When I attended college immediately after graduating high school, I lived at home because my generous financial aid package wasn’t enough to cover living expenses. I’ve never lived in a dorm, nor did I dare to live the bachelor’s life while taking 16-18 credit-hours and working 40-45 hours per week. (The results of that bout of madness were shared in a previous entry. Long story short: those were some of my most miserable years on record.) Since I also made no friends during my stay in academia, I never had the opportunity to visit the living quarters of a real, live college student. This past Saturday, I finally had my first chance.

My son is a high school senior preparing to transform into a college freshmen as of fall 2013. This weekend we took a road trip to the city where he’ll theoretically spend the next four years learning, growing, and becoming greater than his parents. Our family mission: scope out potential apartments for him. Due to the long list of issues that living on campus would present (on which we won’t be elaborating here — suffice it to say this is our family’s decision), his only hope for avoiding a seventy-mile daily commute will be to negotiate off-campus housing. To that end, I found a lead on a pair of potential pads at shockingly competitive prices in a wide market that’s nearly sold out as a whole for the upcoming semester. My wife and I, dutiful and curious folks that we are, drove my son up there for a pair of apartment showings to ensure we wouldn’t be exporting him and his possessions into Avon Barksdale’s prized Towers from The Wire.

Like first-world anthropologists stepping tentatively into the native habitat of an otherworldly culture, we three ventured into each of the two available cribs, whose current tenants would be finishing their current leases in time for my son’s arrival in town. None of us knew what to expect and hadn’t really prepared ourselves. Judging by the conditions we tiptoed around, neither had the tenants.

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