Homeless By Choice

In 2006, there was something a little unusual about the University of Arizona Distinguished Graduate in Mathematics (that’s me, by the way). Yes, he was eccentric, but that’s not what I’m getting at. What was really unusual about that 4.0-earning senior was that he was homeless by choice. This is the story of homelessness by choice in my life.

As a youth I was influenced by the biography of Paul Erdos. Erdos was a prolific mathematician who published thousands of co-papers, papers with co-authors. He was very eccentric. He never drove a car, he never had a girlfriend, and for most of his life, he was homeless. That’s not to say he was living on the streets, by any means! He spent his whole life travelling from university to university, staying with other mathematicians, sometimes for weeks at a time. No one was ever shy to let Erdos stay over at their house, since that often meant some high quality co-research with the master.

While I haven’t yet become a world-famous mathematician, I did adopt several of Erdos’s mannerisms. At the time I’m writing this, I’ve yet to learn to drive. I never had a real girlfriend until I was 24 years old (that’s a whole other story on its own, and you can read it in my article, My Time In The Seduction Community). I was eccentric as an undergrad, and still have some eccentricities today. And, for several years off and on, I’ve chosen to be homeless.

I was never forced to be homeless. When I left my parents’ house at 18, I flew straight into the arms of another kind of parents– the U.S. Military. While I served in the U.S. Air Force as a USAF Weather Forecaster, I saved money like crazy. Due to my spartan lifestyle, while other airmen were travelling across the border for underage drinking in Nogales, I was sitting in my dorm room studying for my community college classes. As a result, when I finally got out of the military and went to university at the University of Arizona, I had a rather enormous sum of money saved up. I finished getting my four-year degree using only a fraction of my savings– in part because I was homeless by choice. But if I’d wanted, I could have easily stayed in an apartment all throughout college, and still had money left over.

The thing is, I was finding that I wasn’t getting my money’s worth from my apartment. I slept there and, sometimes, ate there– and usually not even the latter. I would wake up, take the long trek to campus, and go to classes. After classes I’d study on campus, mess around on the campus computers, go to academic clubs, eat at restaurants, and so on. Only later at night would I go back to my apartment.

As a matter of fact, the apartment was actually something of an annoyance– I was spending an hour or so per day, just walking to and fro. “How convenient it would be,” I imagined, “if I lived next to my classrooms.”

During my second semester, I was really hunkering down with a heavy courseload. Full time was considered 12 units and I was seldom registered for less than 20. My weekends were sacrosanct and I refused to do much homework during the weekends, so to cope with all that coursework, I started pulling occasional all-nighters at the school library. Some math friends started joking that I should go “full Erdos” and just live on campus. They were joking, of course, but that sewed a seed in my fertile mind.

A friend from the physics department hooked me up with the secret door combination to get into the physics undergrad lounge. The physics undergrad lounge was perfect for squatting: two couches, lots of nooks and crannies to hide personal belongings, a desk and a table, bookshelves, even a computer (but unfortunately it required a physics department account so it was useless to me). It even had wireless internet, but at the time I didn’t have a laptop. Best of all, only a small handful of students ever actually used the place, and half of them were “in” on my little mission.

I started sleeping in the lounge several times a week, mainly when I had a class in the physics building the next morning at 8am. This was during the Winter months, and although Tucson doesn’t get all that cold, I was used to San Diego, so getting up at 7am and trudging to class from my apartment got old real fast. Under those circumstances, it seems like not sleeping in the physics lounge would have been the crazy choice. I started sleeping there on nights before physics class, transforming the 7am “Hell March” into a 7:55am leisurely stroll through a heated building.

This, combined with the earlier consideration I’d put into homelessness, made the decision pretty easy. When my apartment lease came up for renewal, I told the manager I was moving out.

My personal belongings were strewn to the four winds. Some went to the physics undergrad lounge– mainly books and clothes and sleeping supplies. Some, like my computer, went into a friend’s house. Others, like my bike (which was barely used) went to the house of some distant relatives who lived in Tucson. It turns out, all the storage was unnecessary: in the end, I realized just how little I actually needed all that junk, and most of it, I threw away when I left Tucson. But at the time, I still harbored the illusion that I needed to keep all that stuff, so I kept it.

Since I’d been sleeping in the physics building on pre-physics-class nights already, it was a very easy transition to go from apartment to campus. In fact, I started living on campus full time before my lease actually expired all the way. I remember on the last day of my lease, looking around my empty apartment. Some societally programmed part of me wanted to find some irreplacable convenience there, some reason that I couldn’t possibly give up “the roof over my head”, maybe just to perpetuate the views society had been pushing on me for the past two decades. But the fact is, there was nothing. Moving onto campus was a pure upgrade for my quality of life. There were no drawbacks and no sacrifices.

By gradually shifting from occasional all-nighters, to regular sleep-overs, to full-time campus squatting, I had slowly disabused myself of the stigmas society programs into us about homelessness. It’s really rather absurd, if you think about it. We’re programmed to believe that if we don’t have an official apartment, studio, or at least shared room, that automatically puts us at the same level as the panhandlers who beg on the streets. That’s not the case at all. In fact, in the years since, I’ve become aware of a whole homeless population of “invisible homeless”. They could be your coworkers, your friends, you wouldn’t know they were homeless unless they told you.

