So you are trying to visit my room at college on a weekend, which is a nice event that will give you a chance remember your old rooms and find the similarities with mine. Let's start from the very beginning; the Door for all obvious reasons should contain stickers reading "END WORLD HUNGER TODAY" or "SAVE THE KAULA BEARS". This reminds me that there was a time in my life, years ago, when I was so full of energy that I was going to not only END WORLD HUNGER, but also STOP WAR and ELIMINATE RACISM. Whereas today my life goals, to judge from the notes I leave myself, they tend to be along the lines of BUY DETERGENT/COOK DINNER etc.
Upon entering the house, you will look like you were transported from the Federation Ship of Start Trek to the deepest part of the Amazon jungle. Usually, no less than 4 people and approximately 200 empty boxes of Pizzas share the room. The next thing one impulsively looks for is generally the furniture, which is at the barest minimum (Zero in plain English). Of course you would find a couch, but a person who likes to be clean would never in the wildest dream take the risk on getting seated on it. The sofas are the main focal point for the collection of books.
The fundamental reason behind this is that more the books you keep on the sofa the more the fines you got to pay the Library. In fact, it is found statistically that my room contributes to more than half the library funds by the way of penalties. Most of the books which we lend somehow fall behind the sofa and get lost in the space-time continuum. Certain community firmly believes that some one from the "Lost Book behind the Sofa Committee" would come and ask for those age-old books and pay you handsomely since by the time they arrived the books would have been classified as RARE CATEGORY. (I am still waiting for one of them to arrive)
The other main items that one finds in the living room are the cordless phone and the TV. The TV will rarely feature channels such as "Discovery" or "The History Channel" but shall have HBO, CineMax, and TNT (these are the Favourite Channels List on the Remote). Speaking of remotes, the best place to find the remote would also be behind the same sofa where "The Principles of Parallel Computing" book is. At any given time of the day, both the TV and the Phone would be used not by the persons who are living in the room but by other unwanted visitors.
The next place where your eye moves is on the walls and the floor. The wall decoration is of two types - by Females and by Males. The rooms of the females have curtains and matching pictures on the walls. Of course the nature of the picture varies with the type of the female whereas the Male's room is painstakingly decorated with: Nothing. The only designer touches that you could find in a guy's room are some shoe marks, cigar stubs and some half emptied laundry powder on the windowsill. Coming to the floor, the female section of the crowd somehow manage to keep things clean, while the male room's floor looks far cleaner.
Shocking? Yes this is achieved by precisely placing a lot of shoes in random order on the floor such that you obstruct the eye to detect the flooring. The shoes are without stating the obvious dirty so the floor appears to be clean relative to the shoes. The inches of dust make the floor fluffy and as the Fluff-O-Meter index goes up, we vacuum the carpet. The normal duration between each vacuum event is a very reasonable period which when calculated turns out to be 6-8 weeks.
The very next room is the Dining room, you may immediately wonder: "What would happen if a burglar breaks into the kitchenette and steals those pizza boxes?" Do not worry; we keep a reserve supply of pizza boxes in the living room. If a burglar tried to get those, he'd trip over the cord that stretches across the room from the TV to the video-game controller held by a young man who is permanently installed on the sofa for this purpose. The only word that he would say (Polite at certain times) is "Hi" that too whenever you trip over the chord. He is allowed to stay in this room for the sole reason that he shares our monthly grocery bill.
The utensils in the dinning room are very limited, in precise terms just one spare set than the number of guys living in the apartment (Officially). Before I forgot let me warn you that the utensils may be cleaned once in 6 days without fail. It's your luck if that happens to be the day you come to dine with us. If the sofa in the Living room was the place for study books, then the dinning table is the place for all scrap books from comics to ^%^&*&, Yes those kind of books. You need to be very calculative to find a space between those books to sit and dine without damaging the existing ecosystem balance between the dusty books and cockroaches.
The adjoining room to the Dinning is always the Kitchen; this is a tradition that has been followed right from the Mohican tribes. The kitchen is an important area for the guys. This is the place where you find the refrigerator so that you could stick a lot of papers stating "You Cook Tonite - Shanks" and another on top of it, "Shyam shall cook instead of me" and just besides it would be "Jugs - Shyam is out of Town!!! So, I am ordering Pizzas". You now clearly know the source for those empty Pizza boxes around the house.
