12/2/22
“Oh, we have a dog by the way. You’re ok with that right?” Is a great thing to be telling your subletter during the tour, or even the initial conversations with potential subletters if you’re bold. However, I was told about this with a pen in my hands to sign the lease.
Now someone else might wonder why they wouldn’t pitch a dog living in the house as a perk. After all, colleges often bring dogs onto campus as stress relief and there is something calming about a husky you can just hug while it sits there happily.
This dog was not a husky. Or a shepherd, lab, or really any huggable and sweet family dog breed. It was a mutt ratdog of the truest form, named Emory. While well-intentioned, he was a puppy and chaotic, probably not designed for the college experience, and had a temper. Which to some degree set the tone of the house
This house had five girls, all juniors, and me and freshman boy. So to call it different from the usual would be accurate. That’s the surface of the fun though. Those kinds of house dynamics (especially in sublets) are not incredibly uncommon, to the point where anyone reading this could probably think of one from their college days. The fun is what happened next.
For the first month, we got along fine, I saw them when cooking food or getting home from class or Baja. Jolie, Maya, and I went to Winterfest (the frat event not the club festival). Madds and Hannah took me to Taco Bell one time. They even threw me a “welcome to the house Sam and goodbye Sai have fun on study abroad” party. There’s a video of my walking in the door late because I was scared I wasn’t invited to the party and dozens of upperclassmen being excited that the freshmen had arrived and my roommates running over.
And in a normal year, this is how it would’ve gone. I would’ve met and known these roommates as agreeable older kids who were funny but overall in a different stage of my life. We all had different social scenes anyhow.
Course then COVID happened.
I recall sitting on the couch in the war room taking a break from Baja freshmen year during spring break and reading about how study abroad programs were being canceled. Then my friend Nathan says to me “Hey our study abroad to Rome got canceled”. I was supposed to go to Rome that summer. Would’ve been cool but honestly never got heartbroken over it. We then looked at each other and went deadpan “I’m sure it’s no big thing. No way it gets here”
(Also yes I did spend my freshmen year spring break on North Campus doing Baja. I also spent my senior year spring break and it was canceled my Soph/Junior/something that year. I don’t live an interesting life purposefully. Shit just explodes.)
This statement was claimed on Wednesday at noon. The next Wednesday at 3:30 pm, I’m taking an NMR measurement in the organic chemistry 1 lab when I hear a commotion coming from the main lab room. I walk over with my lab partner to see someone reading out that all classes are canceled for the next two days and all in-person classes are canceled in the foreseeable future.
The GSI looked defeated more than anything else. And told us simply “pack your stuff” and head home, “I’ll clean up”.
Now originally the policy was that students could stay in the dorms. For the in-state students, the chaos began near immediately as parents wanted their kids home. Two days later they mandated that the dorms should be empty unless you had a damn good reason to stay. Within three days. Those five days I helped move out two dozen kids. Soon enough I was the only freshman I knew left on campus. I would say it was probably the most uncertain and chaotic week I had in college.
Now I was left with five roommates I knew a little about, and the world in a panic.
So we did what we could, and got to know each other. Something useful to understand here is that my parents are divorced. It happened when I was 18 years old and a senior in college. Not exactly hugely chaotic for my life. For a fun time though I learned that everyone else’s parents in the house were either divorced, should be divorced, or otherwise going through it. So no one wanted to go home.
We did our best to fill our time.
There was the time Maya and Madison got 8 new kittens to foster alongside the three we already had. I came back from California to find 11 cats walking around the house. You’d wake up and drink your coffee on the couch and there’d be three kittens crawling over you trying to explore the world.
There were daily walks around central campus (now a ghost town), and drinking with the neighbors (the two houses next to us still had people present). Maya and I would drift in a parking lot. Lots of stupid TikTok drinks (and making really stupid TikTok). There was a rather horrifying video of the time Jolie taped a steak knife to a baby doll’s hand and strung it up on the ceiling fan then turned the fan on. I was near positive the baby was going to fly off and impale a kid.
So much alcohol and weed. So many hours were spent sitting at the docks by the river that goes through Ann Arbor enjoying the summer weather. Making fun of people’s life stories or watching Mamma Mia. It was the most midwestern feel I’d ever received (and the other five were all from the midwest).
I don’t intend to idealize this as a perfect time. Today I barely talk to them and many of the roommates dislike each other. I liked them all but we also all went our separate ways. I barely even saw them the next year and almost all of them were still here then.
The house didn’t have AC, which when you’re home all day in Michigan summer can be absolutely brutal. Covid quickly got old and people became exhausted. There was an element of loneliness to it all that was hard for us to work it. We all know Covid sucked. There isn’t much to say there.
Still, I moved into that house very much alone and burned out of college. College can be rough to start and I think even for big public schools I had a rather rough start. Again a story for another time but even if it didn’t last or wasn’t perfect some of my fondest memories of college come from those initial months of covid. When there blissfully for the first time in college there weren’t any expectations anymore. The only expectation was making it through and we could make the most of it. Tacky and lame ways of wasting time like drinking wine on Mary’s bed and listening to her love life are not a “lame way to spend your Friday night” but instead “mental recovery”. Until graduate school, I never felt the social anxiety so gone from my life.
And for all the shit they gave me (and they did give me a lot), they also provided an incredible amount of trust and fun into my life. They very much wanted to give me the college freshmen year experience they had.
(Editors note: their freshmen experience can be defined as Maya’s “pre-game” being 8 shots in an hour and the first night Jolie moved in she met Sai’s hookup before she met Sai)
Again, life moves on. It wasn’t all perfect. But some things stay around. I just sent a Snapchat to Jolie making a joke about being Jewish. Maya texted me drunk earlier this semester when I was also plastered and we laughed about the old days. Hannah is now engaged. The world changes.
But I’m thankful for the unexpected moments in life. The ones that prove that sometimes you do roll lucky. Even if they’re brief.
Thanks for reading.
Dead Man Travelling 