Crazy kids.   Yin Y Nawaday

Lowell House

Lowell was never my first choice I wasn't sure what my first choice was, but I knew it wasn't some nerdy house with tiny rooms Sure, it was close to everything (too close, blockmate Join insisted) but Leverett just seemed more fun, Winthrop prettier.

Three years later I can't imagine living anywhere else. Am I jealous of the common spaces that the Quad Houses have? You bet Would I like to have a view of the river? Absolutely. Does it annoy me that you could fit an entire Lowell senior double into your average Adams common room? Yup. But Lowell is, well, home. Just ask any Lowellian.

You walk through those gates and you're in your very own Garden of Eden. Mount Auburn Street could be a million miles away. This fall the energetic House Committee sent two busloads of Lowellians to romp in the leaves of western Massachusetts. The Winter Waltz brings Vienna to your very own dining hall. In the spring you can smell the roses that one of the tutors cares for so reverently, and you can help set off the "cannons" for the annual open-air read-through of the 1812 Overture. And what other house hosts the longest running opera in New England?

I'm supposed to say when I felt most Lowellian, so here goes.

The time: Fall, 1991. The place: a kibbutz in Northern Israel, my home for the last six months I receive a postcard from my sister, then a first year at Harvard. The picture: a certain blue tower.   --Lori E. Smith

Mather House

Marvin Gaye had it all wrong. I heard it through the pipes.

It's weird. Mather's reinforced-steel fire doors and maximum-security elevators encourage isolation and fragmentation. If the unknown architect (a Timothy Leary devotee--there's no other explanation for his architectural monstrosity) had his way, no Matherite would ever get to know any other Matherite.

Thankfully, his nefarious scheme was foiled by the contractors. The walls are thin enough so that conversations with neighbors are never a problem. (In fact, they're often involuntary.) And whatever sounds the walls stop, the pipes pick up and transmit through the entire house.

It's a kind of perverse bonding. It's up there with huddling with my fellow pajama-clad tower residents in our neo-Seventies cubist JCR after one of our many midnight fire alarms last month.

But back to the pipes. They're really more fun than anything else. The only time I've ever wanted to actively tell someone else to shut up is when my upstairs neighbor developed a "U Can't Touch This" fetish. (Matherites get to know their neighbors' musical tastes pretty thoroughly and often do not react kindly--my Saturday Night Fever sesseions have gotten a few irate calls.)

There's also the sex. Suffice it to say that all-nighters become much more entertaining when accompanied by the late-night squeaks and groans of cucci-facci.

The one real benefit of the pipes is free movies. One night, my roommate and I listed to the last 20 minutes of The Shining through the plumbing.