Pretty decent Halloween at Tufts University. We got lucky with the weather on Saturday night.
I saw some good costumes this weekend. My favorites were a Terrance without a Philip (group costumes are lame with two people anyway); a quality Hamburglar; a Ferris Bueller, which is a surprisingly uncommon costume; Jesus from "The Big Lebowski," complete with a bowling ball; a Japanese kamikaze pilot; and my personal favorite, Mugatu before he became Mugatu, a.k.a Jacob Moogberg, inventor of the piano key necktie. That last costume works so well because it is obscure, simple and from a movie everyone in college loves. Nice job, Juan.
Worst costume: a guy in a sombrero with a unitar (a crappy, homemade, one- stringed guitar).
Oh, and all those costumes were from my house. You just can't beat us, except for Greg, who sucks.
When you have got seven dudes in a house, you expect a mess. You think pizza boxes as trashcans, piles of garbage high enough to get the hippies at the mountain club hard, and general filth and grime everywhere. You think 20 Capen Street, which I am sure most of my classmates visited when looking for off-campus houses.
So far, this has not been the case in my house. Everyone in the house does a pretty good job keeping the place rat-free, although the neighbors warned us about past infestations. By and large, messes are kept inside bedrooms.
Weekends are generally when things fall apart. People stumble home at two in the morning and make a mess. No big deal. Sometimes rooms like the living room or basement take a couple days to get done, but eventually all the empty Keystone cans and Domino's boxes are thrown out. Usually the only thing we have to worry about is Trash Mountain, which disappears every Thursday.
This week, however, things have gotten the worst they have ever been. Now I don't want to sound like a girl, but seriously, dishes need to be done. I am going to have trouble describing the state which our sink is in right now; it is honestly the worst I have ever seen. I think the roaches in "Joe's Apartment" would not live in there.
Let me try to explain it. There are over a week's worth of dirty dishes in the sink. The people who put them in there not only decided that they wouldn't clean them, but that they wouldn't even take the leftover food off of them. And our house definitely doesn't have a garbage disposal.
So for about a week, whenever someone actually did clean their dishes, the old food would drift towards the drain. As you can imagine, it didn't take long to clog the sink. This somehow led to the walls of the sink and every plate being covered in a mush of grime that resembles vomit. Since there were undone dishes in the sink, and the water was not draining, people would just throw more unclean items in.
Water quickly built up, and we got to the point where water that would not pass government inspection filled up to the rim of the sink, full of dishes that are now growing bacteria.
It has been like this for days. We are one fork away from overflow. I looked in this morning and saw two tadpoles.
How do we deal with such a situation? Obviously no one will admit that it was him who did not clean up after himself, and all of us are too stubborn to take one for the team. What it has come down to is spying on each other to try and find out who doesn't clean up, which has only half-worked. We know a couple culprits, but they still won't touch it without the rest of the house helping them out. And I am certainly not touching it.
A few of us have decided we need to come up with more drastic ways of dealing with problems. We could assign weekly chores, but no one wants to do that. We could hire a maid, but we can't afford to do that. We have tried just asking, then telling, then yelling. I think a strict finger-breaking policy might work the best.
Things were easy with One Source around. I guess that finding ways to cope and finding compromises is the best way to make seven people compatible. But until we work out a quality system, I think that there are going to be a few pissed off people, and maybe a couple broken housemates. If you want to come over and see the spectacle, you are more than welcome. It is definitely a sight to behold. If you want to do the dishes, name your price - I'm sure we can work something out.
I hope everyone got lots of Halloween candy. Have fun trading it with the other kids at school. Try to pass off those stickers that the old lady across the street gave you. Maybe you can trade them for a box of raisins.
Dan Tovrov is a junior majoring in English. You can e-mail him at daniel.tovrov@tufts.edu.
