I’m not trying to be the full time reminiscing about my college days on here. Droning on about how awesome it was back then as opposed to how crummy it is now. By the time my final year rolled around, having watched as the closest of my peers fell by the bi-annual exam wayside, I was WELL ready to graduate and get the rock outta there. I was sick of lectures. I was sick of campus and I was, most definitely, sick of the city. My heart had had enough of buses and lights and neighbours and costs. It was pining for a world that consisted of dogs, the sound of a car engine in the vicinity being a “who’s here?!” situation and being able to see the stars in the night sky.
Home / Henry Street
Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and now, four years into my “real life”, as I assumed it to be, while the thoughts of city living fill me with a sense of suppressed rage and exhaustion, I miss education. I miss learning something everyday. I miss deadlines and the constant niggling pressure that keeps you with something on the to-do list at all times. I miss going to Tae Kwon Do on a Wednesday evening or to the bar on a Tuesday. I miss coming home at the weekends for a catch-up with friends in the smoking area of the dingiest pub in town. It was ignorant bliss at it’s most brilliant, where my biggest concern was whether I should spend my last fiver on printing fees for this assignment that’s due in tomorrow OR should I spend it on three bottles of Koppaberg to drink in the courtyard with the gang right now? The Koppabergs won every time and the assignments almost always got printed somehow, like I’d known they would from the start.
Then, the other night, while listening to my sister describing the three boys she shares an apartment with in college, I got to thinking about the lucky people that have had the pleasure of living with me in Dublin in the mid-noughties and how sad it is knowing that I might never live like that again. As much as I was glad to get out of there in the end, it’s apparent to me now that I took for granted the time I got to spend living with the characters I lived with.
In first year, I managed to secure a place on campus. I was in a tiny little “apartment” that consisted of two single blue-carpeted bedrooms, each with a door that opened into the kitchenette that separated them. Behind the kitchenette was a bathroom reminiscent in size to that of an airplane toilet. On my second day there, another girl moved into the second bedroom, 27B. I don’t even remember her name. It was never going to work. She took one look at me, cigarette in hand, black hair, lip ring and a red t-shirt with the word “HOSTILE” emblazoned on the front. She moved all her food from the kitchen cupboard to her wardrobe. She locked her bedroom door and within a week, she was gone.
Me, popping pills, having seances and provoking people to hide food in wardrobes, circa 2006.
For a while I gleefully and naively thought that she wouldn’t be replaced. I had a whole sub-letting scheme going on in my head. Until one day, about two weeks later, in walked Claire. She was wearing a GAA jersey, her hair strewn back into a bun and a massive smile on her face as she shook my hand. She wasn’t remotely deterred by my menacing appearance. In fact, she was lovely. Claire was consistently cheerful. Her enthusiasm for just about everything was infectious and, despite being incredibly sporty and health-conscious, she tolerated my Thursday night parties, my smoking habit and my continual failure to bother going to class, for the whole year without ever so much as shooting me a disapproving look. She was even there with a comforting shoulder when I broke up with my first real boyfriend. When the college year drew to a close and the time came to move out and go home for the summer, I will admit to welling up a bit when I hugged Claire goodbye.
When I returned to campus in September, I was set to go, new upgraded, facypants 2nd year apartment where I was to have the luxury of my own en-suite bathroom. Except when I got there, there was a fuck-up with residences and I ended up, last minute, being placed in a room in an apartment with four guys, none of whom I knew. I was horrified. I knew immediately what to expect. Mountains of beer cans and unwashed dishes, sticky floors, X-Box and bad smells. It was pretty accurate. But what I didn’t expect was for that living situation to end up being one of the most relaxed times of my life.
The four guys, Willie, Mark, Brendan and Fergal were delighted to have a girl on board. They enquired about my cookery skills, my cleaning abilities and about any “hot birds” that I might have had in my social circle. Our relationship was sealed when, one afternoon, upon the discovery of an army of ants living under the desk in my bedroom, I ran to the living room for help. The guys came running and, after awing at the huge volume of critters invading my space for a minute, proceeded to blast the colony with an arms consisting of a can of Lynx and a lighter. Then, admiring the charred carpet and array of dead ants, and giving me a sympathetic pat on the back, they went back about their business (I got out the dustpan and brush).
