This week, we share the worst places we’ve lived (so far).
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2 Comments
man. off the top of my head, the two worst places i’ve ever lived were:
my senior year dorm suite, where i got no sleep in between getting up at 6 or 7am for studio classes, getting up for work at 5am on my off days, and having to deal with my idiot roommate who was on the basketball team, and thus never had to lift a finger if it didn’t involve partying all year (ending at approximately 4:59am or 5:59am, depending on what i had in store for that day). it’s probably where i got my serious aversion to slamming doors and heavy bass and uhh….college age meatheads.
my first adult apartment, which started off great, but derailed into a series of antagonistic battles with invading mice, roommates who perpetuated the slamming doors/heavy bass aversion, a serious breakup, and a drug dealing neighbor living directly below my bedroom who must’ve been piping in marijuana smoke through the cracks in my floor.
but hearing your guys’ experiences (especially stephen’s trailer story and rodrigo’s toilet hole story)….woof. i feel like i got off fairly easy in life.
Listening to this episode forced me to sit down and list all the places I’ve lived in my life. I’ve inhabited 15 different structures in my 45+ years, and most of them haven’t been bad at all, but there are definitely exceptions, so here are my top (bottom?) five:
5, 4, 3) Weist Hall on the Fort Hays State University campus – Okay, yes. I’m cheating right off the bat, because I only lived in Weist for one year, but in that time I was in three different rooms, and everything about the place was horrible. Let’s start with the brutalist architecture (see https://www.hayspost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG_2460-e1504211240946.jpg) that seemed designed to resemble a prison. The building was a hollow square, so half the rooms looked in on a “courtyard” to which no one had access, and which was simply a place into which people threw trash from their dorm room windows. It was a men’s dormitory, and was plagued by the kinds of problems any place inhabited by young stupid males is prone to, including a back elevator that smelled like urine.
This was the first place I lived in college, and my parents still tell the story of what it was like to drop me off there. I had been mistakenly assigned to the room of a football player who was suppposed to have a single, and when they left me, I was sitting forlornly in the corner of a room where I obviously wasn’t supposed to be, surrounded by belongings that I couldn’t unpack. It got better once I moved into a room with an actual roommate, but I never really got along with either of the guys I shared with there, so I was extremely pleased when Matthew acquiesced to my begging for him to request me as a roommate in Agnew Hall my sophomore year.
2) House on Santa Fe in Owen Park, Tulsa – This rental house is where I lived with my wife and kids from 2010 to 2012. It’s the kind of house that is sometimes euphemistically described as having “good bones”, but honestly, even that wasn’t particularly true. It was probably a very nice Victorian home 50 years ago, but by the time we moved in it was in terrible shape and hadn’t been maintained properly for decades. There was a hole in the floor in the living room and the ceiling in one of the upstairs bedrooms had collapsed.
Beyond all these structural problems, though, was the fact that the owners of the house were the worst landlords I have ever encountered. At best, they were simply neglectful, but whenever we had to deal with them for any repairs or other issues, it became clear that one half of the couple (the one we dealt with most often) was simply irrational and impossible to deal with. The only saving grace of living there was the neighborhood. We got along great with almost everyone we knew, and our neighbors across the street became some of our closest friends.
1) Tribune, KS – After I graduated from FHSU, I was hired to teach high school English in Tribune. I was the thirteenth English teacher in twelve years at that school, and I only lasted one year myself. Tribune is extremely small (fewer than 800 residents) and isolated. The nearest place of any size is Garden City, which is over two hours’ drive away.
I rented an old railroad bunkhouse for that year. It was 20′ square and had four rooms. There were roaches everywhere, and the floor under the shower stall was rotted out, so if you stood on the wrong corner while showering the whole stall would tilt alarmingly. There were a lot of reasons I was glad to move away from Tribune, but that house was at the top of my list.