At what point do we accept failure?
I don't mean that as some sort of deep philosophical question. I've just been thinking lately -- we are all reasonably intelligent and motivated people, or we wouldn't be at Penn, right?
So why the hell can't my housemates and I keep our house clean?
It's not like I haven't lived in dirty places before. In the frat house where I lived sophomore year, shit flowed from the second floor toilets down to the first through the ceiling. Bad once, sure, but after four times, even we knew it was a little much.
To be honest, though, not many people noticed, or at least cared enough to do anything about it. Plus, there was something of a trash problem. There was a poorly-designed area of the house we called "The Pit," an area not quite inside the house, but not quite outside either. It was, traditionally, a trash pile. We managed to get it up probably a story and a half before it was cleaned.
But this year was going to be different. My housemates and I moved from the house we lived in last year, on Pine, to one on Baltimore because of a large price difference. The problem, of course, is that we're getting what we paid for -- namely, a shithole. But that wasn't going to be true forever. We were going to put real work in this house. We were going to make it clean. We were going to make it inviting. People were going to love coming to our house.
It didn't quite work out that way.
There's trash all over the kitchen, a shower curtain with years of mold in the third floor bathroom. There's a bucket of stale beer sitting under the tap of our kegerator and I have kept a spare box spring sitting in the hall for about three weeks by now. The landlord has left trash from our basement on our porch for over a week. We're pretty pissed about that last one, but we, in our righteous indignation, haven't done anything about it. It's not out of place, really. I like to think it fits with the aesthetic we have going on. It's a motif, really - we're going for the sort of house Oscar the Grouch would live in once Jim Henson started coughing up residuals.
Still, we have managed to get off our collective asses to do something for ourselves. Our foosball table is just about up and working, we have HBO On Demand and we've installed a water cooler. Plus, we're having a party Saturday. You're all invited, though I can't promise it'll be clean.
-Alex Koppelman
