When I was a sophomore in college, I was sick of living in a dormitory on campus.
It was a small school where everyone knew everyone else, and there was a clique atmosphere. There was a large campus wide party every Friday and Saturday night. Even if you stayed in your room like I often did, you couldn’t escape the noise short of wearing ear plugs. I’d work myself dead during the daytime and only wanted to relax in the evening hours. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only person who felt this way. Many of my closest friends were simply sick of living on campus with the constant noise. They were done with the campus culture as well. We were all too busy with our academic work to care about cliques and high school level stupidity. That’s when five of us banded together to rent a house that is a short bike ride away from our college campus. I thought that this would be an improvement in every conceivable way, but it wasn’t. Everyone felt entitled to have their own friends visit at random hours of the day. It sort of felt like a negation of what we had all set out to accomplish in renting a house off campus. On top of that, my roommates abused the air conditioner. They’d let it get hot in here while we were all at classes in the afternoons and then they’d crank the a/c down in the early evening hours. This caused the machine to slowly break down over the course of 12 months. By the time I decided to leave, the a/c could barely keep it below 80 degrees in the house from the constant abuse. I found a studio apartment and had my own air conditioner for a change.