Ever think to yourself: What will I tell my grandchildren when the time comes for me to be the eccentric old person whose apparent role it is to tell stories? Perhaps you have started to feel the unbearable weight of inadequacy, feeling as if you do not have any life experience nearly exciting enough to precede with the classic, “Back in my daaaayyyy.”
Well you’re in luck: There is some statistically significant probability that you have lived in a house during your college years whose very features (which of course were conveniently left out of the images uploaded of it online) lend themselves to being fodder for the perfect, golden story.
1. Your bedroom that’s not even technically a bedroom by any stretch of the imagination or other invented metric your landlord could use
When you first signed your lease, you leaned into the fact that you were not in the “smarter” of the two math classes in middle school. The dimensions sure seemed small, but that clawing insecurity that being placed in that math class had irrevocably instilled in you made you doubt you actually knew just how small it was.
Well, when you moved in, those deep-seated feelings subsided, but that happy moment was soon overshadowed. When you walked into the closet thinking, “Okay, I can fit a few coats in here,” you actually found out it was your resplendent bedroom suite.
It might as well have had “to scale” written by it in the renderings on the lease. At least now you can tout that you practically have a certificate in interior design, because in a room which the property management now do not even advertise as a bedroom, you managed to squeeze in a bed (twin-size), a desk that moonlights as a dresser and … yeah, you can’t really fit much more than that in there.
2. Every time you did laundry, you were able to check to see if your fight-or-flight reflex was still intact
Whether you had to venture to a completely different place outside the semi-comfort of your own rented home or had to descend stairs down into the bowels of the basement which appeared as if it was perpetually decorated for Halloween, laundry was no easy feat.
If your VERY humble abode offered this amenity of on-site laundry, you were never in the dark about whether or not your fight or flight was still working. Your heart was able to get its blood pumping when you thought from out of the corner of your eye you could pick something out in the shadows scarier than the slots of the $2.00 of quarters you needed to insert into the machine.
As soon as the cycles were done, you flew out of there. You did not want to be down there for even a minute longer with whatever is doubtlessly residing rent-free in the basement. And most fearsome of all, you did not want to be “that person” who leaves their clothes in either machine for even a minute after the cycles were complete.
3. A radiator that either didn’t work at all or worked too well
Though every room looked as though it had not been remodeled since it was first built, you can bet your bottom dollar that there was a radiator in each and every room.
Though Walt Disney never lived long enough to actualize his longstanding dream of having a theme park entirely with its own weather system, your bedroom’s radiator made it so your room was the next best thing.
Though just right outside your window the weather was so cold that trees were being said to explode, your radiator made sure that as soon as you entered your room you began to miss that cold, coming down with heat stroke.
As an added bonus, if ever you needed to get up early for something, never fret, you were already wide awake. Eyes blood shot because the radiator rattled and sputtered all night long, you weren’t even able to fall asleep in the first place.
4. Upstairs neighbors who might as well have been living right alongside you
For the first couple of weeks when you had moved in, you had figured the not-so-periodic, but rather down-to-the-minute booms and bangs from right above would eventually go away. Eventually reaching the stage of acceptance of having been deeply mistaken, you learned to adapt to it.
When they dropped something not once, twice or thrice but four times right above your bed at 2 a.m., you demonstrated you were the bigger person by not hopping off of your bed to bang the ceiling with the end of a broom and say, “Cut it out up tha!”
It totally wasn’t because you did not want to emerge from bed. When they would loudly sing at the classic singing time of 8 a.m., it brought tears to your eyes at how beautiful their incredible level of confidence was.
Eventually you came to appreciate them as though they were your own personal Big Brother. Their disembodied, omnipresent noises punctuated your day to day, lulling you into a sense of guided routine. One of them shouting about video games? Guess it’s about that time of day to do the dishes.
5. You were practically the Snow White of Squalor, taking care of animals who mistook your home for a wildlife sanctuary
Finally, you can boast that you were essentially a caretaker of many wildlife organisms. A notable example could be the mice that showed up and rudely did not even offer to sew you a dress for Prince Charming’s ball but instead only took the last of your groceries you were forced to use as bait in its trap.
Or perhaps you’d rather discuss the freeloading cockroaches that somehow saw your offer for sublet on your class’ Snapchat story and just came scuttling in without contacting you first. Perhaps the black mold that only began to reveal itself after you had re-signed is more your storytelling speed.
Any and all of these are wonderful and engaging topics which your future grandchildren will no doubt find riveting. They will be incredulous to these tall tales, thinking to themselves that you tell the craziest of stories.
Little do they know they too will encounter all of these five elements and more when they move into their college homes.They then will go on to tell their grandchildren about their experiences, and what once seemed like the humdrum everyday will be elevated to the stuff of familial urban legends, passed down for generations.
