Homeless by choice (during grad school) | Hacker News Reader

Homeless by choice (during grad school)

glowingfaceman.com

39 pointsramchip27 comments

When in High School I once, in the middle of history class, reached into my backpack and pulled out a stapler and computer mouse. This had the intended effect of distracting the teacher. He turned to me and asked, "What, exactly, are you doing?" I replied, "I'm being spontaneous."

His reply was pure gold, and sticks with me to this day. He said, "No you're not. You had to plan to put that stapler in your bag to be able to pull it out in the middle of class. That's anything but spontaneous!"

...this guy and his "choosing" to be eccentric reminds me of that experience.

It would be more interesting if he talked about the details of his lifestyle, for instance showers, etc.

Also, it seems like sneaking into youth hostels without paying crosses some kind of ethical line; sleeping in your office at university is a different situation altogether.

He mentions that he'll write those 'details' in another blog post, but I agree that it would've been more interesting if he said how he handled that.

Yeah, the part of not paying for the youth hostels just for the sake of not paying comes across as a cheap person and not really as a things-just-own-you kind of guy.

Anyway, after reading some more of his posts, he just sounds like someone who is full of himself really, with all the stuff about attending underground groups, 'urban exploration' and ninja stealth/lock-picking -- that just reeks elitism...

Reminds me of how I felt reading Kim Stanley Robinson last year. Robinson creates a homeless-by-choice scientist (Frank) in his Washington DC climate trilogy: Forty Days of Rain, Fifty..., Sixty... Frank lives in a little tent high up in a tree in the city park and joins a gym for the showers. He meets up with dumpster-diving Freegans and traditional homeless people. Well, I won't go into the whole story, of course. But I think Robinson did a good job of making Frank a sympathetic character I rooted for. I kind of wondered, though, about the author himself showing off an a ability to write about "underground" living.

When I was in physics grad school, we'd sometimes amuse ourselves with the game "grad student or homeless", which involved guessing the circumstances of a given person we might come across. It was surprising how often we were wrong... :) There was one guy who I had seen at the weekly colloquia for almost a year, who I had always assumed was a homeless, probably mentally ill guy, who was just there for the food. Then one day he asked an incredibly technical question in the middle of a lecture. I think he was actually from the math department.

One similarity between grad students and homeless people is that both seem to greatly esteem free food ;-)

A friend of mine did this rather less obnoxiously for a couple of semesters at college. He used his girlfriend's dorm room for storage, did laundry in the dorms, showered in the gym after phys ed, spent a lot of time in the library, and slept in the woods (small, well-hidden leanto with sleeping bag) on campus. He's also a much better writer than this guy.

See, I can appreciate that. He was able to go homeless without being a freeloader (he had the right to use the gym showers, library, laundry, etc...) and didn't hoodwink anyone to do it.

Good for him. If only the author did the same.

Does he have a blog?

I can't help picturing one of the characters from an old Val Kilmer movie called Real Genius. This computer geek character had graduated--finished grad school, too--years earlier. He had ensconced himself in a secret hallway behind a closet in one of the freshman dorms. Every once in awhile he'd go creeping in and out of the closet of whatever guy happened to live in that dorm room at the time. No one minded much because he had such a reputation for accomplishment. I got the impression he was supposed to be Richard Stallman. Anyway, it's a fun movie, and various characters reminded me of people I knew in school.

I like Real Genius. It's not exactly a good movie, and yet, it has attained a certain cult status. The movie is based on Caltech and some of the pranks featured in the movie actually happened in the 1960s and 1970s.

That character who lived in the tunnels, Lazlo Hollyfeld, was also based on a Caltech student who once lived a few weeks in the campus underground tunnels because he needed temporary accommodation or something like that...

Ah, yes, Lazlo was the name. Thanks for the Caltech scoop. (I was RPI ages ago.)

Remember that scene where Lazlo comes up with a way of hacking some sweepstakes? That was based on a real event: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Caltech_Sweeps...

More info on the actual stories portrayed in the movie: http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~erich/real_genius_refs.html

Nope, sorry, but thanks for the links. At the moment, I'm chuckling to myself about the hyper gal who knits sweaters for everyone at night because she never sleeps. Oh, and the ice covered hallway. And here I am awake all night...

