Finally, I leave the dorms. No more N64 fanatic RAs. No more futilely attempting to stop my randomly assigned roommate from judging me in the first five minutes of meeting them. We’re in an apartment now.
I’ve been planning this for months now. I spent all my spare hours accumulating supplies over the summer because, hey, I hated my summer job and looked forward to going back to Purdue. I’ve been trying to pick up as much cheap food as I can. Mom helps when she can. She bought some soy sauce and handed me a SoCo sized glass bottle of “the good stuff”. I reached for the smaller pint-size bottle. She asked, “But how will you eat?” I brought chopsticks just to appease her, as well as a remarkable quantity of utensils she never found a use for. (Mostly pasta-related.) I also brought about 100 lbs of dry or canned foods that we got cheap on sale: cereal, soups, Tuna Helper, granola bars, and ramen. Sadly, I forgot the rice. (Please comment on my fail below.)
It’s a small three-bedroom condo about a mile from the engineering mall, part of a complex located next to a busy interchange next to a bridge. Well, it’s not right next to the highway. There’s a thicketed ditch between the highway and our two balconies. The front is right behind two laundrymats/tanning salon/gym and a bar. Aren’t I afraid of drunken guido attacks? Of course I am, who wouldn’t be? It’s why I carry mace and a New England Journal of Medicine article on the dangers of tanning bed overuse.
We have a shoe rack to keep dirt off the carpet and a foosball table to make the place less gay, but also to serve as a visual centerpiece that ties the room together with contrasting hues and directs the eye towards the TRON poster on the far wall.
However, in order to keep this place affordable, we’ve had to undergo certain cost-shaving measures:
- pantsless Saturdays
- shirtless dinners
- cold showers on days containing S
- buying our soap from a lady named Strawberry out by the river
- illegal recycling
- brushing our teeth in the dark
- saving on the electrical bill by running cold water through a dynamo
- turning tricks at the bus station (juggling mostly)
No more brand name foods either. If it is a family name, it’s out of our price range. If, however, the brand name was thought up by some underpaid marketing intern in a basement cubicle in Fort Worth and lacks one or more vowels that would ordinarily place it among words in the English language, we’ll buy it (if it’s on sale). So right now our pantry is a library of Kroger, Valu-time and Safeway products all teetering on the edge of expiration.
Dylan is the shower curtain nazi and I’m the shirt nazi. Dylan makes sure the shower curtain is always unfurled so it dries completely and never gets mildew. I, the shirt nazi, always ask, “Why turn the AC on when you can just remove an article of clothing?” Chris is Austria. He appeases the nazis, then goes back to whatever he was doing.
The neighbors are loud and hard-drinking, but they are pretty much the same as any hall full of freshmen. Some of them started smoking and laughing on the balcony below us and the second hand cloud filled up my room before I could shut off my window fan. I was pissed at first because I had morning class the next day but then I relaxed. It turned out to be easy to get to sleep because I felt like I was floating.