I currently live in a dormitory that could best be described as an attached house. It’s two stories, with three single rooms and a bathroom on the top floor and four single rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen/common room on the bottom floor. While this was the housing I was hoping to get in the lottery, and was glad when it was assigned to me, there were a couple of factors which I did not consider.

Perhaps most important is that on this campus, most of the other houses in this style have six students living in them. For some reason, my particular house had what was originally the kitchen transformed into a seventh bedroom and the kitchen was wedged into a corner of the common room. This makes everything just that more cramped and crowded. Also, there seems to be a lot of people who are adverse to washing their dishes. This is gross and something I can’t really understand. My feeling is that if you don’t want to clean up after yourself when you cook, get a meal plan. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, while many students in the same housing setup as me chose their housemates and petitioned to get this house as a group, I did not. I was randomly put into a house with other students, some of whom are very different from me. They might even have extremely annoying friends who come over a lot and sing showtunes. So it goes.

Often, especially when showtunes are being sung, I wish that I could live alone.

My dream solution to this problem: a Tumbleweed house.

You can read more about them and see pictures on Oprah’s website, but seriously, I wish I could just have one of these built on campus. I would be able to concentrate so much better because there would be no wannabe actresses in my living room to distract me from Dostoevsky.