Mike Juliani and Mitchell Steinfeld wait for the El train on the way to Wrigley Field for a Cubs game.

I walked into Jones Residential Hall with no clue what I was about to get myself into.

It was raining, and I was angry already.  My mother, sister and I had to trudge through three blocks of heavy Illinois storm because the cab driver dropped us off at the wrong corner.

I had heard about my roommate, Ellery Kauvar, and I had talked to some people on Facebook, but that doesn’t really count.  My ignorance as to what would come next relinquished for me a happy accident.

Turning the key to the tall, age-old college-student beaten wooden door of my dorm room, after giving a polite knock, I entered to see a cold room sans Ellery Kauvar.  Good.  I can get settled without having to answer the necessary questions to a person I’d have to learn to love for the next five weeks.

But what I wasn’t prepared for made cherubs the most rewarding experience I’ve had since I was kissed as an infant by Bill Clinton.  The friendships I’ve formed shaped the program for me.

Ellery is truly a sage fellow and the most solid roommate I could’ve gotten.  When I sleep in, he shakes me awake with a “Mike, it’s 8:45 already.” (Class starts at 9.)  He says nothing as the mound of clothes on my side of the room suddenly becomes an amoeba of my laziness. 

Best of all, the man is hilarious.  He’s the only Orthodox Jew I’ve ever met in my life.  He constantly explains his religious practices with tones of humor and mild cynicism as I find stark comparisons in the Catholic Church.

Ellery is really the only person I’ve ever known in my travels to liken himself to celery (mainly due to his name and also because he is 6’4 and 130 pounds).

The most interesting social experiment that I underwent at cherubs was, without a doubt, living with 60 or so girls.  I’m not used to learning around girls.  I go to an all-male Jesuit Catholic college preparatory private school in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles.  Days at school are spent over-testosteroning the other motivated males and reasserting the air that I am a successful, confident, driven, big, tough, funny and sly Casanova. 

I left that at home this time.  Being around girls is real.  Someday, when I’m hopefully a writer of some sort, I’ll be working with girls.  Yay girls.  

But the journalism kid that I will always be friends with is a man labeled by his exuberance and often times, lunatic behavior.  The creature is Mitchell Steinfeld.

Mitch is a personality with bones and skin.  Among my group of friends back home, there are really only one or two kids that in some fragmented inadequate nature resemble his presence. 

Our friendship is characterized by crazy-eyed nights reading each other’s poetry in his cramped single room, being sarcastic with people that aren’t on our level (with all due respect of course) and comparing impressions of various characters we see on the Evanston streets.  I will miss the moments we’ve had at cherubs.

Thankfully, Mitchell and I live in separate neighborhoods of the greater Los Angeles area, and a half hour drive is all it takes for me to see my literary partner once again.

Overall, I came to cherubs starved for some sort of literary companionship, some man or woman to match my fueled interest in the written word.  I plan on writing books someday.  I live life in constant search for “cool cats” to personify in my literature.  All I know is, at journalism camp this summer, I found more than a few Holden Caulfields.