As most have said, this is very cargo cult. The effects were copied but not the causes behind them. The planes don't land.

A more authentic case of eccentric homelessness was Richard Stallman's period of living in his MIT office.

Would be more interesting if he didn't just 'bum' around campus. Was hoping to read of a more interesting homeless lifestyle.

Some eccentric people are very cool, but this guy seems a bit of a poser. A cheap poser, in fact. Sneaking into dorms does not sound very noble to me. The other students pay the rent, and this guy thinks he's too smart, so he lives off the others. That's being an opportunistic parasite, IMHO.

Paul Erdös was eccentric, for sure. But he was a genius, so he could afford to be eccentric. Some people try to do the opposite: act eccentric, so they will be perceived as geniuses (Caltech undergrads are a prime example).

Not to mention Erdos was crashing at people's places with their express permission, and "paid" his rent by working with the people involved, which I gather was a big professional boost at the time. He was not, by the author's description, a parasite.

The author himself, though, does seem like a freeloading parasite. The lounge he sleeps is for work, and on most campuses I've been to there are rules about sleeping and squatting in student lounges. It makes for poor hygiene and disrupts other students' access to the facilities.

If you have to break into a building, odds are you do not have the building owners' tacit permission to sleep there.

Exactly. Paul Erdős was a guest at people's places, not a freeloader. He never sneaked into anyone's living room as far as I know.

Maybe I am judging that dude too harshly, but I think his essay is a good example of how people sometimes do less noble things invoking noble intentions. You see, he's not a parasite, he's eccentric. He's not a nutcase who adopted a parasitic lifestyle because the great Erdős himself was homeless too.

I pay 50% of my grad student salary in rent. It's the way it is. I do resent smart-asses who think they know better.

Well, if he figured out a way to go apartment-less without being a freeloading, lock-picking drain on society, then good for him, my hat is off to him.

Reading the other stuff on his blog, he comes off as a bunch of people I actually know in college - people who have no social lives, spend their existence on the internet, sleep on couches in the buildings, all the while lording their "non-conformity" over the rest of us regular folk who bathe, go out with friends, and God forbid, have our own apartment.

I hate to be judgmental, but if you have to write a blog post about how a trip to Japan and your deep, philosophical introspection and meditation resulted in you realizing that pickup lines and nightclubs are not the best place to get real "love an affection", you're probably doing it wrong.

[edit] I notice there are a lot of people here from the University of Waterloo. Seriously, this guy is like the scores of people who constantly crash in the comfy lounge. They raised your student dues just to clean up that place, and it's still known to the non-CS community as a smelly, stinking, and likely disease-ridden cesspool that reasonable people dare not venture.

I had a similar reaction. I'm turned off when people describe themselves as "eccentric", "weird" or "freaks." In my experience, such people want to be as they describe. Perhaps it makes them feel special.

I also tend to dislike people who describe themselves as artists. True artists create art, they don't brag. Many are enchanted by the power of labels and mistake their identity with the labels they use to describe themselves. Reminds of that Shakespeare quote:

"There is nothing so common as the desire to be extraordinary."

I know the sentiment that you're getting at, but the other side of the coin is ponying up and not being afraid to call yourself such-and-such has a significant effect on taking one's goals seriously.

There's a difference between, "I founded a company" and "I'm a founder". Similarly, getting the girl that I'm dating to start referring to herself as "a writer" rather than saying "I write" helped her to start taking that seriously.

It's like the effect Paul describes of wishing he could get all YC teams on the cover of Newsweek. Once you start telling people, "I am a [writer/founder/artist]" you're setting yourself up for failure, which is a pretty powerful motivator.

Hate to nit-pick, but an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote close to this is often attributed to Shakespeare: "Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable." [Note that in the numerous google citations that attribute either version of this maxim to Shakespeare there is NEVER a play:act:scene:line citation - a sure giveaway.]

[Sorry: I was a Shakespeare nerd in a previous life]

Thanks for the input. I stand corrected and ashamed for blindly trusting the authenticity of quotes randomly found on the internet ;-)

"Some eccentric people are very cool, but this guy seems a bit of a poser."

I might be misjudging him based on too little information, but that was the impression I got too.

Guess we all agree on this.

He just seems a bit immature to me, after I read two of his posts.

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