This past week's weather has served as a reminder to many students just how much a roof over your head can do to enhance your Bowdoin experience. Those of you who wish to continue to have this comfort for next year's "April showers" have probably noticed that the 2007-2008 housing lottery is happening.

So, now that some of your best friends aren't speaking to each other and you're seriously considering saving the time and stress and simply hauling a mattress into the atrium next year, I offer you this bit of housing humor. I've heard it said that Residential Life is fixing to make Moore Hall a "quiet" dorm next year. As in a "silent," "calm," "peaceful," or "inactive" first-year college dormitory.

This is not to say chem-free, mind you; you can use all the chemicals you want, as long as you do so in silence. There will be somber Beirut games, conducted with civility and discipline (anyone know sign language for "elbow?"). Kings will have to be fused with charades (making the "10 Fingers" component likely to result in some harassment charges). The party scene will consist of only the waving of arms, grinding minus actual music, and the quiet cracking and hissing of opening cans.

This would make Moore Hall a drastically different place from when I was there. When I lived there, men were men, women were women, and the stealing of towels from the bathroom made it clear which was which. We didn't have any of these new-fangled "painted walls" and "clean floors." Night after night, as paint chipped off the ceiling into my eyes and I listened through sturdy walls to the kids next door talking, watching TV, clearing their throats, and blinking, I was grateful for these lullabies to loll me to sleep. The vomiting of the drunk in the hallway was my hooting owl, and the coinciding screams of girls my chirping crickets.

The very usage of the words "quiet" and "Moore" in the same sentence is enough to send any former resident of the dorm into loud and obnoxious (read, Mooresque) shrieks of laughter. This, primarily, is my concern for the Class of 2011's Moore experience. Somebody out there, some dull weekend, is going to be looking back on his days of debauchery in Moore, and remember that the word "quiet" has been stamped on those memories, as well as the legacy that could have been. What can be done to salvage his shattered heritage and wounded pride?

"Hey, you guys wanna go streak the quiet dorm?"

"YEAAHHHH!!!!! WOOOOOO, BABY!!!"

And that will be the end of the silence. Men, once again, will be confirmed male, and the women female.

I say all this not without an understanding of the purpose of a "quiet" dormitory. We all had moments our first year when we longed to not be able to hear quite so loudly the landing of a bird's feet on the roof, or when you had learned just a wee bit too much about the guy next door's now-sort-of-foggy Saturday night "romantic engagements." Wanting to come back to a quiet home is a very understandable notion, and one that has its place sometime after the age of 22. But asking a building of more than 50 18- and 19-year-olds to become "quiet" is akin to asking a two-toed sloth to "move it along, please." It's simply neither in the language nor the physiology of the beast.

Anyone who has ever lived in or been in Moore, or any college dorm for that matter, knows that noise is simply part of the culture. It's the language of college first-years. Moore has loud, obnoxious sounds essentially engrained into its structure. The bricks themselves seem to cry out desperately, "Shot? Anyone? 'Nother shot?" If these sounds are repressed, my theory is that they will eat away at the mortar that holds Moore together, until the whole dorm collapses in a pile of warbling college chants, dust, and Solo cups.

Of course, I could be wrong. It's entirely possible that next year's Moore residents, and the ones after that, will be able to enjoy all the benefits of "quiet" dorm. But until that happens, I think it would probably be smart to keep an eye out for streakers.