Please. I'd say out of the house of 6 we went through 10 or so of these combined a week, with massive amounts of cheap beer. Also, knife throwing contests in the kitchen on the target we drew on the wall. I once watched my buddy lose a fight with a vacuum, take it outside and blast it with a shotgun. This was in downtown Charleston too put it in perspective. No clue how we didn't go to jail that night. Spoiler Spoiler
This thread reminds me how boring college really was for me. We had a meal card that was split between the two on campus cafeterias, and then the few restaurants around the school that were smart enough to opt-in to that. The two bad habits I can think of was substituting Gatorade for water since we could buy cases at a time with our meal cards. Also, I don't think I ate more than 2-3 vegetables a month that wasn't hamburger toppings, celery with wings, or mixed in chinese food. My room was always clean. I still can't understand the people who'd just live in fucking filth.
God our dining hall had great build your own stir fry that I would have for lunch and dinner. No wonder I and everyone else gained 30 pounds that year.
I started college at age 20 after working in the real world for two years and was one of the few responsible college students with "adult money" (as my roommate described it). I had a nice apartment and could afford decent stuff. In hindsight, however, some of my lifestyle choices in college disgust me. When I started school I was in the best shape of my life. Crossfit every day, running 12-15 miles per week, 1000+ meter swims regularly. After the first semester I stopped going to Crossfit, swam about once a month, and barely broke 10 miles per week running. By senior year I worked out twice a week (on a good week) and had gone from 160 lbs to 195 lbs. My diet in college consisted of three food groups: alcohol, fried stuff, and Starbucks. There was a Chick Fil A on campus that accepted meal plans and I probably ate one or two meals a day there because it was the best tasting food available. When I wasn't scarfing down spicy chicken biscuits and peach milkshakes I was filling my face hole with thirty-cent wings or half-price burgers. One of the sorority girls I hooked up with regularly worked at the Starbucks on campus and used to give me free drinks so I can't remember doing homework without a quad venti mocha in front of me. I probably had ten of those a week. When it came to alcohol my drink of choice was Admiral Nelson rum. It tasted only slightly worse than Captain Morgan and came in plastic 1.75L bottles. I could afford better alcohol, but my general rule of thumb when visiting the liquor store was not to buy any bottles that wouldn't bounce back into my hand if I dropped it (this happened often). I'm also a firm believer that the bars around my college colluded to deplete my bank account over four years. Monday through Thursday there was at least one bar offering dollar beer/$2 bomb night and I attended all of them. Dollar beers and $2 shots sounds like a bargain until you start drinking 20 per night, four nights a week. I can still taste the shitty, grape-flavored rail vodka and generic "energy drink" as I write this. Ugh... That said, the absolute most disgusting thing I did in college was play beer pong at our fraternity house. Let's look at this game objectively: the same two or three ping pong balls are being thrown into 150-200 people's drinks each night after bouncing around and rolling on the disgusting hardwood floor covered in spilled beer, mud, and vomit. Sure, the wash cup took off the big chunks of dirt but I doubt bleach would take off the filth on that ball. Then you put that ball in your solo cup and drank the beer. Fucking gross. I can't believe I didn't get sick more often. Edit: actually, pretty much all of my activities at the fraternity house were disgusting. Unprotected sex with girls I knew for a fact had banged 20+ guys in my chapter or girls I had just met, sitting on couches that had every possible body fluid spilled on them at one point or another, eating food that had been dropped on the floor of the fraternity house when I was drunk, and probably a thousand other things that I can't remember.
I think I'm one of the few people that initially lost weight when going off to college. I attribute this to being Jewish and not having nearly the amount of food readily available for my mom to force-feed on me, like I did back home. My dorm was always a wreck and smelled like rotting trash. The microwave looked as if someone placed a human heart inside and turned it on for 3 hours. When my dad came to visit, he had to use lighter fluid to clean it. We ended up just buying a new one. When I moved off campus and started smoking pot, that's when the disgusting eating habits started and subsequent weight gain. We had all you can eat wing nights every Monday which we went to religiously for 3 years. We would get obliterated and eat about 40 wings a piece. There was a cheap Mongolian grill where we would smoke in the car on the way there and do a weigh in before we ate. Whoever gained the most weight by percentage "won". But in reality, we were all losers there because we had to drive home at the speed of light to make it to the bathroom in time. Typical pregaming included trips to Baskin Robbins/Dunkin' Donuts and stocking up on ice cream about 3 dozen munchkins. Our campus dining hall was alright but there was something about the French fries that caused you have to emergently shit within 20 minutes of eating them. Didn't really stop us though. It's really amazing that girls would occasionally get naked around me.
When I was 18, the first place I lived on my own was 3 bedroom condo with 7 people in it. All guys except for 1 girl. She moved out fast. My bedroom wasn't a bedroom, it was the laundry room. We didn't have a washer or dryer so I threw down a mattress and had it. We threw huge parties and take in the empties the next day to buy bongs. The one time we vacuumed we had to borrow a vacuum cleaner from the neighbours. Puke on the carpet was covered with a towel and we would just spray cologn at it until it stopped stinking.