My “bedroom” wasn’t just restricted to the physics lounge, although later on, it become more and more so. I also slept in the library. There were study rooms, and there were couches outside the study rooms; I took the liberty of pushing the couches into the study rooms. I’m sure lots of other students appreciated that. I also slept in the computer science building, the Gould-Simpson building. At first, the main determiner was where I had access to. I had the physics lounge’s codes, but I didn’t have codes for the building itself. So if I stayed out after the doors were locked, I was outta luck. Eventually I took a computer science class, which let me open the computer science building with my “cat card”. But the library and the computer science building had significantly lower quality “accomodations” than the “physics building resort”.

And that eventually led me to learn how to break into the physics building. During my tenure at the university, I became acquainted with the extreme sport of Urban Exploration (I even wrote a whole article about it, my Introduction to Urban Exploration). Urban Exploration is, in a sentence, the art of going where you’re not allowed to go. And that includes locked-up physics buildings. I devoured the online literature about urban exploration, and, in addition to gaining access to all sorts of tunnels and abandoned buildings, I learned how to spot openings in the physics building security. Eventually, I could break in with both ease and stealth. From that point on, I rarely slept in the library or CS building again.

HOMELESS IN GRAD SCHOOL

When I got to Ohio for grad school, I wanted to get to know campus a little before diving head-first into homelessness again. So, I got myself the cheapest room I could find, scouring the depths of craigslist, sharing a room with some Indian guys a few blocks from campus for less than $200 a month. It turned out, I didn’t even need a single full quarter before I was back on campus snoozin’ peacefully. See, in grad school, I didn’t even need a secret key combination or stealthy ninja infiltration techniques– I had a freakin’ key, and I had an office.

It almost took the fun out of the whole process!

My grad school homelessness continued up until a little ways into my seduction community induction. And it even continued for a little time still. Yes, for a couple months, I was the world’s premier homeless pickup artist!

Around that time, I had taken to sleeping in stairwells in the building (up by the roof, where people seldom actually went). Why sleep in a stairwell when you have an office in the very same building, you might ask? Actually it’s pretty simple, with the stairwell I didn’t have to worry about my office mates coming in early or staying late at night. I had one office mate who would sometimes stay in the office ’til after midnight, and that really got old fast.

The drawback to sleeping in the stairwell was that it was a little more eyebrow-raising. Nobody cared if they caught me sleeping in my office, though it was a little embarassing to me when it did happen. But when I got caught sleeping in the stairwell, one of my supervisors got word and I was told to quit doing that. At the time, I was in the seduction community, so I was thinking of quitting anyway, and returning back to “homed” life for awhile. Logistics are much easier for a pickup artist when he has a home to take the girls back to!!

I went through one college dorm and one studio just off campus, spending about a year and a half “homed”. During that time my focus was elsewhere; having gone my entire life without ever knowing how to get a girlfriend, I was devoting all my energy to learning that skill, so it was best to take some time away from being homeless. Long story short (read the long story here), I eventually grew out of the seduction community, having used it as a creepy stepping stone toward becoming a naturally sexworthy man; and then, when my last apartment’s lease ran out, I didn’t renew it, instead moving back into the office.

I didn’t stay in the office for too long on that last bout of homelessness. I was there for a short while before going to Japan for thirty days. Make sure to check out my Japan photo gallery to relive that trip with me. What you can’t really see in those pictures, though, is that I went to Japan having only booked four days in the youth hostels in advance. I was so confident with my “homeless ninja” technique by then, that I figured four days was all I’d need, if that. Sure enough, most my trip, I was a youth hostel stowaway. Using skills I’d learned being homeless in universities to infiltrate youth hostels and sleep in them without paying

It was during my Japan trip that I turned away from the seduction community, after a period of profound inner reflection and meditation. When I got back to the U.S. I was a new man, resolved to be more open and genuine. Not long after, I met my current girlfriend, and now I’m living with her. (Proving that yes, you can get a lovelife while being homeless by choice, and without a car, too. As a matter of fact, the whole homeless thing turned out to be a total romance non-issue, once I got the really important parts of my life nailed down.)

Stay tuned to GlowingFaceMan.com, as I plan to write some more articles in the future about homelessness by choice. In the past, with an article like this, I’d stuff everything into one article and it’d be ridiculously long. That was my initial temptation when I sat down to write the article you’re reading. I was gonna add a section about hygiene and showering, a section about getting caught, a section about reasons to go homeless, a section about the natural enemies of the homeless college student (spoiler: they’re not who you’d expect; they’re actually janitors), a whole separate section about being homeless in Japan vs. homeless in America, a section about the myths and false stereotypes of homelessness, and so on. Instead, I’m going to experiment with making separate articles instead, and keeping this one to a reasonable length. All part of the process of becoming a better writer.

FURTHER READING

Homeless Mooching
Four Reasons to go Homeless By Choice