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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.

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....

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.