Student housing is a giant experiment. We are all rats in a maze, driven to madness by the aroma of invisible Gruyere cheese. We think there's a prize - spacious apartment, decent landlord, privacy - at the end. But we have to find the end.
And where's hope when you start out in a 3-by-2-by 5 dorm room? Yes, dorm. DOR-MI-TOR-Y. A term as distinguished as "residence halls" just doesn't apply to Velveeta.
Gosh, I have a great idea. Experiment phase one: Let's take hundreds of displaced high school seniors with scattered ideologies and place them in little tiny boxes - and see if they all get along. Then we can call the University "diverse!"
A friend of mine was lucky enough to share his dorm room with a nice boy named Fish. (His name was actually something normal like Mike or Joe. Maybe he was trying to discover his new identity.)
Fish was special. He liked electronics. He liked to build things. He did some extracurricular reading.
He built a pickle machine.
No, really.
Imagine coming home to the overpowering smell of burnt pickle - in your clothes, your sheets, your favorite teddy bear. Mmm, pickles.
You see, the pickle machine consisted of two electrodes at either end of the pickle. Flip a switch, and the pickle glows faintly. But Fish - being a special boy - wanted a BIG glow. So he skewered the pickle (actually, he went through an entire jar of Vlasics) on a coat hanger and plugged it into the electrodes. The pickle gave off a very special glow - until the fuse box gave up and blew. But Fish persevered. A Dr. Frankenstein aspire, he spent all his time refining his creation. And my friend lived in a virtual pickle barrel. (Hey, it's better than dorm food.)
If you survive the dormitory cages, you can graduate (oops, didn't mean to taunt) to apartment living. Choose the two very-best-friends-you've-ever-had-in-your-life that you just met last year and set out to find a slumlord. My personal favorites: Slime Realty and Campus Slimeballs. If you think their "joint and several" clauses are confusing, wait until your kitchen pipes explode. They'll fix it two weeks later and take it out of your security deposit, claiming you should have told them sooner than five seconds after you got sprayed by recycled dishwater.
(Hint: The Ann Arbor Tenants Union in the Michigan Union puts out helpful pamphlets, including "How to Evict Your Landlord." Nice people. Pay them a visit.)
Sometimes you have to get creative. One year we had furniture that must have been left over from a burnt-down Boy Scout camp - it was SO ugly. The couch sunk when you sneezed; we constantly hit our heads on the hard armrests and backs. Did I mention that it was ugly?
While our third roommate was away, the two of us took the situation into our own hands. We jumped up and down on the couch like it was a trampoline, cackling and giggling until our feet touched the floor.
The new couch was an exact copy of the old - only an even uglier plaid.
Incidentally, roomie #3 is probably at her desk reading this information for the first time, and I am in so much trouble ...
Maybe you'll have to get a bit more creative than we did.
Or maybe you'll try an alternative sort of landlord: the co-ops. They're cheaper and friendlier than your average landlord. Why? Because everything is cooperative and democratic. Everyone does their fair share and everyone gets a vote. Everyone solves problems cooperatively and nicely and for the greater good.
WARNING: If you are a control freak - no matter how socialist you would like to be - stay away from the co-ops. Some hippie will cooperatively park in your space - despite the fact that she doesn't believe in cars because they are not good for your karma - and you will feel very uncooperative.
If you make it to phase four (your senior year, your fifth year, the year before you drop out), use your knowledge gained from running around in the maze for a few years. Find a small, independent landlord. Make sure there's laundry in your building. Find a parking space you can padlock. Choose your roommates and your bedroom carefully.
The mad scientists, you see, believe that if we can get that far, we can survive life after graduation. On your own in a new city for the first time. And eventually onto the mortgage with the picket fence and a large lawn to mow.
But who wants to mow the lawn? That's for grownups.
- Adrienne Janney is a senior who can be reached over e-mail at pantheon@umich.edu.