Home alone?

After spending a year or two in our assigned, womb-like dormitories, many of us fledgling proto-adults decide we want to see what real freedom tastes like.

We want liberation. We want our own kitchen that isn’t covered in layers of greasy debris.
 
We want a bed that isn’t bunked. We want to be able to drink a beer in the shower. We want to be able to put up a whiteboard without a stranger drawing various genitalia all over it.  We want to rent our very first home.

Settling in is easy. You invite all of your friends to revel in your newfound homestead. No more crummy dorm cafeteria food for you!

In fact, between demanding classes and your part-time job, you will have neither the time nor the money to buy food.

You will transcend the need for consistent nutrition. You will live off of cookies, coffee and late-night sandwich runs.

Conveniently, on your new diet, you will no longer have any use for proper silverware or dishes.

Sure, you might be drinking out of spice jars and eating expired fruit sauce with your hands, but remember: These are your spice jars. This is your expired food.

A conflict arises. Someone has spilled something all over the floor, and you don’t have a vacuum cleaner.

Your dishwasher-less kitchen smells like bad wine and looks like Armageddon. Instead of a recycling bin, cans and bottles are loosely shoved into a corner of the room.

Thus, the first chore chart is born.

Strong in principal but weak in conviction, the chore chart lives a short but tumultuous life.

First, she is followed with reluctant obligation. She is despised, but keeps greater demons at bay.

We all know, however, deep inside ourselves, the chore chart will not last. Soon, she will be used only out of spite. Even sooner after that, she will die.

Still tacked up to the refrigerator, a constant but subtle reminder of your failure, the chore chart remains, mocking you.

Clean something, I dare you, it whispers menacingly.

Sooner than later, you will experience your first real house problem. What will be the first to go? The heat? The electricity? The toilet paper?

Many of your appliances are prone to malfunctioning.

You wonder if perhaps the domestic problems you have are not a result of the age of the house or your collective neglect, but that you have angered a spirit, and your house is now inhabited by a trouble-making poltergeist named Gabi.

You start to blame the poltergeist for everything that goes wrong in your life: your terrible social skills, your poor health and your failing relationships. It is all because of Gabi.

Eventually you realize that your poltergeist inhabits not only your home, but your mind.

In your weakened state, after months of eating only starch-based food items and watching endless hours of television, you are powerless. She has finally won.

So, that’s your first six months of off-campus living in a nutshell!

All in all, what I’m really getting at is: You should invest in a vacuum cleaner, before it’s too late.

­— alliston@indiana.edu