The rest of the year became a rota of television shows on MTV. We’d convene on the sofas daily for a round of ‘Next’ and ‘Date My Mom’, placing bets on the outcomes and pleading our case when we guessed it wrong. Fergal was poker fanatic. He’d come home at night, drunk, after a hard night’s bluffing, and regale me with tales of how close he’d come to winning it, “fuckin’ ragin’!” he’d say, inhaling his cigarette and shaking his head, thinking about the €400 he’d just lost. Brendan and Mark were old friends. Mark, tall and serious, was often to be found in a suit. I think he actually owned a briefcase. Brendan was quite the opposite. He was always found in slouchy jeans with earphones slung around his neck. Before leaving the apartment he’d always stop and give you the peace sign through the window before he exited. Willie (Hi Willie! ;)) was a real sports-head. In addition to playing gaelic, he was also on the university’s American Football team and was really involved in go-karting. He was very popular, known by everyone and constantly on the go, fuelling up with Berocca before running out the door. He was also a regular Cassanova, owing to his tactical and perfectly executed charm. Willie once learned that I am apt to a bit of cleaning after a few drinks. From that point onwards, whenever we were having pre-drinks drinks at home, if I turned my back for a second, Willie would have my glass re-filled and strengthened twice-over in the hope that I’d get drunk enough to clean the place, alas it more often resulted in me not getting very far past the bed for the rest of the night.
The apartment was usually messy. The floor was decorated with shoes, bottles and random bits of clothing or books. Every now and again I’d try and clean it or put some flowers in the window. But mostly, I didn’t care. The point of that being, that I learned that the better part of how content we are somewhere has nothing to do with our surroundings or any of that feng shui bolox. It’s the people who make an environment bearable. Living with the lads for that year, I had some of the best laughs I ever had.
You know how it goes…
The following year, my final one, I was placed in an apartment in the same complex. This time I lived with four girls. All nursing students. All strangers. They hated me. I mean, those girls thought that I was the devil incarnate. I think in the entire year that I lived there, I had maybe two conversations with them. They were all really straight-laced, friends already and not into anything remotely out of the ordinary. One night I invited some friends over. I didn’t want to mess up the girls evening by commandeering the living room so we spent the night hanging out in my bedroom. We had some drinks, listened to music, talked, laughed, tried to talk one of the guys through his relationship woes. By the time we realised the time, it was too late to send everyone home. We set up some beds on the floor and two of the lads headed for the living room sofas. The next morning, Paidi, a big metalhead with long red-hair who looked a little scary but was actually a gentle giant, told me that while he’d been asleep on the couch that morning, two of my roommates had come into the kitchen and had a whispered conversation about what they assumed my friends and I had been doing all night. Their description concluded that we must have been “popping pills and having a séance.” I. Shit. You. Not.
I barely said goodbye to those girls when I moved out at the end of the year.
Living with the boys in 2nd year, although I was happy, I was wholly unappreciative of the simplicity of the other sex. Boys don’t judge the way girls do. They don’t make assumptions. They take things as they see them. The general rule of the apartment seemed to be something along the lines of, “if the mess bothers you, clean it.” It didn’t matter who made it. If you had the problem, you could deal with it. That year, I was content in a world where everyone said what they meant and bad behaviour was applauded. Pranks, in boy world, are a million times better because along with the elimination of girls goes the elimination of the risk of someone getting upset and storming off. A joke is a joke. Retaliation is fair and it’s all to be laughed about later. I felt embraced by the guys, part of the gang. I heard all the smut and gritty details. I learned how to be really good at Mario Kart and I learned to chill the fuck out a bit and not to think so damn much.
Now, older, wiser (ish) and musing over the good ol’ days, I doubt that I’ll ever have such a situation again. In the years since my emigration from Dublin, I’ve lived with my best friend. It’s a much more gratifying experience. It’s an environment where the smell is pretty decent, the dishes are washed and the carpet is vacuumed. We get on like a house on fire and, while I do look back fondly on the days of the “boy pack”, I’m not sure I’d go back.
I guess I just want to take that uncomplicated, it is what it is, boy mentality away with me. Bottle it and try and convince people that maybe, just maybe, men have got it right when it comes to social skills. They’re not dumb, as stereotype dictates we believe, they just don’t give a shit if we think they are.
And then they go about their day. Harmony.
sureitsallabitofcraic 