After I wrote about how I was homeless by choice as a college senior and off-and-on as a grad student, the number one question people seem to have is, how did I shower, wash my clothes, and so on? If the question were just "how does one shower while homeless on campus, in general", then I could answer it in a single word: gym. Laundry duty, in general, would be only slightly more complicated: you can either use public laundromats (easy to find around any big campus), or just use the laundry room in any dorm or apartment complex that's convenient. What are they gonna do, complain about you giving them your quarters? Now, it might be a little suspicious if you walk out of, say, the physics undergrad lounge carrying a big clothes hamper. The solution to that is simple, just put your clothes in something more opaque and commonplace than a hamper.
As is usually the case, the story is a little more complicated and interesting in the case of one particular human being. I was hesitant to even embark on this article, because while it'll end in glory, it'll begin in shame. But, as Smith tells Samantha in Sex And The City, the world's truly inspirational speakers (or writers) are the ones who just keep it real. So I'll keep it real. It's certainly not the first time I've published mortifying personal details about my life, and I doubt it'll be the last ;)
To put things in context, so I don't scare everyone right away from Homelessness By Choice, let me start in the apartment I had in Tucson before my first plunge into homelessness. I had just gotten out of the Air Force and into the University of Arizona. I had no social life except some friends from the math department. I'll cut right to the chase: I almost never showered and I washed my clothes even less often. I had an apartment with a shower, I just didn't use it. I almost never brushed my teeth either, though I certainly had a toothbrush. Almost never shaved, though I certainly had a razor. Hell, I only even changed my shirt once or twice a week (rotating between something like ten shirts total). I was a star student, but I smelled and looked homeless, even though I still lived in an apartment. I'm kind of surprised that I had any friends at all; I guess my perceived mathematical genius went a long way (though a lot of that was just the fact I studied all the time).
When I moved into the physics undergrad lounge, I actually started showering and changing my clothes more, just because I had officially moved into "invisible homeless ninja" mode. I became less homeless-looking and smelling when I became homeless. How did I shower when I was homeless, you ask? As I said in the opening paragraph, I used the university gym. I also sometimes used a shower mysteriously installed in the bathroom in the physics building basement. I guess they had it there as a requirement in case anyone ever doused themselves with harmful crap in the labs, or something.
I felt a little self-conscious going to the gym to shower, because I never went to the gym for any other purpose. That was years before I started working out regularly. As a result, I still didn't shower nearly as often as I should. I was still a non-hygienic mess. And I was so socially clueless, I hardly even cared or knew it.
Fast forward to grad school. When I arrived at grad school, I wanted to get my bearings before diving into homelessness again. So I took a cheap-arse shady illegal sublease in a room with a bunch of dudes from craigslist, the room was <$200 a month and only 20 minutes from campus, so it was an okay deal... for someone with no social life. I started showering regularly then, and I appreciated taking showers without going to the gym where I felt so out of place because I was so scrawny and obviously not a person who actually uses the gym. But it was only a couple months before I returned to homelessness, this time with a building key and an office to make things easier. I quickly reverted back to an unhygienic mess, showering only occasionally and often going days without changing my clothes. So how did I break out of that cycle? The turning point was one night when I finally got up the nerve-- for the first time in my life, at age 23-- to ask a girl out. I was shot down miserably, and I can certainly see why! It was an important point because it finally gave me the momentum to get out of the warm comfortable glow of denial. I suddenly acknowledged that my social life was not healthy and I needed to assert power to take hold of it! Before being condemned to eternal solitude!
I had almost no idea how to proceed. I'd studied NLP-- neurolinguistic programming-- and in browsing some of the fringe tangents of that discipline, I had seen a glimpse of the seduction community a long time back. I'd thought then, "Hmm that might be something to look into", and then forgot about it. Now, jarred into lucidity by a crush's rejection, I went online and started reading about seduction material. That night I stayed up late, reading introductory seduction literature using a classroom computer in the journalism building. I was hooked, and it ushered in a long and profound period of change. You can read more about this in my main article on the subject, My Time In The Seduction Community. This was right around the time seduction was exploding in popularity due to Neil Strauss's book The Game
(and later the reality tv show "The Pickup Artist"), but I got into the community independently of that.
The community rather messed me up, and that's not uncommon. It's pretty standard for a guy to become waaaay creepier before he gets better, when he joins the community. I wrote a little about this sort of thing in my Dancing Monkey article. The positive side, though, is that it got me showering and caring about how I looked and smelled. I even discovered deodorant, which, believe it or not, no one had ever introduced me to!
Over the next two years, I changed so radically it's all a blur. I went from being a guy who never showers, to a guy who actually cares about fashion! I've even written about it here, in articles like How Fashion Works and Becoming More Photogenic.
Pretty soon after I got into the community, I moved into a dorm on campus. But there was a short overlapping time period when I was a homeless pickup artist. (No, I did not manage to drag any club girls back for some math-office lovin'. I didn't say I was a very good pickup artist!)
