This is certainly shaping up to be a blockbuster summer. The media world is eagerly awaiting June 17, when we will all learn about Deep Throat. According to an article on cnn.com, part of a paper written by Nixon White House counsel John Dean will appear on salon.com that day, revealing his guess after 20 years of research.

Everyone knows who Deep Throat is, right? He’s the father of Rachel’s baby, who developed spider sense and had to fight an army of clones, all while helping his former partner recover his memory to fight aliens . well, perhaps I’m mixing up blockbusters here.

Anyway, for my last column this semester, I thought that I could liven Dead Week up with a little about student life. I know my writing doesn’t go over well with some – the phrase “a guy known to be an idiot” comes to mind – so I decided to fill this space up with images and nuggets of wisdom from the dorm room door.

Of all the expressions of personality on campus, perhaps none is as overlooked as the part of your room open to everyone. The doors of the residence halls across campus start off blank in August and, while some remain that way, others are turned into works of art.

People post a photograph or two, a page of inspirational quotes, or cover their door and ten feet of the surrounding wall with sports clippings, like the fans on the fifth floor of Larch.

Many doors still have an expression of some sort about the Sept. 11 tragedies. Some are patriotic, others express hope for peace, some have Photoshop images of Osama bin Laden that are, if you pardon the expression, quite graphic.

Indeed, there are many images from the Internet of varying types and qualities pasted on the doors. Quite a few people seem to refer to the “Beer Troubleshooting Chart.”

Many students have a little fun with their roots. There is the Iowa Rule Book: “Let’s get this straight. We have one stoplight in town. We stop when it’s red. We may even stop when it’s yellow.” This rule goes nicely with one of the ways you know you’re from a small town: “You refer to THE stoplight.”

I also saw a list of “You know you’re from Chicago when .” which seemed to duplicate quite a few things from the Iowa list. “You’ve had school called off because of cold. You’ve had school called off because of heat. You’ve used both `heat’ and `A/C’ in your car on the same day. You drink `pop’.” Others were uniquely Chicago: “You refer to anything south of I-80 as `southern Illinois.’ You have used your furniture to guard your parking spot.”

There are quite a few pokes at college life. “I am a college student. My telephone number only has five digits.” “There are no stupid classes, only stupid people who forget to bring clever diversions.” The college version of Psalm 23 showed up a few times, the one that starts with “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not flunk.”

Computer engineers seem to have an affinity for taping CPUs, RAM chips and opened hard drives to their doors. On one, there’s a keyboard taped to the door and still hooked up inside used as a sort of “white board,” with some of the messages printed out and taped above. But on the other side of the coin, there’s the joke “What do engineers use for birth control? Their personalities.”

Doors are often used as a form of communication. Often it’s a white board of some sort – some doors ARE a white board, covered from top to bottom. Other times there is a little listing of where the person is at the moment, and if they don’t have that, there might be a schedule on there anyway.

The doors are also a theater of the somewhat silly. Two doors had letters from telecommunications taped up; each had a bill for nine cents. Another read, “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” There are instructions for cooking a Microsoft TV dinner.

Others just have Far Side, Garfield or FoxTrot cartoons.

Some get a little philosophical. One had a page about leaving college for summer: “We will leave our best friends to return to our best friends. We will come into town on that same familiar road, and even though it has been months, it will seem like only yesterday.”

As you pack up and drive down those familiar roads, for those of you coming back, remember that next year you get to decorate your doors all over again. And for all of you who saw it fit to tape our errors to your doors in all their glory: You’re welcome.

Jeff Morrison is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication and political science from Traer. He is a copy editor for the Daily.