Travel Fever & Other Assorted Stories: Entry Nine

Home is where the heart is. Or it is where the heart has always been. Always will be. No matter: Home is waiting with open arms, with an open embrace, with a love that cannot be surpassed.

So it was with me. Once I went Greek, the one home I could truly feel comfortable being at was the fraternity house. I lived there for 1 1/2 years so I should know, right? Oh, I'm digressing here. But to be honest, the fraternity house was home in the broadest, most expansive sense of the word & even if I tried I wouldn't think of leaving it for anywhere else. And for the aforementioned 1 1/2 years I was residing at one, this is how I felt, this is what I believed...to a point. By hanging out at the frat more, other valuable places which I would visit regularly fell by the wayside & those who knew my presence, those who knew how often I stopped by their digs sensed something was amiss. It wasn't that I was too cool to hang out with them anymore; far from it. The thing was that in hanging out at the fraternity house more, I ended up stopping by so & so's place(s) less & less - the typical natural progression one goes through post-initiation & beyond. But the fact of the matter was the frat was home to me, where I felt most at ease even when I did travel to the bars (among other places on the weekend itinerary). I don't know how many other duders harbor these strong convictions that the frat is home but I surmise that if you truly love your respective chapters, that's how you should look at the house in general.

Some duders, after staying on at the frat for a year or so, decide to break from life at the house & strike out on their own. Maybe it's to find a more conducive atmosphere to do their studying & thus keep their grades in fighting trim or it's to make up for the lack of amenities which they experienced while living at the frat. It's anyone's guess. But at any rate, there comes a time when they decide that life at the frat house is no longer enough for them. For what? why? The fraternity house should be home, no questions asked, if not one of the best places to live off campus. Yet this doesn't suffice so they move on to more comfortable digs for the remainder of their time as undergraduates. And of course, there's no pressure on them to stay stuck at the frat unless their chapters insist they stay on to fulfill their contract obligations.

Oh well, whether it's the restroom sinks filling up with dreck, the showers not working properly, no one holding themselves accountable for the growing tide of garbage filling up on each floor of the house...these are just a few downsides of life at the frat but somehow I got used to them, however reluctantly I had to adapt to the disadvantages of living there. Maybe it was these above factors which drove duders to leave the fraternity house in exchange for nicer, more cleaner confines? I can't say for sure. But whether it's just to hang out & visit or whether it's to attend chapter meetings, the fraternity house, to me, is home. And that is where my heart needs to be sometime soon.