking a billion box sets. (My CD collection is mostly TV-on-DVD. Stargate! Bones! Dark Angel! Eureka! Also, Narnia, obviously, is coming with me.)

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Oh, yeah, carry DVDS in a case. Friend of mine has hers all in cases and they take up *three separate boxes* that have to be farmed out to people every holidays.

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*shudders* If I brought them in their boxsets, I think I wouldn't have room for clothes, and I think those are kind of important.

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omg i knoooooooooooooooow
After a certain point (uh, usually quite early on), I just start throwing my stuff in trash bags. Not for throwing away, but for packing. This trash bag has clothes, this trash bag has school supplies, etc. This is... maybe not the advice I should be giving, but if you're packing in a rush, it is the way to go!

Keep track when people borrow beloved DVDs/books! Things lent in college don't always make their way back... I know this as a bad borrower...

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That's probably much better than what I do, which is piles. Piles everywhere...

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Haha, piles is the default state of my room. Through last year, my bedside table was a stack of the biggest books I had (including my Qur'an, but, uh, we won't mention that to my parents!). It was a pretty good bedside table though, never toppled over once.

I was totally the messy roommate.

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swift-tales.livejournal.com

I really wanted to get a dorm room when I registered for collage a while back, but now reading all of this, I'm kinda glad that we can't afford it and that I'm staying home, comuting to and fro everyday or spending the night at my sister's apartment if it's really too late to catch the train home. The packing alone would have probably killed me.

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