Beta Upsilon Sigma house

I live in the progressive version of a frat house. It's a DIRTY hippie boy commune. After a week, it is getting hard to take.

The bumper stickers plastered on the walls say things such as "Close the School of the Americas" and "All War is Sin." I suppose that is an improvement over the neon beer lights and commemorative paddles that decorate the walls of more traditional frat houses.

It is all very boy. There are 9 people in the house. Two of us do not have Y chromosomes. These fellows, my housemates, are such stereotypical guys. I do not usually associate with such characters. They are macho. These sit around shotgunning Natty Light -- a beer that I have not had since freshman year of college frat parties -- and watching very boy movies: Kung-Fu Hustle (which I love, so was happy to watch), Sin City, The Basketball Diaries. Monday Night Football is apparently a house event. On Tuesday night, I wandered into the common room to find many of them watching Australian Rules Football (kind of like rugby). None of them are Australian. None of them understood the rules of the game. But it was sports and, therefore, must be watched.

And it is all very filthy. Messy I can handle - I'm not the tidiest myself. But this place is filthy. There is dirt ground into the carpet & the vacuum will not pick it up. There is plaster missing from the walls. Food is regularly left out - an offering for the resident ants, perhaps? People's things are regularly left in common spaces for days.

Only six weeks, I keep telling myself. I only have to live like this for six weeks.