My son's college apartment has a pleasant pepperoni motif (Dave Barry) (LoL)

Maimi Herald ^

[nuconvert]

My son's college apartment has a pleasant pepperoni motif

BY DAVE BARRY

(This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Nov. 21, 1999.)

So I visited my son at college on Parents Weekend, which is a nice event that colleges hold so that parents will have a chance to feel old.

I started feeling old the moment I got to my son's housing unit and saw a sign on the door that said: END WORLD HUNGER TODAY. This reminded me that there was a time in my life, decades ago, when I was so full of energy that I was going to not only END WORLD HUNGER, but also STOP WAR and ELIMINATE RACISM. Whereas today my life goals, to judge from the notes I leave myself, tend to be along the lines of BUY DETERGENT.

I felt even older when I entered my son's apartment, which he shares with three roommates and approximately 200 used pizza boxes. When I was a college student, we also accumulated used pizza boxes, but we threw them away after a reasonable period of time (six weeks). Whereas my son and his roommates apparently plan to keep theirs forever. Maybe they believe that a wealthy used-box collector will come to the door and say, ''If you can produce a box used to deliver pizza on the night of Sept. 12, 1999, I'll pay you thousands of dollars for it!'' Because they WILL have that box on file.

They keep their pizza boxes in the kitchenette, which is also where they keep their food supply, which is an open jar containing a wad of peanut butter as hard as a bowling ball. You may be wondering: ''What happens if a burglar breaks into the kitchenette and steals their pizza boxes?'' Do not worry. They keep a reserve supply of pizza boxes in the living room, and if a burglar tried to get THOSE, he'd trip over the cord that stretches across the room from the TV to the video-game controller held by a young man who is permanently installed on the sofa. This young man is not one of my son's roommates; for all I know, he's not even a student. But he is stationed in the living room 24 hours a day, focused on the video game, although he always gives you a polite ''Hi'' when you walk through the room and step over his cord. I'm not familiar with the game he's playing, but I noticed, as I stepped over the cord, that the screen said: ''YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED EIGHT THUNDERS.'' Maybe this has something to do with world hunger.

After passing through the living room, I stuck my head into my son's bedroom. I was reluctant to enter, because then I'd have been walking on my son's clothes. He keeps them on the floor, right next to the bureau. (I don't know what he keeps in the bureau. My guess is: pizza boxes.) My son assured me that, even though his garments appear to be one big intertwined pile, he knows which are clean and which are dirty.

''Like, this one is clean,'' he said, picking a garment off the floor, ``and this one is clean, and this one is ... never mind.''

There were no sheets on my son's bed. Asked about this, he explained (this was the entire explanation): ``They came off a couple of weeks ago.''

I'm not complaining about my son's housekeeping. He is Martha Stewart compared with the student who occupied his bedroom last year. According to true campus legend, when this student moved out, his laundry was so far beyond human control that he simply abandoned it. As a kind of tribute, his roommates took a pair of his briefs outside, climbed a lamppost and stretched the briefs over the lamp. They remain there today, a monument to the courage and dedication it takes to put underpants on a lamppost. I was gazing up at them in admiration when a student said to me: ``That's the cleanest they've ever been.''

Not all student rooms look like my son's. Some are occupied by females. If you stand outside the building, you notice that those rooms have curtains and pictures on the walls; whereas the males' rooms have all been painstakingly decorated with: nothing. The only designer touches are lines of bottles, and the occasional tendril of laundry peeking coyly over a window sill. We stood outside my son's building one evening, noting this difference; my son, looking at a tasteful, female-occupied room, said, with genuine wonder in his voice: ``I think they vacuum and stuff.''

Speaking of which: During Parents Weekend, I took my son shopping, and we bought, among other things, a small vacuum cleaner. When we got back to his room, one of his roommates opened the box and held up the vacuum cleaner. We all looked at it, and then at the room. Then we enjoyed a hearty laugh. Then the roommate set the vacuum cleaner down on the floor, where it will be swallowed by laundry and never seen again. This is fine. These kids are not in college to do housework: They are there to learn. Because they are our Hope for the Future. And that future is going to smell like socks.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[toddlintown]

Dave Barry? Never understood the fascination.

