irony house

The Friends House is better than your house. Why?

Here are five reasons:

1) In the Friends House, no one pees on the toilet seat, or if they do, they clean it up.
I have greatly enjoyed my time in college, but dorm life does have its drawbacks. An example of one of them is the serial seat pisser who dwells on the second floor of the sacred halls of the Alpha Delta Phi Society. There is really nothing worse than sleepily walking into the bathroom after waking up to relieve myself and sitting in someone else’s urine. I don’t know who you are, Mr. Serial Toilet Seat Defiler, but since I’m fairly confident you are not Ben, I know you will not be at the Friends House.

2) The Friends House does dishes.
This past summer, I lived at Hockey House which was, you guessed it, the home of the Brown men’s hockey team. Turns out that hockey players are generally nice and also hot. However, they aren’t cleanly, unlike the members of the Friends House. In the Friends House, the sink is clear enough to wash dishes in, and at any given time, there are clean dishes to be used. In the Friends House, there are no swarms of flies or ants, drawn to the rank aroma of unwashed dishes and untaken-out trash. In the Friends House, I don’t take out the dripping and disgusting trash every day. In the Friends House, we take turns taking out the trash. And the Friends House doesn’t put things that drip in the trash.

3) In the Friends House, you don’t have to wear shoes in the shower.
I am tired of wearing shoes into the shower. In the Friends House, it is okay to go shoeless into the shower. You also don’t have to worry about your elbows hitting the walls in the shower, although I have become a master at avoiding this without thought. However, if your elbows did hit the walls of the Friends House shower, it would be okay because you’d know the shower was clean and that the Friends are not disgusting.

In the Friends House, there are no flimsy shower curtains that don’t close all the way, curl back at the edges, and may or may not be ripped on end hooks such that you can never feel totally secure of your shower privacy. However, even if there were, it wouldn’t matter because in the Friends House, there aren’t 3 other people of various sexes/genders in the bathroom at the same time as you.

Come to think of it, showering isn’t the only bathroom activity for which it will be nice to have some privacy.

4) We can paint the walls in the Friends House.
For years, we college students have papered our walls with as much color as possible to bring life to the cracking, surface-marred white paint of dorm rooms. And while I will miss the dorm style of decoration (and may in fact still employ it in my Friends House boudoir) I will enjoy the fact that my abode will still have personality and beauty without it. So maybe we can’t paint it really bright or interesting colors, but at least it will have an even color and surface texture.

5) The Friends House is in a nice residential neighborhood – not in the middle of the frat and program house section of campus.
It will be nice not to be woken up and forced to leave the building whenever DPhi sets vomit on fire and not to be woken by Thetes chanting “Naked Moat!” at ungodly hours before exams.

Once, sophomore year, at 4am on the morning of a 9am physics final, some Thetes actually took a megaphone outside to start yelling at the quad with the express purpose of waking people up and disturbing them. When, at 5am, I called the Department of Public Safety in hopes that I could at least get something approaching a decent amount of sleep, they informed me that noise complaints weren’t their problem and that I should find my community director’s room and tell her to deal with it. Uh-huh. I should pit a poor sweet girl against the football frat when they are being intentionally disruptive? When you make a lot of noise outside of the Friends House, I call the cops on you and you get your ass busted.

Ben has med school and I have 2 upper level physics classes to look forward to. I think we will appreciate the quiet for studying. Skip will no longer have to take periodic sabbaticals away from noise. And Leah and Sonia will probably appreciate the transition into rooms that aren’t right above nightly Beirut games and oh-so-kickable doors.