We finally have a common room. Well, I guess we've had one all along, but it was only used as a court for dormcock, our suite's official sport (basically badminton with table tennis paddles—don't read too much into it). But now we have the couch arranged in such a way that it's actually facing something (a TV) and the chairs have been moved out of my room and back where they belong.

The whole thing kind of happened out of coincidence. I think it was Monday night/Tuesday morning when my insomniac tendencies didn't allow me to sleep, so I was up at 4 a.m. cleaning up the common room. Masking tape to define the dormcock boundaries—in the trash. Broken chair—hello, new coffee table. Playing cards lining the baseboards from card-throwing death battles—trash, before I get killed. Deflated beach balls from would-have-been raves—um, I'm actually not sure what to do with those…

Later that day my suitemate called saying he had a spare TV at home. Sweet. After managing to get the TV from the car to the room, we had a common room. I can't believe we had been wasting all that space.