The benefits of not living in a fraternity...
Are not at all clear to me. Are there any? More specifically, are there any benefits to not living with a group of close friends? I don't think there are any. Let's compare my current living situation with my previous one at DX:
Cost: My rent is $700 a month with utilities. If you include groceries, it's $750 - $800. I don't know what it was at DX, but I think it was cheaper.
Time spent doing menial activities: Much higher now. I have to cook, do dishes, occasional vacuuming, occasional pickup. Before, I spent 20 minutes a week cleaning and an hour in meetings that were usually only semi-menial.
Cleanliness: I live in a cleaner place now, but I don't really care.
Company: Living with Emily is great, it really is. But I would include mates in my dream fraternity, so Emily could live there anyway. On the negative side, I now live with one friend (the Monster), instead of (realistically) tenish. I think how big a shame this is can't be stressed enough. It sucks, it's terrible. For every bummer I no longer have to live with (Jay, etc.), I don't get to live with two friends and two warm acquaintances. Not a good trade at all.
Food: It's better now, but I have to cook or pay for it. It's not worth it, I'd prefer the soul-numbing convenience of LE.
Entertainment: I've been to a number of really fun hangouts/parties here. And it's certainly nice to not have to entertain freshmen etc, but I still give the nod to DX.
So, from these first six comparisons, it looks like DX has 5, apartment has .5 (because cleanliness isn't a priority.) Those aren't good odds.
So, I propose the abolishment of single-dwelling houses. Instead, let's look at the advantages of a household for five singles/couples/families.
Price: It'd be way cheaper.
Specialization of space: You wouldn't need a dining room/study room, or a living room/computer room/tv room/game room. A house/building big enough to support all of those people would have to have enough rooms for such specialization.
Hire a cook: Cooking's fine, but doing dishes is the fucking worst. We'd higher somebody to do this.
Friends: You'd be surrounded by friends! It'd be great!
Childcare: Presumably, many people would eventually have kids. The kids could all hangout, and you could have the other people babysit.
You'd have less privacy, sure. But how much privacy do you really need? You only read need privacy to fuck around, and DX proved how much fucking around could be had with minimal privacy.
Am I missing something here? I really think this would be a better solution than what we have now.
posted by Nate at 11:17 AM
13 Comments:
The beauty of having a cook is that if she sucks (read LE), you can hire a new one that rocks (Wes's mom). Food here is so damn good, I can't imagine living here without it.
Plus, i think she's saving us some ridiculous number of thousands of dollars by not serving the quotidian pre-made pans of lasagna from LE days.
11:54 AM
agreed, Life in DX is 10 times better. Try living alone in an apartment.
3:29 PM
I basically agree, but I wonder if the comparison is really fair. As it stands, single-dwelling-ness and lack-of-friendness comes as a package deal. What if all the people from Delta Chi and Depauw that you like could live in Chicago, but in apartments scattered across the city (but not too far apart--close enough that you could hang out pretty much whenever you wanted without too much hassle)? Would you settle in a heartbeat for this compromise?
Also, would you want to live in a big house with couples/singles from Northwestern? I would possibly consider doing so with people from law school, but I'd be very selective and pretty apprehensive about it no matter who I was going to live with. I'm decent enough friends with a handful of people, but I don't know anyone really well. And I'm definitely not comfortable going into any of their rooms at 1AM, grabbing a book off their shelf and a clementine, and debating the merits of handjobs for hours on end.
Basically, I'm wondering if this post is really just an expression of your yearning to once again let our voices mingle (in strains that set our hearts aglow)?
Perhaps it is all about the brotherhood after all.
CT
7:07 PM
God, that lasagna was terrible too. I'm glad to hear it's better now.
I really think living alone would be the pits, man. Especially having a real job (as opposed to being in class with a bunch of peers) makes it even shittier I expect. How long are you planning to stay in DC, Kyle?
And there is like a 100% correlation between "losing" all my friends and living alone. I don't know if I'm just confusing the two events or not. I would be overjoyed to have six or seven great DXs living within a few miles (which makes me feel like a hypocrite for not doing more with Our Hero), but I really think the in-one-house thing would be even better. I think as soon as you live in separate places, I imagine interpersonal contact drops off %50. As soon as you have different places, you have to set up meetings (even if it's only a quick AIM of "you wanna come over for dinner?"), and you lose a lot of the staying up late, bumming around looking for distractions. It's also harder to go from residence to residence drunk :-)
As far as people from here go, I've met a lot of really nice people (mainly yoinking Emily's first-year chemistry friends.) While I haven't met any Knights or anything yet, there are definitely a number of people that I would be happy to live with if I lived with 40 or 50 people. I don't think I'd bullshit handjobs or purple spunk with them, but I would definitely be pleased to see them in a game of six on six Halo. I don't think there is anyone I'd be real excited to split a two-bedroom apartment with or anything, though, where any Knight would be welcome to take the spare bedroom.
Sigh, I don't know, maybe I'm just missing the warm, healing glow of the Ranch and the great advantages that are derived from a close association of college and university men.
