COLUMN: The Perks of Penn

From Jason Brenner's, "My 20 Inches," Fall '95 From Jason Brenner's, "My 20 Inches," Fall '95Gunshots, ambulances, and blood-curdling screams 24 hours a day or relative peace and quiet. Spending your day at Rosengarten reading 12 books that were due last week or relaxing, never having to worry about exams, papers, or labs. Going to the dining hall and eating something that looks like it should be labeled with the Mr. Yuk logo or dining with clean silverware and eating food that actually looks and tastes appealing. Maybe your dad's delusion that the kitchen is his catwalk for daily underwear modeling, your mother's constant sock draw organizing, and your sister's growth -- the phone out of the ear, that is -- ain't so bad after all. Each day I spend at home I realize all the luxuries that I used to take for granted?that is before I became a Quaker. But for some reason, I feel my life would be empty if I spent all my time living in this atmosphere of relative luxury. My off-campus residence at school has several luxurious features that cannot be topped by my 3 bedroom house in suburban Baltimore. Glass chandeliers are replaced by exposed pipes hang from the ceilings; holes in the walls remind me of my drunken roommate turned interior decorator; and beer cans and week-old pizza crusts delicately placed in the couch help provide that four-star touch. With the semi-annual fire and the Motzart-esque interweaving of car alarms and police sirens, my school dwelling offers many perks not available at home. Now let's consider my housemates in the two locations. In sunny Baltimore, I share an abode with my compulsively neat and orderly mother, my kind-hearted albeit slow-witted father, and my spastic, phone-hoarding teenage sister. So they're not perfect, but I only had a limited gene pool with which to work. But at school, I share a house with a much more "colorful" group of characters. One of my next-door neighbors' sexual fantasy is to watch SportsCenter on a leather couch. The other one has a bong surgically attached to his face. Two Einsteins living downstairs have the exciting and intelligent hobby of throwing pool balls through the drywall. The other one thinks he's a gorilla, leaving a trail of body hair wherever he goes. The more I think about it, the more I realize I could have thrown a "Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not" sign above the door and charged an admission fee to curious onlookers. Not only do I adore my superb living conditions at Penn, I also am infatuated with my daily college routine. You know how it goes: Wednesday night, just after last call at Cavanaugh's (only after one or two beers -- you know, it's a school night), I tell myself that I better get to bed because I have a 9:00 a.m. class in DRL. Thursday morning, 8:15 a.m, alarm rings for the first time. I hit snooze, "Just ten more minutes." Alarm rings again, 11:59 a.m., I finally roll out of bed, "Time to get to class." Oops. I love exam time. Everybody works real hard during drinking -- I mean reading days. Then, after panic sets in two days later, large quantities of coffee are consumed intravenously. By 4 a.m. the night before an exam, my study partner begins to bear a striking resemblance to Homer. "What did you say? 'Dohhhh?' " At home all I do is sleep until noon and watch Geraldo -- oh, the intellectual stimulation. No high pressure life. No all-nighters. The only thing I have to do is to pretend to teach swimming to a bunch of uncoordinated kids. Tough life. At home, I have to bear the anguish of eating at nice restaurants (with real silverware and everything) with my parents. I eat for free and actually don't have to worry about little things like salmonella and botulism. And finally, who could forget the neighborhood? I'm not saying that I live around the corner from Wally and the Beave, but I tend not to worry as much during the summer about getting shot while sitting on my porch. When I returned home from the battlefront after last semester, I was unaccustomed to a life free of pestering panhandlers. In fact, there's a WaWa a few blocks away from my house and no one camps out on the front steps. After eight months in West Philly, trivialities such as edible food and a safe neighborhood became luxuries. Don't get me wrong, I love life at Penn. I like good lectures (when your professor can actually speak English), Spring Fling, the occasional fraternity party, Cav's, going to the NCAA tournament. But you certainly do give up some of the things you take for granted. In the end, is it worth it? Assuming you don't get shot or die of dysentery, definitely.