I’m a senior and I still live in student housing.

It sounds kind of sad, doesn’t it? Every time I tell someone I’ve just met where I live, I get pretty much the same response: “Oh.... really?” they ask, with a mixture of amusement and pity on their faces. I suddenly feel the need to justify it somehow, to explain why I never hatched out of my scholarship hall and into the real world of apartments and houses.

“My friends never left, so I stayed,” I offer, which is really only sort of true. Some of my friends did stay over the years. Some of them left. Some new ones moved in as I got older.

My home is Stephenson Scholarship Hall. I don’t remember clearly the point at which Stephenson supplanted my house in St. Louis as my home. Maybe it was when I realized that between school, archaeological digs, journalism internships and spring/fall break trips, I only really spent a few weeks out of the year in St. Louis, while I spend months living in Stephenson. Maybe it was when my hallmates became closer friends to me than the guys I grew up with. Or maybe it was just the morning in St. Louis when I spent ten groggy minutes after waking up trying to find my flip flops only to realize that at the pristine hotel that is my parents’ house, one doesn’t need foot protection to shower.

My parents have tried to get me to move into an apartment for years. Stephenson is a dirty, fetid hole of a place. The rooms are shoebox-sized, the food is usually terrible (when you have a hall director who actually bothers to order it) and the residents have a destructive streak a mile wide. My friends from St. Louis who visit from time to time say it’s like living in the frat from Animal House.

I was probably the only person in the world to have moved into Stephenson knowing full well what I was getting into. Everyone else either didn’t get their first pick of halls or just wrote Stephenson down as their top choice arbitrarily (like my roommate Steve, who did it for his namesake).

The men of Stephenson are known as the “Bastard Sons of Lyle” – or Lylemen – because the man who built our hall, Lyle Stephenson, died during the construction and his wife cut all of our funding. As a result, we’re in the only hall without an endowment, the money used to help Housing take care of the building. When I was a freshman, it was the last hall still lacking air-conditioning. The wiring had gone bad so there were constant brown-outs. Housing hadn’t installed sprinklers yet, and I distinctly remember the fireman who came to talk to us about hall fire safety, joking that if we were ever woken up by a fire alarm we should just go back to sleep – in a real fire, we were all screwed anyway.

I moved into Stephenson because of all of the stories my sister told me about Lylemen. She went to the University of Kansas before I did and used to tell me about all of the pranks the guys pulled and all the trouble they caused. For my high school graduation, my future brother-in-law – a previous resident of Battenfeld Scholarship Hall – bought me a water gun for all the Thursday-night water fights. My friends from back home had always been involved in whatever harmless trouble there was to cause around town, so I couldn’t imagine any place where I’d fit in better. I knew I’d made the right choice when, on my first night in Lawrence, I came back from Unionfest with a mob of Lylemen triumphantly holding a stolen palm tree decoration over their heads and there was a police car sitting out in front of my hall already.

This isn’t to say that I never got tired of living in student housing. For example, right now I’m sitting at my computer, writing this at the last possible minute (as always), and there are five other people crammed into my tiny room loudly cheering as they play Mariokart. It’s not the easiest place to get work done. It’s also not ideal for bringing girls home. Most of the girls I’ve brought back have been appalled by the conditions and annoyed by the guys, many of whom still see drunken defecation in the second floor bathroom’s urinals as the absolute height of humor.

All of that aside, I wouldn’t trade the time I’ve spent in Stephenson Hall for anything. While my friends who have moved off campus often complain to me about how lonely they get, I’ve always had more friends right here than I know what to do with. They’re fun to hang out with, especially if you like playing soccer on a sheet of ice, pegging fratties with balloons from a waterballoon launcher or dropping flaming couches off of the fire escape. They’re generous; anyone who needs tools to build a loft, books for Western Civ. or pirated software doesn’t have to look farther than a couple doors down the hall. And most of all, they’re loyal, as I found out when my roommate roused an angry mob of Lylemen to come fight the entirety of Battenfeld Hall the time he thought I’d been caught stealing food there.

That, of course, is the irony. I remember hearing a couple of years ago from the old proctor that a Housing official – frustrated by the 42 holes we managed to put into the hallway walls with a baseball bat – had told him that if he could, he’d kick everyone out of Stephenson and replace them completely with a crop of new, presumably more docile guys. He may have just gotten his wish. At the end of last semester, Housing removed 35 of the 50 residents, claiming that they are a bad influence on the community. What they don’t realize is that the thing that makes Stephenson great is its residents, destructive and immature though they may be sometimes.

In the end, that is what I have come to realize after living in Stephenson for four years and what has really kept me here so long. When I leave, it’s not the moldy showers and hallway clogged with dirty dishes that I’ll remember, it’s the people. If this decaying old building really has become my home, then the guys who live inside it have become my family.