Freshman under House Arrest

No, I’m not under house arrest…but certainly close to it.

My name is Irene and I am grounded - for a month to be exact. (You can stop laughing now.)

My friends have all taken the liberty of making me the practical joke of the day by laughing at me every time they see me, still in awe that I can actually get grounded at the age of 18 - well, it is possible…just ask my mom.

“You’re grounded for a month,” my mom said angrily once she found out I had wrecked the bank accounts.

I was in shock. I couldn’t breathe and I could feel my heart palpitating its way to my mouth. I pushed out the only words I could come up with.

“What do you mean?” I said. She gave me one cold look and replied, “It means, you can’t go out with anyone for a month - that’s what it means.”

And so for the past week my life has felt like something that was taken out of a scene from Groundhog Day. Every morning I angrily stumble out of my bed, take a shower, blast music in my car, get stuck on I-95, go to school, politely decline invitations to go out, come back home, do the dishes, do my homework, and repeat the cycle all over again the next day.

Long gone are the days of my so-called “college freedom,” of enjoying a curfew of 1 a.m., parties on Friday nights, and Sunday afternoon lunches with friends. Not to mention the fantastic Easter week sales that I’m going to miss thanks to my newfound lack of freedom. (Bye bye, Old Navy...)
“Don’t worry, I get grounded too,” embarrassedly admitted Karina Da Luz, a fellow freshman whom I’ve known since high school. “I think it might be because we don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

True, we don’t have any other siblings, but I thought grounding was more of a cultural thing. Ever since I was in high school, it always seemed that among my friends, I was the only one who ever got grounded. Sure, their parents got mad at them occasionally but never really grounded them.

I don’t blame my mom for being angry at me after what I did with the accounts though. Thanks to my poor judgment and my inexperience with money, I spent $330 more than what I had in my account. Now I owe the bank money, don’t have a job, and have absolutely no way of paying my mom back.

But grounding me? Isn’t that a bit extreme? No one even gets grounded anymore.

I was determined to prove that getting grounded was in fact a cultural thing - that maybe it was a “Hispanic” thing. I talked to eight other Hispanic freshmen who lived at home with their parents, asking if they still got grounded while in college, and to my surprise, they didn’t.

“Grounded? Is that a trick question?” asked Ana Valles, a political science freshman who was part of my survey. “I haven’t been grounded since I was in middle school, much less in college.”

At least she answered the question. All of the other freshmen I asked took the liberty of making me listen to their laughs and ridicule me for being the only person in college they knew was grounded.

I was wrong, it's not a cultural thing. In college, nobody gets grounded anymore - except for me, of course.

I now have to endure 20-something more days in my house while fellow freshmen are out and about clubbin’, partying, and enjoying freedom while I sit in my house watching reruns of Scott Baio is 46 and pregnant and eating buckets of ice cream.

I can’t wait to come back to the world of freedom, but for now VH1 is definitely my best friend.