i hate orthogonality by Boheng C. '28

in a blog post a few months ago, i talked about my dorm last year (simmons hall) and its architectural eccentricities — its five thousand windows, its foreboding concrete walls, its twisty layout and cuboidal furniture and all its holes and colors.

this year, i moved to east campus, which had just finished remodeling. unlike last year, i know the names of everyone on my floor, which number around forty rather than fifteen. i get access to an elevator that reaches the first floor; i get a clean kitchen on my floor, a room to myself, a single big window with an opaque curtain rather than thirty-nine tiny windows with sheer transparent curtains. the lounges are filled with soft plushies and traffic signs and hair dye and strange cruft⁠01 junk furniture, electronics, and decoration that we get from loading docks and scrapyards that has been with our floor since time immemorial. my neighbors and i share similar thoughts about fire and opening strange doors.

but the dorm itself is painfully drab in comparison. the hallways are narrow and devoid of chalk drawings; the walls are disappointingly straight compared to the curves of simmons; the rooms are big rectilinear boxes instead of trapezoids and bends and semicircular arcs.

last august, after stepping off a sleepless five-hour flight and finding out that i had just become a second-year student⁠02 as per tradition, continuing students move up a year the moment that the convocation speech every year, around the beginning of orientation at the end of august , i stepped into my room for the first time:

there was something wrong about this. it was all so immaculate and new; the walls were pale white and anemic and the floor was completely barren, even of dust, and the whole room had the intoxicating woody scent of new standard-issue furniture. absent were the unwieldy metal cube seats and bizarre shapes and the ghastly ceiling lights of simmons.

in a newly remodeled dorm that was more sterile than most hotels, i could only do one thing: i had to make my room weird, in spite of it all. and i did so, by rotating all of my furniture diagonally by fifteen degrees:

and there the furniture would remain, all the way until the end of the school year. living in a diagonal room was strange! here are some things i noticed about my self-inflicted skewness, in roughly chronological order:

• my bed’s angle meant that there was now a thin triangular gap between its left side and the wall. unfortunately, my bed was also really high above the ground to fit the cabinets beneath it, meaning that i was perpetually afraid of rolling off into the corner for the first few nights. it got better after a while, when i realized that rolling off the other side was just as likely, but it was still a bit disconcerting to think of the foreboding cramped dark void that lay between my sleeping self and the wall.
• even though it was so claustrophobic, the corner still offered limitless possibilities. would i use it for storage? as a space to stack old assignments and newspapers, to put circuits from electronic classes or piles of sweaters and jeans from years past? i ultimately settled on a thick cushion from my suitemates last year, on which i sat reading books every now and then, walled-in by bedframe and cabinets and closets on all sides. on some nights, when my psets felt interminable and the world grim and harsh, i would also retreat to the corner to cry and cry for a long time. after a while sitting there, encased by furniture so much taller than i was, huddled in noiseless half-darkness, sometimes, just maybe, things would get better again.

• the drawers beneath my bed were originally positioned so that there would be a gap to their right, through which i could crawl under my bed to reach the corner. after a while, though, i found that simply hopping over the bed was easier.

• there was an even smaller triangular corner between the closet and the wall less than ten centimeters wide at its widest point, which was only accessible through the bed corner and began to fill up with otherworldly conglomerations of dust and hair and pens that had fallen from the top of the closet. once or twice, i was scrolling my phone in bed and inadvertently let go and watched it tumble off the side into oblivion, at which point i had to push closet and bed away just to access the corner and brush off all the squalid grime from the screen. then i would feel a bit guilty and start wiping up the dust bunnies off the ground, but inevitably it would get just as dusty as before within two weeks.
• over time, my bed would slowly try to drift back into alignment with the walls. i was never too sure why this happened, but i suspect that every time i hopped onto my bed or jumped off it or bumped into it while organizing my drawers below, there was always asymmetry in the force i would exert, which gradually but irrevocably rotated it. every week or so, i would have to manhandle my bed back into its original diagonality, lest a triangular gap emerge between the head of my bed and my closet. 
• towards the end of the year, i grew lazy and let this gap fester insidiously, until i found that my pillow would sometimes start sliding and falling into the gap while i slept. one night it disappeared into the depths altogether. i awoke from my half-conscious state, startled by the sudden absence of softness beneath my head, and found to mild amusement and dismay that my pillow had simply vanished in the blink of an eye.
• one of the main drawbacks of non-orthogonality was that the apparent size of the room shrunk dramatically. this was especially true considering my desk’s position as an island in the center of the room, which partitioned the very little space that was remaining into two narrow (diagonal) corridors. in order to have a comfortable space between my bed and desk, i had to push my desk back to the point where there was barely enough room for a chair, meaning that the back of the chair would constantly scrape the wall. the only solace was that only the right corner would ever hit the wall, since the chair, like everything else in this godforsaken room, was oriented diagonally.
• one day, i was sitting at my desk and absorbed in a book. when i looked up from the book after a while, i found, to my mild consternation, that the walls of the room appeared to be slanted and my desk was straight, instead of the other way around. it only took a few moments for my spatial perception to recover, but it still frightened me a bit that the world could just rotate around me without warning. it did not help that the book i was reading was house of leaves.
• the largest open space in the room was the quadrilateral region under the window that was bounded by the bed and desk. the first time one of my friends wanted to sleep over in my room, we had to endure several minutes of awkward experimentation in that space, growing more and more exasperated over the configuration of the cabinets and bed and the orientation of the shelves and eventually the diagonality of everything all at once, laughing at the fantastic absurdity of the situation, until we found that we could push one of the shelves further into the corner and relocate a moving box still towering with unused clothes and reroute the extension cable and have just enough space for blankets and a pillow and a sleeping bag — albeit at a 45-degree angle from the walls, stretching the entire distance between the far corner of the desk to the shelves.

• during the winter, when i couldn’t open my window without having the floor freeze beneath it, i would prop open my door, and sometimes the cats on my floor would come in! kalashnikov, the gray tabby owned by my neighbor caleb p. ‘28, would run circles around my desk while i chased him and he would hop on my bed and leap atop my closet, dizzying height off the ground, and squeeze into the bedside corner and then the closet corner⁠03 we called him a hacker cat for this reason , which was no wider than a hand and where he would hide in mischievous silence until i looked for him and he would dart out as if nothing happened.

all in all, did this result in a wide breadth of unnecessary inconvenience and turmoil in my life? of course it did. but did i also enjoy it? of course i did. i was more than prepared to sacrifice in the name of whimsy and mirth and deviance for the sake of deviance — whether it be a bit more time spent clearing dust in unfathomable locations or leaping over a bed to get to a corner or rotating my furniture back into non-orthogonality every few days or laying awake at night for a few minutes, slightly perturbed by the skew of the room around me, questioning what led to all this. it was all more than worth it in the end.