Kitchen is also the room where most of the guys don’t like to stay for too long. The average floating population would be around 1 per day since the person who stays longer has to do the dishes. Although there is an unwritten fact that the kitchen is the only places in the world that is far beyond human control, that even cockroaches fear to enter this area. Possibly, "Danger - Environment hazardous Area" is an apt hoarding for these rooms which are maintained by bachelors. This scenario however doesn’t fit for the women, who have all their crockery and dishes arranged according to chronological order in the morning and the reverse chronological order in the evening and inspected by the other roommates on every Thursday evening.
After passing through all these rooms, you finally enter into the untamed area-51, the bedroom. Although cleanliness is in our blood but this is the room that is the last in which it is reflected. Many people would be reluctant to enter this room for one main reason; you shall have to walk over the clothes. The clothes are assorted in a prearranged order that is decipherable only by the living in-mates. They shall with all their adept skills in cryptography be able to pick between a clean and washed shirt from the dirty ones. The distinction is that if the dress is not washed for over 2 weeks it’s termed "DIRTY" otherwise "CLEAN".
Another strange thing that would strike anybody is that there isn’t any bedspread over the bed, after a few moments another strike would occur in our mind; there isn’t any bed in the first place. The bed is made of make shift sleeping bags which are washed once every 2 weeks. The bedroom is the garbage dump yard for everybody when they want to make the living room a cleaner place. All the things are carefully moved and reconstructed into this room until you arrive at a drastic idea - you plan to clean the bedroom. Taking your roommates help you reconstruct the mess back to the living room thereby saving the bedroom from extinction.
This type of cleaning routine continues until you decide to change the apartment as a whole. This doesn’t mean that the new apartment will maintained just like Martha Stewart's Winter Home, but is liveable for at least one year without any problems. All the above description would be thrown into a toss if one of the roommate’s family members pays a visit to this sanctuary. The other roommates start to move (i.e. from Sleeping to Active). The best part of student life is that you enjoy the inertia. My roommates term sleeping as "Creative Inertia", and it’s really tough (I am not making this up) to move them from this state unless acted upon by some external cousins/family visit.
When I look back on these days, I get a hearty laugh since the argument is that students are there to study and not to do household jobs and in reality we are forced to do household jobs while studying. Perhaps this is the main reason for our low scores.
I guess my son will narrate stories like this in a few years from now – I hope he clean his clothes at least once a week, otherwise I have to plan for a weekly visit!!!
Upon entering the house, you will look like you were transported from the Federation Ship of Start Trek to the deepest part of the Amazon jungle. Usually, no less than 4 people and approximately 200 empty boxes of Pizzas share the room. The next thing one impulsively looks for is generally the furniture, which is at the barest minimum (Zero in plain English). Of course you would find a couch, but a person who likes to be clean would never in the wildest dream take the risk on getting seated on it. The sofas are the main focal point for the collection of books.
The fundamental reason behind this is that more the books you keep on the sofa the more the fines you got to pay the Library. In fact, it is found statistically that my room contributes to more than half the library funds by the way of penalties. Most of the books which we lend somehow fall behind the sofa and get lost in the space-time continuum. Certain community firmly believes that some one from the "Lost Book behind the Sofa Committee" would come and ask for those age-old books and pay you handsomely since by the time they arrived the books would have been classified as RARE CATEGORY. (I am still waiting for one of them to arrive)
The other main items that one finds in the living room are the cordless phone and the TV. The TV will rarely feature channels such as "Discovery" or "The History Channel" but shall have HBO, CineMax, and TNT (these are the Favourite Channels List on the Remote). Speaking of remotes, the best place to find the remote would also be behind the same sofa where "The Principles of Parallel Computing" book is. At any given time of the day, both the TV and the Phone would be used not by the persons who are living in the room but by other unwanted visitors.
The next place where your eye moves is on the walls and the floor. The wall decoration is of two types - by Females and by Males. The rooms of the females have curtains and matching pictures on the walls. Of course the nature of the picture varies with the type of the female whereas the Male's room is painstakingly decorated with: Nothing. The only designer touches that you could find in a guy's room are some shoe marks, cigar stubs and some half emptied laundry powder on the windowsill. Coming to the floor, the female section of the crowd somehow manage to keep things clean, while the male room's floor looks far cleaner.
