This past weekend, I had the opportunity to stay at a rather interesting co-op that shall remain nameless. And honestly I was so far out of my comfort zone I had the vague feeling I had stepped in a portal and was transported to an old run-down Soviet-era apartment complex.

I couldn’t believe people lived like that. A huge mountain of dishes screaming to be put away, a basement resulting from what seemed like decades of neglect and cats running around. For some reason.

But that isn’t necessarily bad.

One thing I’ve noticed in my first year of college is that people are a lot less hive-minded than I remember them being at high school. Then everybody was from the same town, with parents generally working similar jobs at the biggest employer in town, making vaguely similar amounts of money. In that environment, you get a lot of people with a similar way to go about even the most menial things.

With a much larger range of people at MSU, I see people do things far more individualistically than the hive mind I remember. And that definitely applies to how people live.

My dorm wasn’t the cleanest thing last year, but I (unfortunately) have seen much worse and much better, especially with my roommate, who kept his side of the invisible dividing line a well-oiled machine. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” was I’m sure the unofficial motto of my roommate, whereas mine reminds me of that episode of Rugrats where the gang has to climb a Mount Everest size pile of clothes.

I don’t think one way is better or worse. While my co-op experience made me appreciate just a little more all my mom did to keep the house clean, people can live however they want, in whatever conditions that might be called decrepit from an outsider staying for a weekend.

In terms of the culture of this glorious building I stayed in, it was different too. To be fair, my only experiences were living at home and Hubbard Hall, but dorm culture can be described as a lot more immature than what I experienced this weekend. Dorm residents aren’t the most laid back individuals I’ve met, in terms of senseless drama that forces one angry girl to move to another room down the hall and give her ex-roommate stink-eye during all future encounters. People across town seemed to take a live-and-let-live approach, an aspect of maturity, where little battles just aren’t worth fighting anymore.

People are simply more or less comfortable in different environments and there’s nothing wrong with that. Though at a certain point things can get a bit much in terms of messiness­­ ­— my room is a lot like my thoughts: scattered but I can sort through them. And while it would take a while for me to get used to living in a co-op like that one, those people, and the kinds of people who lived there, seemed most comfortable there and I say more power to them.