Too Many Moves My first semester of college was the worst I’ve been through. Everything started out smoothly enough. I had made plans during the summer to share an apartment with two of my close friends from high school. We had found a nice enough apartment about two miles from campus, but before we even moved in, problems started developing that kept me on the move the entire semester. One of the two girls I was to share an apartment with was going to work instead of going to college. However, a week before we were to move in , she found out that she didn’t get the job she had been counting on. She was forced to live at home and look for work, and two of us were stuck with higher monthly rent payments. We lasted for a month and then agreed that we couldn’t make it by ourselves. Joan moved away and I started looking around. I found another apartment and the rent wasn’t bad. The room was small with one tiny bathroom for four people. The place was noisy, but it was the best I could afford for the time. However, one day when I returned from school, I saw smoke coming from the back of the house. The cottage had caught fire, and the fire department was putting out the last flames. My room was a charred mess; there was no way that anyone could live there for a long time. I was once more out of a place to stay, and there was still over a month of school left. After looking around all weekend for lodging, I finally gave up and moved home. I had to drive forty miles to school every day, so I almost spent as much on gas as I would have on lodging . I’d drive to school, go to classes, and come home and sit in an empty house for a few hours. I was very bored; I’d also lost the will to study. It had been such a bad semester moving all over the place that my heart wasn’t in school anymore. So the semester just played itself out.