I was very quickly inducted into the local seduction scene, which means I suddenly gained a huge new network of contacts and friends. Men who knew I wanted to improve myself, men who went well out of their way to teach me things I should've learned in junior high and high school. Suddenly, I was no longer self-conscious going to shower at the university gym, because I actually went to the gym. You know, to lift weights. Often, I'd shower twice a day. I bought an iron and stowed it in one of the drawers in my desk, and if you walked into one of the math classrooms after hours, you just might have found me in there ironing my shirt for an evening of clubbing!
Fast forward mode again. Very long story short, I mellowed out a lot when I got a regular sexual partner. Then she moved away and I let my lease expire and went homeless in my office again. Shortly after that, I took a month-long trip to Japan. While in Japan, besides almost non-stop crazy adventures, I had a few days of intense inner reflection and meditation which set the curtain falling on the seduction chapter of my life.
When I returned to the states, to living in my math building office, I decided to leave the seduction community. I was very horny and very lonely, but I somehow had a sense that things would fall into alignment naturally, that my lover was already somehow "determined" and all I had to do was live life and meet her.
I met her while washing my clothes in one of the dorms. I had infiltrated the dorm to get inside: that's easier than it sounds. To infiltrate a dorm (assuming you can pass as a student), just stand outside the door until someone opens it. If you wanna look less conspicuous, whip out your cellphone and pretend to talk on it or text on it. Anyway, I was there in the dorm, working on the blog, and I saw this gorgeous Asian girl in the laundry room. It turns out she was Japanese, so we had a great excuse to talk, since I'd just returned from Japan. I asked her out right away, and the stage was set for a whirlwind of passion and romance. Now I'm no longer homeless because I live with her, very happily.
So, as I said in the beginning, if you just want a straight up "info-crack" answer to the questions of how to shower and wash your clothes while homeless on campus, I can give you that in a couple sentences. I'm not even sure why people even ask about the clothes-washing part, since a lot of people in apartments don't have their own washing machines anyway. But just answering those questions, doesn't begin to do justice to the story, to the adventures underlying my campus-homeless showers and laundry.
FURTHER READING
The main article on homelessness by choice is Homeless By Choice. Read more there about how I left my apartment, what the hell I was thinking, and what I gained from the whole experience.
One criticism a lot of people have expressed with my previous homeless-college-student lifestyle was, isn't that mooching?? This prompted me to respond with the article, Campus Homelessness and Mooching.
I also wrote Four Reasons To Go Homeless By Choice. It's mainly aimed at young people without too many family responsibilities; perfect for college students or single grad students. You can also pull it off as a non-college-student, though that's not my area of expertise.
My time as a socially clueless hygienically clueless math wiz gives me the experience to shed some unique insight into the whole nerd-vs-jock thing in Western society. In my article, Is Society Biased Against Smart People?, I argue that smart people aren't inherently social awkward, and explain why, then, we have the situation with nerds and dorks and such. This is one of my older articles, from June 2008.
As is usually the case, the story is a little more complicated and interesting in the case of one particular human being. I was hesitant to even embark on this article, because while it'll end in glory, it'll begin in shame. But, as Smith tells Samantha in Sex And The City, the world's truly inspirational speakers (or writers) are the ones who just keep it real. So I'll keep it real. It's certainly not the first time I've published mortifying personal details about my life, and I doubt it'll be the last ;)
To put things in context, so I don't scare everyone right away from Homelessness By Choice, let me start in the apartment I had in Tucson before my first plunge into homelessness. I had just gotten out of the Air Force and into the University of Arizona. I had no social life except some friends from the math department. I'll cut right to the chase: I almost never showered and I washed my clothes even less often. I had an apartment with a shower, I just didn't use it. I almost never brushed my teeth either, though I certainly had a toothbrush. Almost never shaved, though I certainly had a razor. Hell, I only even changed my shirt once or twice a week (rotating between something like ten shirts total). I was a star student, but I smelled and looked homeless, even though I still lived in an apartment. I'm kind of surprised that I had any friends at all; I guess my perceived mathematical genius went a long way (though a lot of that was just the fact I studied all the time).
When I moved into the physics undergrad lounge, I actually started showering and changing my clothes more, just because I had officially moved into "invisible homeless ninja" mode. I became less homeless-looking and smelling when I became homeless. How did I shower when I was homeless, you ask? As I said in the opening paragraph, I used the university gym. I also sometimes used a shower mysteriously installed in the bathroom in the physics building basement. I guess they had it there as a requirement in case anyone ever doused themselves with harmful crap in the labs, or something.
I felt a little self-conscious going to the gym to shower, because I never went to the gym for any other purpose. That was years before I started working out regularly. As a result, I still didn't shower nearly as often as I should. I was still a non-hygienic mess. And I was so socially clueless, I hardly even cared or knew it.
