We Had Built a School and We Were Our Own Teachers

When I was a college sophomore, I had four roommates. We'd all been randomly assigned to the same dormitory floor as freshmen and liked each other enough to give it a go in a large two-bedroom house just off campus.Many of our other friends from the dorms had joined fraternities, but none of us saw ourselves as the frat boy type. Our house was located to the west of the majority of the frat houses, so we mockingly called ourselves Frat West. Our joke caught on. One evening, while I was there alone, an entire sorority stopped by to serenade me: just me alone hanging out a window with 30 young women singing to me. My roommates and I made an agreement to start the year: we would create a schedule that required one of us to be responsible for a dinner for all five of us each evening, Monday-Thursday. That left us with a schedule that meant we each got an occasional week off kitchen duty. Our other rule was that you were allowed one "cheat meal" per quarter. A cheat meal was anything that…