Shocking? Yes this is achieved by precisely placing a lot of shoes in random order on the floor such that you obstruct the eye to detect the flooring. The shoes are without stating the obvious dirty so the floor appears to be clean relative to the shoes. The inches of dust make the floor fluffy and as the Fluff-O-Meter index goes up, we vacuum the carpet. The normal duration between each vacuum event is a very reasonable period which when calculated turns out to be 6-8 weeks.
The very next room is the Dining room, you may immediately wonder: "What would happen if a burglar breaks into the kitchenette and steals those pizza boxes?" Do not worry; we keep a reserve supply of pizza boxes in the living room. If a burglar tried to get those, he'd trip over the cord that stretches across the room from the TV to the video-game controller held by a young man who is permanently installed on the sofa for this purpose. The only word that he would say (Polite at certain times) is "Hi" that too whenever you trip over the chord. He is allowed to stay in this room for the sole reason that he shares our monthly grocery bill.
The utensils in the dinning room are very limited, in precise terms just one spare set than the number of guys living in the apartment (Officially). Before I forgot let me warn you that the utensils may be cleaned once in 6 days without fail. It's your luck if that happens to be the day you come to dine with us. If the sofa in the Living room was the place for study books, then the dinning table is the place for all scrap books from comics to ^%^&*&, Yes those kind of books. You need to be very calculative to find a space between those books to sit and dine without damaging the existing ecosystem balance between the dusty books and cockroaches.
The adjoining room to the Dinning is always the Kitchen; this is a tradition that has been followed right from the Mohican tribes. The kitchen is an important area for the guys. This is the place where you find the refrigerator so that you could stick a lot of papers stating "You Cook Tonite - Shanks" and another on top of it, "Shyam shall cook instead of me" and just besides it would be "Jugs - Shyam is out of Town!!! So, I am ordering Pizzas". You now clearly know the source for those empty Pizza boxes around the house.
Kitchen is also the room where most of the guys don’t like to stay for too long. The average floating population would be around 1 per day since the person who stays longer has to do the dishes. Although there is an unwritten fact that the kitchen is the only places in the world that is far beyond human control, that even cockroaches fear to enter this area. Possibly, "Danger - Environment hazardous Area" is an apt hoarding for these rooms which are maintained by bachelors. This scenario however doesn’t fit for the women, who have all their crockery and dishes arranged according to chronological order in the morning and the reverse chronological order in the evening and inspected by the other roommates on every Thursday evening.
After passing through all these rooms, you finally enter into the untamed area-51, the bedroom. Although cleanliness is in our blood but this is the room that is the last in which it is reflected. Many people would be reluctant to enter this room for one main reason; you shall have to walk over the clothes. The clothes are assorted in a prearranged order that is decipherable only by the living in-mates. They shall with all their adept skills in cryptography be able to pick between a clean and washed shirt from the dirty ones. The distinction is that if the dress is not washed for over 2 weeks it’s termed "DIRTY" otherwise "CLEAN".
Another strange thing that would strike anybody is that there isn’t any bedspread over the bed, after a few moments another strike would occur in our mind; there isn’t any bed in the first place. The bed is made of make shift sleeping bags which are washed once every 2 weeks. The bedroom is the garbage dump yard for everybody when they want to make the living room a cleaner place. All the things are carefully moved and reconstructed into this room until you arrive at a drastic idea - you plan to clean the bedroom. Taking your roommates help you reconstruct the mess back to the living room thereby saving the bedroom from extinction.
This type of cleaning routine continues until you decide to change the apartment as a whole. This doesn’t mean that the new apartment will maintained just like Martha Stewart's Winter Home, but is liveable for at least one year without any problems. All the above description would be thrown into a toss if one of the roommate’s family members pays a visit to this sanctuary. The other roommates start to move (i.e. from Sleeping to Active). The best part of student life is that you enjoy the inertia. My roommates term sleeping as "Creative Inertia", and it’s really tough (I am not making this up) to move them from this state unless acted upon by some external cousins/family visit.
When I look back on these days, I get a hearty laugh since the argument is that students are there to study and not to do household jobs and in reality we are forced to do household jobs while studying. Perhaps this is the main reason for our low scores.
I guess my son will narrate stories like this in a few years from now – I hope he clean his clothes at least once a week, otherwise I have to plan for a weekly visit!!!
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