Build 'Em Up

My campus has been undergoing a pretty drastic facelift in the last couple years. Some of the classroom buildings, and most notoriously the dorms, that were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s were getting embarrassingly run down and slummy. Tables and chairs were wobbling and the wood was giving in to decades of bored scribbles. Some of the walls were sagging and paint crumbling. Carpets were stained by stray coke and coffee spills that accumulated over time. Bed mattresses sunk, bathrooms were too public, too cramped, and too often stained with piss or stray fecal streaks. No one should have really been expected to live, or carry out their studies and other business in places like this, and it's all the more shocking in a rich, "elite" institution.

And yet people did precisely all that for decades. Thinking back on the bad things I've heard about this school, I wouldn't be surprised if these nasty places were the source of a lot of the students' frustrations and faculty's snappiness. And when I had to live in one of those slummy dorms, a couple days were enough to make me feel uncomfortable about my surroundings, a couple weeks were enough to make me uncomfortable about myself. No one else there seemed particularly happy. We'd walk past each other in the dorm hallways like mummies, unconscious of each other. Afterall, who likes to take dumps with 3 other people in stalls next to you doing the same thing? Or who likes coming home after a long stressful day to a bed that can't even hold you up, a closet you have to wrestle with to open, and a carpet you don't want to walk on because it's so run down and stained that it might stick to your feet.

This year is a different story. They knocked that old dorm I lived in last year and instead of it they're building another new one. Now I'm living in one of the new dorms that they built in the past two years, and it's a world of a difference. Aside from the nice, new everything the people surprise me the most. I went from unsocial, miserable neighbors last year who wouldn't even acknowledge my presence down the hallway, much less reciprocate a "hello," to smiling people who not only say hello but even stop to chat with you. Is it sheer luck that this hall is full of friendly people, or does our contentment with the place we're living in play a role in it, too?

The funny thing is that my next door neighbor is a girl who was on my hall in the nasty dorm early on last year. I remember seeing her and brushing shoulders down the hall a lot last year, but I never remember swapping even one word with her. This year we're already on a first-name basis.

Moral of the story, if you want happy people, one thing you can do is house them in a place they'll be happy about. It doesn't take a mansion.