Off Campus Life: A Treatise
As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!
As my time in the dorms last year drew to a close, my friends and I eagerly speculated about how nice it would be to live off campus, where there were no meddlesome RAs and we wouldn’t have to share the same six toilets with 40 other people. Off campus life, we decided, was the true college experience: complete independence without the school looking over our shoulders every five minutes to make sure we hadn’t died of alcohol poisoning. As this year started, we moved into our apartment expecting to live like kings – mature, independent kings with no need for supervision from University Housing.
Reality struck a few hours later, when my roommates and I became hungry. Last year, when we got hungry, we’d go to Fire and Spice, or Carson, or Dux, or any of the other places where the University provided pseudo-free food for its freshmen. A lot of the fondest memories I have from my freshman year involved eating in one way or another – late night drunk people watching in Common Grounds, blistering my tongue on molten cheese from Carson calzones, eating dinner at 4:30 to avoid the line at Fire & Spice… When we were freshmen, eating was an event, a grand occasion occurring three (sometimes five) times a day that was usually the impetus for a flurry of phone calls and text messages attempting to wrangle more friends into the festivities. “Hey! Have you eaten yet? Do you want to eat again? Well, we’re eating now! Come watch us eat! We’re eating!”
But now we live off campus, and the freely-available food honeymoon is over. Two weeks ago, my roommates and I collectively spent over $600 on groceries and basic supplies for living: soy sauce, bread, Xbox 360 controllers, milk, et cetera. Already we have to go shopping again as we’re fresh out of yogurt and have reached the strategic reserves of our Eggo waffle supply. It’s been a shocking change to us three sheltered middle class suburbanites. We’ve always understood that food in stores and restaurants costs money, and we’ve known from an early age that if you don’t want to spend any money, then you eat the food at home. However, this is the first time we’ve actually been in charge of the food at home, and only now do we realize that things like peanut butter in the pantry and popsicles in the freezer do not just grow there. They, too, must be bought, only now it’s no longer Mom’s responsibility.
There’s so much planning to be done – it’s not just a matter of what you want for dinner tonight, it’s what you want tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. A chunk of a given day now has to be blocked out for shopping, and the shopping itself requires all sorts of thinking. How much Ramen is too much? My roommates eat Skippy yet I am a Jif man – what kind of peanut butter do we buy? What’s the ideal amount of pulp for our orange juice? Once you’ve bought everything, then there’s still the matter of actually preparing it once you’re hungry and not burning anything down in the process. In the dorms, eating was a party. Off campus, it’s practically homework.
The other night, desperate for food with nary a chicken pesto sandwich in sight, my roommates and I took a quick inventory of what food we had left in the house and did our best to cobble together something resembling a complete meal. My roommates set to deciphering the instructions on the sides of our last two boxes of frozen pizza while I brewed up a pot of rice, and half an hour later we were sitting down to relatively nutritious dinner, by college standards. There were plates and silverware, too, and we actually ate at a table instead of just shoving food into our mouths over the counter. Once we were finished, we all did the dishes together and then watched “88 Minutes”, which was without a doubt the worst part of the evening. Maybe this doesn’t mean much to you, that three adult males were capable of successfully feeding themselves, but it was an achievement for us. For three busy students to collaborate on the preparation of a meal and subsequently sit down and eat together is a heartwarming milestone in the vein of a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. It was something we’d never done before, and something we certainly wouldn’t have done had we been in the dorms with no kitchen and free prepared meals a single card swipe away.
So sure, maybe eating has become a homework assignment, but like any good homework assignment, we’ve learned something from it. And in the end, I guess learning new things is what college is really about.
As my time in the dorms last year drew to a close, my friends and I eagerly speculated about how nice it would be to live off campus, where there were no meddlesome RAs and we wouldn’t have to share the same six toilets with 40 other people. Off campus life, we decided, was the true college experience: complete independence without the school looking over our shoulders every five minutes to make sure we hadn’t died of alcohol poisoning. As this year started, we moved into our apartment expecting to live like kings – mature, independent kings with no need for supervision from University Housing.
Reality struck a few hours later, when my roommates and I became hungry. Last year, when we got hungry, we’d go to Fire and Spice, or Carson, or Dux, or any of the other places where the University provided pseudo-free food for its freshmen. A lot of the fondest memories I have from my freshman year involved eating in one way or another – late night drunk people watching in Common Grounds, blistering my tongue on molten cheese from Carson calzones, eating dinner at 4:30 to avoid the line at Fire & Spice… When we were freshmen, eating was an event, a grand occasion occurring three (sometimes five) times a day that was usually the impetus for a flurry of phone calls and text messages attempting to wrangle more friends into the festivities. “Hey! Have you eaten yet? Do you want to eat again? Well, we’re eating now! Come watch us eat! We’re eating!”
But now we live off campus, and the freely-available food honeymoon is over. Two weeks ago, my roommates and I collectively spent over $600 on groceries and basic supplies for living: soy sauce, bread, Xbox 360 controllers, milk, et cetera. Already we have to go shopping again as we’re fresh out of yogurt and have reached the strategic reserves of our Eggo waffle supply. It’s been a shocking change to us three sheltered middle class suburbanites. We’ve always understood that food in stores and restaurants costs money, and we’ve known from an early age that if you don’t want to spend any money, then you eat the food at home. However, this is the first time we’ve actually been in charge of the food at home, and only now do we realize that things like peanut butter in the pantry and popsicles in the freezer do not just grow there. They, too, must be bought, only now it’s no longer Mom’s responsibility.
There’s so much planning to be done – it’s not just a matter of what you want for dinner tonight, it’s what you want tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. A chunk of a given day now has to be blocked out for shopping, and the shopping itself requires all sorts of thinking. How much Ramen is too much? My roommates eat Skippy yet I am a Jif man – what kind of peanut butter do we buy? What’s the ideal amount of pulp for our orange juice? Once you’ve bought everything, then there’s still the matter of actually preparing it once you’re hungry and not burning anything down in the process. In the dorms, eating was a party. Off campus, it’s practically homework.
The other night, desperate for food with nary a chicken pesto sandwich in sight, my roommates and I took a quick inventory of what food we had left in the house and did our best to cobble together something resembling a complete meal. My roommates set to deciphering the instructions on the sides of our last two boxes of frozen pizza while I brewed up a pot of rice, and half an hour later we were sitting down to relatively nutritious dinner, by college standards. There were plates and silverware, too, and we actually ate at a table instead of just shoving food into our mouths over the counter. Once we were finished, we all did the dishes together and then watched “88 Minutes”, which was without a doubt the worst part of the evening. Maybe this doesn’t mean much to you, that three adult males were capable of successfully feeding themselves, but it was an achievement for us. For three busy students to collaborate on the preparation of a meal and subsequently sit down and eat together is a heartwarming milestone in the vein of a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. It was something we’d never done before, and something we certainly wouldn’t have done had we been in the dorms with no kitchen and free prepared meals a single card swipe away.
So sure, maybe eating has become a homework assignment, but like any good homework assignment, we’ve learned something from it. And in the end, I guess learning new things is what college is really about.