Apartment Life

Living in an apartment for the first time has been quite an adventure. Albeit, I’ve only lived in Lido for two weeks, but I already call this place home. I don’t think it’s just the new location on the opposite end of campus (or really, across the street from campus), or having to prepare my own food. It isn’t even the exciting prospect of not having to share a bathroom with thirty other girls. The move into the apartment has really been a change of perspective. Being here makes me feel like I’m beginning to take the first baby steps towards real adulthood. Of course, I still have a long way to go before I can really exercise my independence and allow God to take me anywhere He pleases in the world.

I’ll admit that I entertained some major misgivings about moving between semesters. I felt like I just got used to living with my Fall semester roommate, and all of a sudden, I was putting myself in a position where I would have to adjust to three new roommates. But on the way home from our excursion to Wal-mart, Michael’s, and Bobaloca today, I told my apartment-mates Ariel and Meli that I think living with them (along with our fourth roommate Janelle) has been such a huge blessing this semester.

There’s never a dull moment in this apartment. Whether we’re eating a random assortment of edible items at the dinner table, gathered around one of our laptops watching Lego Beowulf on YouTube, or curled up on the carpet of one of our bedrooms talking about life in general, we seem to always enjoy our time together. Often times, the apartment will hum with the sound of the TV in the living room, where Meli and Janelle are reading, while Ariel contorts her body and reads on her bed, and I type on my computer and listen to music through my headphones. All of a sudden, one of the girls will burst into our room to tell us something interesting that happened that day, or complain about having too much to read.

There’s something so beautiful about living our lives together, sharing both our stage of life and what we bring to it, working together, laughing together, praying for each other, helping each other deal with our struggles and frustrations. And even though we’re all very dedicated to our studies, we all seem to take a special delight and pleasure in being English majors, in embracing our nerdiness, embracing our love for literature and writing.

And we always have fun. For instance, today, Ariel and I got overly excited about making connections between the critical literary theories of Roland Barthes and the short story "Shrodinger’s Cat" (by Ursula Le Guin) that we read two semesters ago. Last night, we watched Janelle don a snow coat and five or six scarves, then walk around to our neighboring apartments to “beg” for some ice cubes. We even have a bulletin board dedicated to anything that one of us says that is particularly random, strange, hilarious, or grossly out-of-context.

It reminds me of Anne in Anne of Windy Poplars, who shares a small cottage with three other girls while they are in the university, living, studying, and working together. That picture of the girls, sitting around a warm crackling fire reading, or getting into mischief together, has always been something of a dream of mine. I feel like I’m finally getting a small taste of that reality. Except we have a pomegranate-scented candle for a fire and we gather around the TV to watch LOST.