What in the fuck? I had some sloppy roommates, but that's next level shit. One of my favorite lazy roommate stories happened my senior year. We lived in a tri level house with 5 guys. 3 bedrooms in the pseudo basement, one in the converted garage, and one upstairs off the family room. Well, my roommate Eric was a slob. Not terrible, but just wouldn't pick up after himself, contributed greatly to the stacks of dishes in the sink, took more time delicately balancing trash on the top instead of emptying it, etc... Well he made a bowl of steamed broccoli as part of dinner one night and only ate a bite or two and left it on the family room coffee table...where it sat for a day. Then it got moved to a side table. We figured we'd leave it out until he did something about it to prove a point. but it sat for another day or two. Finally someone took it and put it in his doorway. He, no lie, stepped over and around it for 2 days until it started to smell bad and I dumped it on his pillow. Mature? No, but effective. He also didn't wash his sheets very often, and definitely didn't right after, despite 5 day old mushy broccoli being dumped on it. The next year I had two neat freaks among my three roommates. I didn't love being chirped at to clean while hungover on a Saturday, but I much preferred it to the alternative.
Okay. This wins the thread in the worst way. I've been thinking about it, and I'm pretty sure all of my grownup habits go back to when I was in high school, and a lot of them to middle school. My dad more or less treated me as an equal in the "not letting our house collapse in on itself" responsibilities, and I was really shocked when I got to college and discovered that people there were doing their laundry or feeding themselves (in as much as remembering to go to the dining hall and picking out what to eat counts as feeding yourself) for the first time. Even a few years after college and when I was the only girl in my apartment, I was still the only one with a toolbox and ended up being the person who fixed our electricity, plumbing, and little handyman issues that would pop up. I stopped my more disgusting drinking habits when I was 17 - here's my contribution to the plastic bottle gallery: Spoiler and stopped being a pothead when I was 16. I'm probably most embarrassed about certain clothing choices, but my style was basically the same just with lamer clothes. I really think the biggest change that made me feel like an adult that was different from when I was living at home to when I moved out was having to buy all those stupid little things that you always assumed would be in your house when you were growing up. Having to buy toilet paper is probably one of the lamest things about being an adult. Not to mention things like staples. Or garbage bags. Having a well-balanced diet and cleaning the tub and sweeping the floors - yeah, yeah, I'm used to that. But I have to think about buying detergent, and soap for the bathroom, and Windex? I want to spend this money at the bar or on a dress, damnit.
I lived by myself in the dorms and for one year in an apartment before the wife and I moved in together, so I didn't get a lot of living by myself gross habit time, but I had some terrible habits: First, I never wore pants in my own place. The minute I hit the door, my pants came off, and I walked around in my boxers. My wife (then girlfriend) always commented on the pile of dirty jeans or shorts laying by the door, because I was too lazy to put them in the hamper, which brings me to the second one. There was no separation of laundry. It was all one big load, stuffed into as few washers and dryers as possible (cause I had to pay for that shit and I rarely had enough quarters), which means it didn't get very clean. That was what Febreze was for. Third, while I did straiten up and didn't have garbage all over, I would only dust and vacuum once a month, maybe longer if I was feeling incredibly lazy. That was also about how often I'd wash my sheets (again, lack of quarters). Finally, the vast majority of my meals were microwaved, because I hated cooking. I ate like total shit, which is what led to me gaining 25 lbs once I started living on my own. All of those have been abandoned now that I have a wife and kid. Dust and Vacuum at MOST once a week (usually two or three times). Sheets rarely last more than a week before they're removed, but we have 6 sets of sheets so we only have to wash them once a month in a couple of big loads (we bought an expensive, front-load, BIG washer and dryer, because we both despite laundry and want to do it as little as possible). And I've agreed to at least wear basketball shorts around the house, which I am okay with.
This is not a terrible habit. This is a privilege of having your own place. Hell, I only put on boxers around my apartment maybe half the time.
A great way we had to "discipline" ourselves from drunk driving were locking our keys in the apartment when we left for the bar. Of course, because we're stupid we would forget to take the apartment keys with us which mean we'd have to paper-rock-scissors to see who got to scale the building drunk when we got home. And it's extra hard when the girls you picked up are laughing their asses off while you're doing it, or on their cell phone with their girlfriends saying things like "No SERIOUSLY, he's climbing the fucking building right now!!!" We had a large balcony and no air conditioner, so on hot nights we would drag the ugly-ass couches outside and sleep on them. I had an alarm clock as loud as a diesel truck horn plugged into an extension cord and it would wake up half the neighborhood when it went off. We wouldn't make the couches after leaving. That was too much work. Our dining table served the most useful purpose of all: holding all the utterly unopened mail, and only that. Opening mail was too much work. Dishes served the purpose of substituting for ashtrays. Soap, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, moisturizer, facial cleanser and shaving gel was condensed into one magical bottle that was labeled in the store as "Pert".
I carefully constructed a cross between a homeless hovel and a troll cave to deter people from wanting to visit, so much so that even though I was the only one of my friends to have their own apartment, the suggestion, 'Let's go hang out at Roxanne's place,' filled even the bravest of souls with dread. I lived in an apartment built in the 70s, managed by a slum lord who prioritized all my repairs last, because I was his daughter and he could do that. I owned one poop brown couch, a cardboard box which doubled as an end table and a chest, and a mattress. I lived primarily within a two-foot radius of my desktop computer, foregoing my mattress for the nest of blankets and clothing I compiled in front of its loving glow. My closet was for monsters, not for hanging clothes. Every inch of floor space was covered in books or drawings or cat piss from ill fated attempts to catsit for my sister. The only food I kept around was a large chocolate cake and canned soup. I never really ate the soup. I never cleaned. I bought rats and would construct elaborate mazes out of books that I would leave up when I had company so we would have no place to do anything, and also there was the threat of rats running around at your feet. The rats eventually died. Then I got a dog and real furniture and started vacuuming regularly. I still mostly subsist on cake, though.