My Barbie Dreamhouse

My time on this campus is fleeting!! And I’ve been spending a lot of it in my Carleton townhouse.

Lemme tell you about it: Last spring, when it was still a little chilly outside, when room draw was coming up and I didn’t have a plan for where to live (are you nervous? me too), I had dinner with one Clara Buck.

We lived on the same floor freshman year, and it was catch up time. Obviously, we started talking about housing — always a hot topic at Carleton, especially hot in the spring — and Clara told me that she and her friend Julian were on the hunt for 2 roomies. And this might be a cinematic recreation of my mind, but I’m pretty sure that at that moment, Julian walked by our table, and we stopped him in his tracks to pitch the sitch: me, their third roommate.

Nick lived with us in the fall. I knew him from comedy and friendship, and he was really a lot of fun to have around.

When you live in a townhouse, you get to be off-board, meaning you make your own food, and Nick was always cooking up blueberry french toast or chicken stir fry or, as you can see, a whole apple pie with me!

It was a funny dynamic — me and Clara sharing our house’s double and getting to know each other better than we ever had over the years of knowing each other; Julian in a single down the hall, good friends with Clara but only just getting to know me; and Nick, downstairs, never having met Clara or Julian before, but very eager to take us all to the grocery store in his electric blue car.

Nick graduated that term, though, and we had to pull in another friend to replace him. Lucky for me, I got to pull from the comedy/friendship game again, and in entered Alex. He’s a year younger than the rest of us and also didn’t really know Clara or Julian, but that didn’t stop him from carving out a sweet place for himself in our house dynamic.

The winters can be cold and busy at Carleton, though, and most of the time, Clara and Julian and Alex ate in the dining halls (I missed them from my spot making soup at home). So let’s skip ahead to the revitalizing, renewing, replenishing spring.

This spring, we have a cooking plan. It’s real. Alex made a Google Spreadsheet. We each have one day of the week to cook — we’re not even chefs, but wow, we’ve been living large. Clara cooks on Tuesdays, and her first meal was this delicious pot of chili with cornbread. I’m on Wednesdays, and I’m always very nervous about making enough food for all of us, but I think my roasted veggies and nut burgers were a hit. Alex is a pasta master, and on Thursdays, he gives us pesto or tomato sauce and always broccoli. Julian takes Saturdays, and he loves to make a big pot of lentils.

But more exciting than the food that we get to eat is getting that community around meals back! Remember when I did a whole fellowship about this??! I love having time carved out to just talk to my friends and joke about the things that could just as easily stress us out. I love when we’re all done eating and complimenting whoever cooked for us, and then we all just keep sitting there because we have more to talk about. I love when someone gets up to clean their dish and Alex really insists that we play bananagrams (he is very good at it).

I do need ideas on what to cook this week, though. Email me your fave vegetarian recipe? barberat@carleton.edu 😉

Lynn is a senior CAMS major and WGST minor from the desert. She’s super into podcasts, comedy, queerness, and food. You can catch her doing improv with Cujokra or stand up with the Queens of Comedy—or perhaps reading something by Roxane Gay, baking at Dacie Moses, looking at her résumé to remember what else she does, or in the Weitz trying to find her hard drive. Meet the other bloggers!