[dennisw]

Dave Barry is the antithesis of funny. He's just shooting American middle class memes back at you

-- just my take

[nuconvert]

"Dave Barry? Never understood the fascination"

You also think Dylan's a "liberal moron" and "haven't understood a word Bob Dylan has spoken since 1989"

Nuff said

[nuconvert]

pong

[toddlintown]

"'You also think Dylan's a 'liberal moron' and 'haven't understood a word Bob Dylan has spoken since 1989.'

Nuff said."

Wow. Must be Stalker Sunday.

[billbears]

Never read that much of his columns in the past. But ever since he retired, I have read them from time to time. This column just made me laugh out loud. We didn't collect pizza boxes, we collected beer bottle caps. Literally thousands of them ;) And no, I have yet to have a collector come calling to buy them from me. LOL

[cowtowney]

funny stuff

[Irish Rose]

Thanks for the pong.

[i_dont_chat]

We once made a Christmas tree out of Pearl Beer cans and strung the "poptops" together -- for tinsel.

[reformedliberal]

Ever had a teenage son?

This is cathartic laughter after the 4+ years when no one over HS age dared enter the upstairs of our home. The Garbage Dump sign over the bedroom didn't begin to tell the story. It took 2 entire packages of 30 gallon trash bags to pick up and dispose of the visible debris after he left home. We then remodeled, which included taking up the floor boards and collecting the thousands of snippets of electrical wire that had somehow sifted down there. Then we had to remove the railroad spikes ("Mom, I couldn't FIND any nails") that studded the walls in order to wind enough copper wire for a Faraday cage around the room. This was done to enable him to receive the FM rock station his peer groups had to listen to constantly at top volume.

He is quite bright, has a BS in Chemistry and his own business as an IT consultant. He also has a wife who finds these sorts of articles hilarious. She may have married him out of pity. His first apartment post college and pre-marriage had a tasteful decor of hundreds of pieces of paper, some identifiable, most not, all over the floor of a large studio.

I believe it is a Y chromosome-linked behavior mediated only by military service.

[spookadelic]

I dont know much about the "college life" since I went to a school in central illinois that at the time catered to local working people and was held mostly at night.

I was however active duty in the army from 1990 - 1993 and as a single guy living in the baracks I can relate to the images paited by people of college life. Video Games, Music, masive beer parties, sculpures of pizza boxes and beer cans, and trying to sneek girls in to our room.

The only difference being once a week we were forced to haul all the stuff to the recycle bin. Also different, college guys go to class hungover and military guys go to PT hungover.

So I disagree that its mediated by military service.
Damn those were good times....

[radiohead]

I believe it is a Y chromosome-linked behavior mediated only by military service.

I'm tending to believe you. My son was a terrible mess. I went to visit his college apartment once and he told me he had cleared a path from the door to the bed for me. He did not lie. There were piles of WSJ (he and his roomies were smart cookies, I guess I should take some solace there) up to my knees, mixed in with the clothes and sports gear./

I realized I had actually turned into my mother when I found myself cleaning their kitchen - and liking it.

My late husband, however, had been in the Army. He used to take the faucets off of the sink to clean under them. He would wake up happy on a Saturday, ready to start the day off cleaning. He did the laundry the whole time we were married because as a young bride, I had once made his underwear pink. I wish he had been around when our son was an older teen; he might have listened to him rather than the 'nagging' mom.

The boy is still something of a mess, but not as bad as he was. I think girlfriends' comments are a mediating factor, whereas mom's words fall on deaf ears.

[nuconvert]

"Must be Stalker Sunday."

Lol. You came to a thread I posted. Who's stalking who?

[Dr. Eckleburg]

LOL. I miss him and hope he returns ASAP.

[nuconvert]

You mean you still have them?

[billbears]

LOL, no one of the other roommates took them when we left college. Unfortunately, knowing how much of a packrat this guy was, they're probably sitting in the back of his garage somewhere 14 years later

[reformedliberal]

Every military man I have ever known was a totally compulsive neat freak, up to an including underwear folded square and
placed precisely in a drawer.

[reformedliberal]

I think some of them just have to rebel, no matter which parent they are opposing.

Good luck. My son is now 40 and his wife is still trying to get him to clean up after himself! At least now, he is forced to confine the mess to his office and it IS marginally improved from his teenage room.