Dives

Part of being a college student is renting out a substandard residence that is undoubtedly thousands of dollars shy of being up to code. I’m not living in the worst house I’ve ever seen, but it’s pretty bad. No one room in the entire place looks as if it belongs in the same building as the others. I think that my landlord must have had five or six houses demolished due to their decrepitude only to realize that he needed a place to rent out and ended up duct taping the remains together.

On Friday night I was shooting the breeze with some friends in the common room. We couldn’t seem to get off the topic of wondering when the second floor was finally going to fall on us. The upstairs is rented out by a group of “bros” who for whatever reason REALLY enjoy jumping up and down. Our only line of defense against the house’s inevitable collapse is a thin ceiling with a very foreboding crack in it. It’s possible that I lost a few dollars betting that the house wouldn’t make it the weekend.

When we lost interest in the structural integrity (or lack thereof) of our surroundings we made our way out to a local bar. As you might expect from a Friday night in a college town the place was completely packed. Naturally everybody there was having a miserable time. That’s what happens when you cram yourself into a hole in the wall featuring loud music and lacking a dance floor. Even still a number of people got up and moving (to the extent that they could) to the tune of “Shout” by The Isley Brothers. At this point I could feel the floor beneath me rise and fall with those who were “dancing”. I thought that the night might actually get interesting if the floor gave way. I had no such luck.

I've always had a certain disdain for the “bar scene”, but this occurrence really put my position into perspective. I had literally gone from sitting around worried about having a ceiling fall on me to standing around wishing that the floor would collapse beneath me.