ballin' on a budget

Monday Night Jamz

Last summer was one of the best of my life. My best friend and I were residing in the shittiest apartment imaginable, living paycheck to paycheck (not like that’s changed since then), eating $0.99 pasta every night, had no cable, no internet, and basically no dignity. We did, however, have one important thing going for us: Monday Night Jamz.

My roommate worked through the weekends, having only Tuesdays & Wednesdays off, and I did not have class on Tuesdays, so in solidarity we created our own weekend and made Monday night into a Friday night. Genius, no? The regular folk who dreaded the horrible monotony of Monday now had a reason to be excited, and we had an excuse to buy a case of 40s.

The benefit of living in a shithole was that nearly everyone else was a college student as well, so I think in 6 consecutive months of raging our faces off, we got one noise complaint. And we dodged that bullet by flirting with the police…but that’s a story for another day.

Now that I’ve set you pu with the background of MNJ, I will periodically reference them in subsequent posts, because let me tell you - many an HRT went down in that glorious dump.  My favorite: the ruit table.

The ruit table is a necessary component to any college party. It promotes cameraderie and healthy competition, encourages social interaction, and provides ample opportunity to berate your partner for being a “pussy”, “sucking”, and proving to all in attendance that you can “drink everyone under the table” (yeah, pal, you can puke me under the table, too).

Unfortunately, we were too broke to afford even the cheapest table.

What’s a girl to do? Well, if the girl happens to have a closet with a door, and is in possession of a screwdriver, she takes the door off the hinges. And that’s exactly what we did the first night we moved in. Both of us had a nightstand, so we placed the door on top of one on each end, and we had ourselves many a hearty game of ruit and flip cup for the following 6 months. The wood got bubbly and sticky from the constant flow of liquid, and by the time we moved out, the door hadn’t been on my closet for the entirety of our lease. It also looked like shit.

Ohhhhhhh, it all makes sense now. That door probably had a lot to do with the fact that we only got part of our security deposit back. “Excessive cleaning charges” is quite vague, but I guess “mangled, beer-stained closet door” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.