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Asian American E-Zine
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Dear RA Sir or Madam, It has come to my attention that you RAs as a collective whole have become compulsive, nagging, and perfectionist. In short, you are becoming like my mother, whom I love dearly but have desperately eluded by living on campus. Your behavior is a far cry from my freshman and sophomore years where no one seemed to care about how any of their residents were living, and that is very well how things should be. Once you breach the line of what you think is right and wrong for us residents, you are crossing into dangerous territory my friends, and I don’t think I can be responsible if you step on one of my land mines while you are doing a room and safety check. A metaphorical land mine of course, I mean no harm unto you. First things first, the reason I write this letter to you is because of an incident that occurred last semester. The occasion? My twenty-first birthday. A time of revelry, merriment, and getting plastered out of your mind legally. Now, in my suite, I have not, in the 3 years previous I had lived there, seen any party broken up. And I lived with frat people who threw loud parties at 3 in the morning and disturbed my sleep: but did any RA do anything about that? Heck no. So much to my shock, my first party, which was a relatively quiet celebration with only about 15 people there, was interrupted by an RA saying that there were too many people in the room and that everyone had to leave or get written up, plus any open alcohol had to be poured down the drain. Everyone knows: you mess with a college kid’s liquor, you’re going to be hated. forever. This incident, horrible as it may be, was graciously overlooked by me, and I could not wait to get back to the freedom that Stony Brook provided before long. Then I have to go through crap like an RA saying that our computer wire cannot be taped down to the floor, rather, the 15 foot cable must somehow be taped to the ceiling! These RAs also wrote us up for having a dirty kitchen. We are guys, we live dirty by choice. I’m really glad that you RAs think that you’re doing us a favor by telling us how to live, but you are not. In fact, you are slowly earning our ire. If our living conditions cause damage to the room, we’ll take care of it. I don’t believe for a minute you’re looking out for our safety in just the same way I don’t believe cops care about our security when they write us tickets for not wearing a seat belt. Oh, and when I was bringing in a 30 pack of beer with my 2 friends who were 21, you informed me that I could only have 6 cans of beer per person and I would have to pour the rest of the beer down the drain. Smooth move guys, smooth. Look, I don’t really care that you are an RA. You are not special to me in any way – I view you as a regular college student. In that sense, I wouldn’t mind chilling with you or even partying with you. It’s a part of college; relax and have some fun. But if you think that your 2 weeks of “training” (read: sleeping, drinking, partying with other RAs) qualifies you to tell us how to live our lives, think again. You think you need to earn the respect of your residents? Well we respect you already for what you’re doing. You’re helping us get back to our rooms when we lock ourselves out. You give us advice on what’s going around campus, you build our floats, you talk to the annoying RHD for us, you’re supposed to look out for us. And we respect that, we really do. But, we respect you forcing the school’s rules unto us just like we respect the RIAA’s wishes for us not to download copyrighted music. You don’t have to earn our respect by being a hard ass; in fact, we’ll respect you much, much less. Stop being so damn pompous and thinking you’re above a regular resident – you live by the same rules and in the same society as all of us. No one is going to fire you if there’s a party on your floor and you don’t bust us or force us to drain our liquor or kick everyone out of the party. Unless there are strippers and Metallica playing a live concert with 500 people stuffed in a 6 person suite, it doesn’t exist, okay? No one is going to fire you if our rooms are “dangerous living quarters” due to a wire taped to the floor or because the garbage hasn’t been taken out for 3 days. The whole premise of safety inspections is ridiculous anyway – if you give us an entire day to cover up any evidence of drugs, liquor, and other illegal goods, how is that enforcing our safety? Hypocrites. Being an RA is stressful, I know. I have plenty of RA friends. But that doesn’t mean you have to pass your stress onto us. Just because you live in a way where rules must be followed to the letter, doesn’t mean we all want to be subjugated to your dictatorship. Live and let live. You collect your free housing and $300 of free food from the school, and we say that’s cool and won’t bother you that much unless we really have to. Piss us off, and you know what, when stuff breaks in the building, or someone rips down your bulletin board, you’ll have no sympathy from us. Or if you need the building’s cooperation to compete in a recycle-thon or float/boat building, you will not find our help. We don’t want to hate you, we really don’t. So stop making life hard for us. That is all I candidly ask from you. Thank you. Sincerely, James Han
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