Henry Marken
So I’ve been home for a few days now. The transition has been… well… let’s just say that it’s been an eye opening experience. I say that because perhaps my way of life in college was more nonsensical than I may have understood.
Regardless, I still haven’t quite adjusted to the home culture.
I feel like I was just traded from one NBA team to another, and, Jesus Christ, the locker rooms could not be more different. One minute, I’m with the Miami Heat, running with a bunch of young bulls who go straight to the clubs right after routing a team out of the gym… and then all of a sudden, I get traded to the fucking San Antonio Spurs, where curfew is in effect at a sharp 10:00 and they watch scouting reports on VHS tapes.
Then again, the Spurs have a lot of championships to their name.
Let’s just run through the basics real quick and see what’s obviously different between my life now versus four or five days ago while living in my fraternity house.
Right off the bat, if I walk into a bathroom now, there isn’t much thought that goes on in my head other than… you know… the usual protocols of using the bathroom.
Wind the clocks back to last week, if I entered the bathroom in the fraternity house, I’m instantly assaulted by a smell, a vile scent that is equivalent to a bunch of sweaty raccoons having an orgy inside a wet dumpster. Then I’m bothered by the visuals. Whether it’s the numerous clumps of hair colonizing the ground or the variety of differently colored stains tattooing not just the floors, but the walls, the mirrors, and the ceiling, the fucking ceiling… it can be a haunting experience. I’m left with asking myself existential questions: Is this bathroom about to be ground zero for a new pandemic and how many of those stains (including the ones on the ceiling) are semen based?
I could also write this whole blog on my two very different shower experiences. Shower shoes are a foreign concept here. It’s amazing to actually have hot water come out of the faucet as soon as I change the temperature lever. It’s also an incredible feeling of actually getting clean while showering at home. I’m pretty sure I’d just walk out dirtier after taking a shower in my fraternity bathroom.
Not to mention, I only had two towels all semester. Sure, I kept them in a pretty decent wash rotation, but just letting a couple of wet towels hang on my bedroom door to dry off in between showers most definitely created a foul odor. I was probably used to the smell, but I can’t imagine my guests were too thrilled when they walked into my room and instantly thought they were walking around PetCo.
Oh, I almost forgot about vacuuming up my room in the fraternity on my last day. I figured I might as well leave the room in good shape for the next bastard, so I plugged in a reliable vacuum and I went to work. My god, when I emptied out the bag after I was finished, it felt like I created a dustbowl. If I kept what I had collected, I could have made a dust-brick and killed a man with it. The worst part was that it seemed like an endless population of dust. I didn’t matter how long I vacuumed for, the dust just never went away. It was like I was vacuuming sand in the Sahara Desert.
Now that I think about it, there’s a much larger list of traits of living with my parents that exposes the nonsensical activity that I was very comfortable living with not too long ago in the fraternity house. I’m gonna continue to document these findings as I spend more time at home, so expect blogs of this nature to be produced on a regular basis.
I’m still looking for a title to this series, but I think the leaders in the clubhouse are:
“Name that Stain” and “What the fuck was I thinking?”
