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Over the weekend, a friend of mine from high school moved into a house. He sent me a blissful text message-"I am officially moved in!!"-and invited me over for coffee.
After work, I pulled up out front in my grandfather's old car. I called my friend on my cell phone.
"Is it the brown house with the sunflowers?"
"Yeah, the flowers are ours. But is it brown? I sort of thought it was white."
I let myself in. The house is eerily clean, like a hotel room just after you unlock the door for the first time-there's a sort of strange, antiseptic smell in the air, and the floors are far too clean to be comfortable. There's still no furniture, just low-end hardwood and blank beige walls.
My friend emerges from the basement and gives me a tour-here is my coffee machine, here is a box of Oreos, here are some paper cups and apple juice (as yet, the only food in the house. Beer is on its way.) Here is the washer and dryer, here is my walk-in closet (!!) and best of all,
"It has central air! And look at how tall these windows are."
This friend of mine has a pretty dark past, rife with failed relationships (one of them with me) and dangerously heavy drug use. But looking around this still-spotless room as he quests for a lightswitch, I realize that I am a little bit jealous. He has two housemates and that's it; other than that he is independent, a working man. He sold his car and bikes everywhere now, and his name and down payment are both pinned firmly to his one-year lease. To me, this kind of long-term commitment to independence is intoxicating in its maturity. The grown-upedness of it all kills me.
At the same time, though, this friend is not going to college. He says he will take classes if his parents pay for them, but I doubt they will. I, on the other hand, spent the past year up in the orgy of liberalism and deliciously dense literature that is my Ohio arts school. I love it there, and I am learning important skills. But my friend back home has a lease, for god's sake, he is a real functioning human being, a permanent member of the workforce and someone who can get excited about reasonable monthly payments and central air.
The dorms I'll spend my remaining college years living in are tiny cinder-block cells of sex, music, and all-night study sessions. There is no lease, only the spectacular bills which I am blessed to have my parents pay. And that's it-I learn, I work a measly 5 hours a week with campus dining (a job I did not even need to fill out an application for), I go to parties and ride my bike and bask in the idealistic unreality of it all. It is most definitely living, but it hardly qualifies as real life.
And I guess that's why I'm jealous. Something about my friend's satisfaction at his new home's air conditioning strikes me as a step ahead, even if he hasn't yet learned the joys of upper-level Spanish classes on Latina gender and identity, even if he never will. He is a real person, living within his means, working full time, and buying his own groceries.
College is a privilege, a joy, and an unquestionably thrilling experience, but it is also a hyper-artificial space, one that is fabricated and transformed to suit my needs - it allows me to lead an almost horrifying narcissistic lifestyle. When I graduate in three years, I want to pay back for that in what I do, want to take my privilege and turn it into something broader. Education will give me the freedom to live in a house in Paris, not a house in the same town I grew up in.
But no matter where that house is, it sure as hell better have central air.
- D, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Summer 2007
early draft