Living Conditions

It's been thirteen years since I lived in my college dormitory. Living there was a great opportunity since I got to live in Manhattan in a relatively safe place for what amounted to about $200 a month. A ridiculously low price even then. A few days before freshman year started, my parents moved me in with some basic stuff, food, dishes, silverware, toiletries. My mother swept and mopped the floor while my father and I chose where to put the imitation wood and metal furniture that came with the room. This particular dorm had originally been built for nursing students. The dorm is situated in a part of the east side called "Bedpan Alley" because it's right near Bellevue and the VA hospital. The rooms were designed as small cells, about seven to eight feet wide, and about twelve feet long. By the door, there's a sink and a closet. Each floor has communal bathrooms and a communal kitchen. If it sounds dreary and institutional, that's because it is. Or was, I don't know what the dorm looks like now, but I have seen small air conditioners in the windows recently. Jerks. Where was that in the summer of '94 during the heat wave?

The dorm was cheap and convenient, but it was also kindofa hellhole. Definitely the kind of place you can feel good about living in only when you're a certain age. Let me put it this way, after moving me in, my mother never again visited the dorm. I don't think she liked seeing the conditions I was living in. Not that my folks had a lot to compare it to; I think I'm the only member of my family who ever lived in a dorm. At nineteen years old, I'm not saying I was completely cool living with insects and mice. Those things freaked me out, but not enough to make me live at home instead. If I saw a bug, I squashed it or sprayed it with whatever was handy. (I remember a particular incident in which I made a critter very shiny with Pledge before it ultimately expired.) If I saw a mouse in the kitchen--usually sniffing around whatever I was cooking--I banged on the counter with a wooden spoon to make it go away.

After five years in that dorm, I moved to an apartment in Brooklyn with some friends. It was cleaner, but there were still bugs to contend with since we lived upstairs from a restaurant. Many pieces of our furniture were hand-me-downs from our families. We also had some sidewalk furniture. Nothing matched, and we occasionally used the bathtub as an ersatz cooler when we had parties. The apartment was sweltering in the summertime. From there we moved to another apartment in Queens. Still with the sidewalk furniture, still with the hand-me-downs, still with ridiculous heat in the summer.  A studio in Los Angeles followed where I the only quiet study place for me was the bathtub. A studio has but one room and my boyfriend at the time watched TV a lot. Had no cable for a while, no cushions on my couch, and carpeting that got absolutely gross almost instantly. But who really cared? I was a starving graduate student and it felt perfectly right for me to be "struggling" in a tiny place, sitting on wood slats, and eating that terrible $.99 frozen pizza for dinner.

It was when I was in the next apartment that things started to change for me in my mind. This apartment had two rooms, and that was a huge step up. I could actually close the door to the bedroom and work in there. This apartment had a dishwasher--a terrible, barely-working dishwasher--but at least it dried the dishes well. I bought new furniture that matched. There was still that gross carpeting, which got downright nasty in the seven years I lived there, but I felt lucky to live in a place without pests, except for the occasional spider. I began to consider what was important to me in an apartment. 

The first thing that really changed was my tolerance for pests: I suddenly had none. Then I looked at the carpet and began to think that wood flooring would be so much better. I began to crave my own washer and dryer after years of lugging loads and loads of laundry down to the extremely inconvenient laundry rooms in my complex. I decided that my next place would have the things I wanted and I wasn't going to move until I found them all for a reasonable price. Luckily, I found such a place: hardwood floors, a washer/dryer, two bathrooms (that was a nice extra), and a dishwasher. Granted, this dishwasher still sucks, but I'm mostly happy with all of it.

Something weird happened in my current complex this week involving a guest and some alleged vandalism (long story for another time). It was handled pretty poorly by the management and it made me go on Craigslist to price other places. I thought that if there was a sweet deal, I might look into it. What I realized is that since I moved into the dorm almost eighteen years ago, my taste in accommodations has changed greatly. I'm older and I feel past the age where I want to sit on a couch I rescued from the garbagemen. I don't want to be rolling my shopping cart full of clothes down the street to the laundromat. If I saw a mouse sniffing around my pots on the stove now, I'd freak the hell out. I've become used to a certain standard of living that, while not super fancy, is decidedly decent. 

I hope that one day soon I'll have one of those kick-ass dishwashers that doesn't require any preemptive dish-scraping, and I'll wonder how I ever did without it. Perhaps, maybe twenty or so years from now, I'll be moving my daughter into some nasty dormitory hellhole, and I won't want to see my baby girl chasing mice away with a spoon. She'll roll her eyes and say, "Mom, would you stop being so picky? It's fine." And to her it will be fine. She'll just be grateful to be on her own, like I was once upon a time. It'll be enough. Putting up with the pests and the sketchy laundry facilities and weird roommates will be just fine because she'll be free. When you're nineteen, freedom is worth all of the gross inconvenience of a dormroom or a tiny first apartment. When you're my age, however, you want it all.