Fast forward to grad school. When I arrived at grad school, I wanted to get my bearings before diving into homelessness again. So I took a cheap-arse shady illegal sublease in a room with a bunch of dudes from craigslist, the room was <$200 a month and only 20 minutes from campus, so it was an okay deal... for someone with no social life. I started showering regularly then, and I appreciated taking showers without going to the gym where I felt so out of place because I was so scrawny and obviously not a person who actually uses the gym. But it was only a couple months before I returned to homelessness, this time with a building key and an office to make things easier. I quickly reverted back to an unhygienic mess, showering only occasionally and often going days without changing my clothes. So how did I break out of that cycle? The turning point was one night when I finally got up the nerve-- for the first time in my life, at age 23-- to ask a girl out. I was shot down miserably, and I can certainly see why! It was an important point because it finally gave me the momentum to get out of the warm comfortable glow of denial. I suddenly acknowledged that my social life was not healthy and I needed to assert power to take hold of it! Before being condemned to eternal solitude!
I had almost no idea how to proceed. I'd studied NLP-- neurolinguistic programming-- and in browsing some of the fringe tangents of that discipline, I had seen a glimpse of the seduction community a long time back. I'd thought then, "Hmm that might be something to look into", and then forgot about it. Now, jarred into lucidity by a crush's rejection, I went online and started reading about seduction material. That night I stayed up late, reading introductory seduction literature using a classroom computer in the journalism building. I was hooked, and it ushered in a long and profound period of change. You can read more about this in my main article on the subject, My Time In The Seduction Community. This was right around the time seduction was exploding in popularity due to Neil Strauss's book The Game
(and later the reality tv show "The Pickup Artist"), but I got into the community independently of that.The community rather messed me up, and that's not uncommon. It's pretty standard for a guy to become waaaay creepier before he gets better, when he joins the community. I wrote a little about this sort of thing in my Dancing Monkey article. The positive side, though, is that it got me showering and caring about how I looked and smelled. I even discovered deodorant, which, believe it or not, no one had ever introduced me to!
Over the next two years, I changed so radically it's all a blur. I went from being a guy who never showers, to a guy who actually cares about fashion! I've even written about it here, in articles like How Fashion Works and Becoming More Photogenic.
Pretty soon after I got into the community, I moved into a dorm on campus. But there was a short overlapping time period when I was a homeless pickup artist. (No, I did not manage to drag any club girls back for some math-office lovin'. I didn't say I was a very good pickup artist!)
I was very quickly inducted into the local seduction scene, which means I suddenly gained a huge new network of contacts and friends. Men who knew I wanted to improve myself, men who went well out of their way to teach me things I should've learned in junior high and high school. Suddenly, I was no longer self-conscious going to shower at the university gym, because I actually went to the gym. You know, to lift weights. Often, I'd shower twice a day. I bought an iron and stowed it in one of the drawers in my desk, and if you walked into one of the math classrooms after hours, you just might have found me in there ironing my shirt for an evening of clubbing!
Fast forward mode again. Very long story short, I mellowed out a lot when I got a regular sexual partner. Then she moved away and I let my lease expire and went homeless in my office again. Shortly after that, I took a month-long trip to Japan. While in Japan, besides almost non-stop crazy adventures, I had a few days of intense inner reflection and meditation which set the curtain falling on the seduction chapter of my life.
When I returned to the states, to living in my math building office, I decided to leave the seduction community. I was very horny and very lonely, but I somehow had a sense that things would fall into alignment naturally, that my lover was already somehow "determined" and all I had to do was live life and meet her.
I met her while washing my clothes in one of the dorms. I had infiltrated the dorm to get inside: that's easier than it sounds. To infiltrate a dorm (assuming you can pass as a student), just stand outside the door until someone opens it. If you wanna look less conspicuous, whip out your cellphone and pretend to talk on it or text on it. Anyway, I was there in the dorm, working on the blog, and I saw this gorgeous Asian girl in the laundry room. It turns out she was Japanese, so we had a great excuse to talk, since I'd just returned from Japan. I asked her out right away, and the stage was set for a whirlwind of passion and romance. Now I'm no longer homeless because I live with her, very happily.
So, as I said in the beginning, if you just want a straight up "info-crack" answer to the questions of how to shower and wash your clothes while homeless on campus, I can give you that in a couple sentences. I'm not even sure why people even ask about the clothes-washing part, since a lot of people in apartments don't have their own washing machines anyway. But just answering those questions, doesn't begin to do justice to the story, to the adventures underlying my campus-homeless showers and laundry.
FURTHER READING
The main article on homelessness by choice is Homeless By Choice. Read more there about how I left my apartment, what the hell I was thinking, and what I gained from the whole experience.
One criticism a lot of people have expressed with my previous homeless-college-student lifestyle was, isn't that mooching?? This prompted me to respond with the article, Campus Homelessness and Mooching.
I also wrote Four Reasons To Go Homeless By Choice. It's mainly aimed at young people without too many family responsibilities; perfect for college students or single grad students. You can also pull it off as a non-college-student, though that's not my area of expertise.
My time as a socially clueless hygienically clueless math wiz gives me the experience to shed some unique insight into the whole nerd-vs-jock thing in Western society. In my article, Is Society Biased Against Smart People?, I argue that smart people aren't inherently social awkward, and explain why, then, we have the situation with nerds and dorks and such. This is one of my older articles, from June 2008.
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1 comments:
Was just wondering this morning on my way to work how you solved the hygiene issue. Great timing!
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