a closet full of freedom
Joe Muto
Muto Time
For the record, I've always enjoyed my time living on campus. That being said, I can't wait to blow this surreal popsicle stand that we call living on-campus at Notre Dame.
That's right, I'm moving off next year. I'm jumping head first into that big scary unknown realm, referred to in whispers as simply "off-campus." When I was a freshman, I didn't know and didn't want to know what went on outside these hallowed grounds of Our Lady. I'd heard the tales, of course. I'd heard of a place where there was no conveyor belt to take away and magically wash your dirty dishes when you were done with them. I'd heard of a place where males and females stayed up together past two in the morning, sometimes as late as 2:15 or 2:30. No doubt they were sinning and performing intercourse together with Satan watching and clapping the whole time.
Most alarmingly, I'd heard that this place was populated with other people. They weren't students. They didn't go to Saint Mary's. Some of them weren't white. Some of them weren't even Catholic. Just the thought of living in this place was enough to set my little freshman self shivering under my Little Mermaid comforter.
But now I'm older, if not wiser, and off-campus living is beckoning to me.
I do realize that living in the Bend won't be all wine and roses. My friends, who live in a house on Corby Street, got burglarized by their neighbors. And, in a show of cojones that would impress Evel Knievel, the neighbors still show up and demand to be let into parties. And of course the South Bend Police refuse to do anything about it.
The police here are a different story. They bring ineptitude to staggering new levels, even for civil servants. They've decided, that with all the rape, murder, assault and drug dealing going on in South Bend, that they should catch the real criminals — kids peeing on fences at the Lafayette Apartments.
I'd better stop now, lest I make moving off campus seem undesirable. Next year, more than half of my class will be off campus, and who can blame us? Sure, we could get a single in a dorm, but then we'd be constantly barraged by underclassmen asking, "So why didn't you move off?" Of course, we could become RAs, but as members of the hall staff we'd be subject to the Napoleonic whims and mood swings of our temperamental rectors. And from what I hear, some of the campus rectors are about as rational and stable as Anna Nicole Smith after drinking a martini garnished with a handful of Percosets.
But why should seniors get all the fun? Personally, I'd love to see a big exodus off-campus among underclassmen. Whatever your personal vision of college was before you started here, I'm sure it didn't involve throwing a towel over a bottle of hard liquor every time you heard footsteps down the hall. I'm sure it didn't involve explaining to your incredulous visiting friend why she has to sleep in a stranger's room halfway across campus. And I'm dead certain it didn't involve trying to convince a self-righteous ResLife counselor that the young lady was just on her way up to your room to get her purse.
The funniest part about the whole off-campus/on-campus conflict is the reaction of the Notre Dame administration. After 10 straight years of making campus rules stricter, making Reslife punishments harsher and attempting to stamp out anything even resembling fun in the dorms, they have the temerity to ask with a straight face "Why do students want to move off campus so badly?" This is the equivalent of me repeatedly whacking someone in the gonads with a pitching wedge and wondering at the same time, "Now why is he trying to crawl away?"
And it all stems from parietals. I knew one week after I settled in as a freshman that I was going to move off-campus my senior year, if not my junior year, if not my sophomore year. The sheer indignity of constantly reminding someone of the time because some clueless guy in the big building thinks he knows what's best for me should be enough to drive anyone with a backbone straight to a lovely two-man at Turtle Creek.
So, I will go to the parietals discussion tonight in the Coleman-Morse lounge, and I will hope that at least one person is enlightened by the conversation. In the meantime, I will continue to drunkenly sneak three or four willing love bunnies back to my dorm room every night. And next year, when I'm sitting pretty in my Washington Street house, a mere two blocks from Boat Club, I will rejoice in my newfound freedom.
Joe Muto is a junior FTT and English double major who would like to apologize to his grandparents: he just couldn't help taking the shot. His column appears every other Wednesday. Contact him at jmuto@nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not neccessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, November 13, 2002