I'm eager to see everyone over Christmas!
8:30 PM
Yeah, I agree that living in separate apartments wouldn't be the same or as good as living in a big house, and the contact drops off immensely. But I think if you and Nerad, and me, and Shawn, and Tyler, etc, ALL lived in Evanston, we'd get together fairly often. (Assuming we're not more busy than we were as undergrads: I know I'm more busy now than I was back then, especially at peak times like right now). When only myself and one friend from high school are in Indy, we get together maybe once or twice during break. When there's twenty of us, there are mass gatherings of one kind or another almost every night. Some kind of critical mass thing. The weaker bonds between individuals are strengthened by the overall bond of the collective, or something.
And in this case, that bond is the bond of brotherhood.
Anyhoo, I definitely part ways with you on the moving in with grad school people thing. Maybe I'm not as compatible with the people I've met (if I were chiefly a philosophy student, things might be different, but law school is such a mixed bag) I don't think I'd want to live in a house with 50 or 60 of them. Maybe Halo would be the great unifier, but alas, Charles doesn't stand a chance. (I think Mario Kart presumes a degree social familiarity that I don't yet share with the law school folk.)
Oh, how I miss that clean-shaven old buddy of mine. He was supposed to meet me here, the bastard. I haven't heard from him in quite some time.
CT
9:37 PM
I suspect that the minimum critical mass is about three. Three relatively likeminded and humored people (most couples don’t count) can generally banter on and on in a social setting like a bar with minimal pressure or awkwardness. A group of three is also more inviting than two, and begs the attention of others in a bar like setting.
My brother-in-law constantly invites me out to bars with him. It is a friendly gesture to be sure but considering that he is far right wing, fifteen years older than me and I’m not even that close to the women he is married to…I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be awful. I was once trapped in a similar setting last summer and I survived the dinner only by tapping the conversational topic “Disasters of my love life”. Sex, relationships and outrageous psychotic girlfriends make good fodder for family talk. Everyone likes talking about it, and its never a faux pas with relations. Problem is: it engenders a feeling of false closeness. Now THAT brother-in-law wants to take me out to dinner. I think people only get these notions when they don’t have other things to occupy themselves with. Guys have an advantage with this that increases with their youth…. Which leads me to something completely unrelated. Between books, the video game soma and the occasional netflix I can occupy vast swaths of time with very low intensity social contact. Every Sunday I go home for dinner and see Yasmin. It’s not great fun but it’s been enough to prevent me from taking the marginal risk of going to Schuba’ that’s less than a block from my house on a Friday night. (They play music there too! It wouldn’t be lame to go alone! Drinks are cheap and there is no cover! WHY DO I STAY INSIDE!) The problem with one’s home being a castle is that as much as it’s dreary, it is its safe and known. I’m all out off food and that hasn’t even motivated me yet because I can just order in. I’m thinking of uninstalling all games on my computer so that I am forced outside.
OH
2:27 AM
Yeah, I'm not ready to commit to living with 40 people from here. But, I could swap out 5 or 10 DXs (my picks) with people from here, I think.
Did anyone watch SNL tonight? Dane Cook is pretty good, but this David Blunt guy is just fucking terrible man. If you're going to be a sad little white guy, you better really fucking pull it off (ie, be Thom Yorke or Elliott Smith.) God. Anyways.
Our Hero, you should totally come to my party next weekend. Did you get that email? Bring Yas, and talk Dana into coming. There'll be plenty of booze, food, and other drinking, easy-to-get-along with people. It seems to me as good a reason to leave the castle as anything else. And are you still down for some kind of New Years?
I've been listening to the Beta Band a bit recently (along with Mates of State, who are also really good.)
They have that really good line, "The problem with doing your own thing is that you end up on your own." I don't think it really applies here, but it's a cute line I think.
9:56 PM
Yas and me are in. I'm just bad with RSVP.
11:34 PM
Fire up, dude. Dana is coming too. Now you'll have three people to talk to! :-)
9:42 AM
So, I never lived in a frat. But last year, I lived in suite, so I was in close proximity to all of my best friends, and I got from the college all of the benefits of not cleaning/not cooking.
All I want is a house/apartment of my own. I have a room in a house with some roommates, and they're ok guys. But this sharing space shit is for kids. I'm down to clean the bathroom once in a while if the only other person who uses my living space is Ruth.
2:31 PM
Yeah, I was kind of in the same boat when I graduated, Todd. I'll be interested to hear if you still think the same thing a year from now. I must admit, though, that your current situation (sharing a house with people you're not really good friends with) sounds pretty terrible, IMHO.
I think the most important thing is good-friend density, and then you rate by raw numbers.
7:04 AM
Actually, where do you live now? I remember that one night you were hanging out with Tony. Are you still near Bard/Ruth?
7:05 AM
I'm in Waltham, Mass. It's like 3.5 hours from Ruth; we get together roughly every other weekend. It's not the best, but it'll do for now.
Things also may different for me because I've never had/been one for a very large friend set. I think I may just be less social than you/the average fraternity brother.
10:45 AM
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home