I’m in my room. I’m always in my room. And I hate it. It’s a second floor room for one in a Gothic style building at the bottom of a hill – only, it’s really on the third floor because the entrance to the building is on the infernal “ground floor” which is under the first floor, which is under my room. As for the dimensions, it’s approximately 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 – I measured it in arm spans, of course. My arm span, specifically. That gives me 3.375 cubic arm spans, which probably doesn’t mean much to you and definitely doesn’t mean much to me because all the cubic arm span above my head plus half of an arm is completely useless, but you already knew that. It’s probably much more meaningful to know how much floor space I have. That’s 2.25 square arm spans… if the room were totally empty. But every college dorm room comes with a standard set of matching wooden furniture: a dresser, a desk, a desk chair, a bookshelf, and of course, a bed. It’s an extra-long twin mattress, which is such a hassle because I had to go out and buy a whole new bed set that I’m only going to use for 8 out of 12 months for only 4 to 8 years of my life. The floor space that remains amounts to 0.75 x 0.75 = 0.5625 square arm spans, not including the floor space under my bed, of course, which is unusable in the regard that I don’t spend very much time down there. (Maybe it is worthwhile to note that the single next door to mine is twice as large. Maybe it’s irrelevant.)

The walls I’ve so meticulously measured with my limbs are what I would guess to be a French grey. Actually, I prefer “gray,” but “grey” looks like you have to grit your teeth when you read it out loud. Grey… with the paint peeling off here and there. There are pipes everywhere, and they were all painted the same gritty French grey as the walls, as if that would hide them from me, all of them except for the industrials. There’s a small pipe above the doorway, a medium pipe hanging over the right-hand side of my desk, a large pipe looming over my dresser, and three super industrial pipes running vertically through my closet, the floor space of which was not included in my measurements. The closeted super thick metallic pipes keep quietly to themselves. Even when I open the closet door, their glint is demure behind my coats and jackets. The others only pretend to be so modest. I can always hear the water grating aggressively through their channels. Yes, grating. It distracts me completely from the electric humming of the micro-fridge, which also takes up some valuable square arm span-age.