Working with elementary school kids has given me an interesting perspective on life. I have to be ready for anything at any given time: peeing, pooping, vomiting, crying, fighting, spills and other messes, just to name a few. Some things are frustrating, some invoke empathy and some just make you want to laugh. The laughing ones are the ones I like best.

One of my new favorite moments happened just over a week ago. I was playing speedball (a game where you toss a ball to each other while standing in a circle) with eight or nine kids. The little girl who was standing immediately to my right is really cute (we’ll call her Gail). She will be in first grade, still has trouble saying her “R”s and might weigh 50 pounds soaking wet. She is can be one of the most frustrating at times, but also one of the funniest.

As I waited for the ball to come around to me, I heard an unexpected noise come from Gail’s general direction. I wasn’t sure what it was, so I glanced over at her. She was giggling uncontrollably with both hands over her mouth. And while I never would have expected it from her, it dawned on me that she had just passed gas.

“Did you just toot?” I asked her.

The only response she could manage amidst the giggling was a slight nod of the head. I got down on one knee right next to her and said, “Well, you’re just a little toot, aren’t you?” She began giggling even harder, and that got me laughing. At this point, the other kids noticed all of the commotion and wanted to know what was going on. To protect Gail’s reputation, I told them it was nothing and that we should keep playing. But for the rest of the morning, I would almost bust out laughing every time I looked at her.

Sometimes she leaves out all of the dress up clothes, spills every last one of her Honey Nut Cheerios all over the floor or refuses share the dolls, but her laughter that morning more than made up for it. It made me thankful for those little moments of pure happiness, when nothing else is clouding my view. It’s funny that a 5-year-old’s fart put me in that moment, but that’s not the point. The important thing is to enjoy those moments when they come.

I have never been much of a coffee drinker. My mom drank coffee every morning of my life, usually filling a head-sized mug with scalding water and huge scoops of Folgers Instant Coffee. She would always top off her mug with milk, turning the coffee into a soft caramel color. She drank this combination with trembling lips, afraid of the temperature, and then she would sweat from the heat.

I never understood this morning ritual. If the drink is so hot that your lip trembles and you sweat from drinking it, how is that enjoyable again?

Occasionally, I would make a child-friendly cup of coffee. This would consist of the same hot water, but it would substitute Swiss Miss hot chocolate for almost all of the Folgers. This mixture barely counted as a coffee-like substance as it only had the faintest coffee taste or smell.

My pseudo-instant-mocha-latte did not occur very often because hot chocolate tasted so much better.

When I moved to Houston I discovered the most amazing of grocery stores – Central Market. Central Market wowed me on every level, but the sample stations were especially impressive. From sampling hot fudge on vanilla ice cream, to brownies, to the ever-present bread and butter samples, the Central Market samples always delivered. These samples always included coffee.

I am not the type of person to pass up a free sample, so on every trip to Central Market I would fill two-inch cups with the following:

Salvadorean Free Trade
French Dark Roast
Central Market Breakfast Blend

These small cups slowly opened my taste buds to a coffee world that was much larger than Folger’s Instant Coffee.

I finished the transition to coffee-enjoyer in Spain. Every bar, every restaurant, every hostel offered Café con Leche. And it was awesome.

It did not matter whether I was in a large city of 100,000 people or a town of 50, the coffee was excellent. Every day I would hit up the local café to order a coffee and a chocolate croissant around 8 am. Every day I would people watch as I sipped my coffee. Every day I thoroughly enjoyed that coffee. It just made the morning so much better.

Looking back, I agree with the general premise of Folger’s advertisements; the best part of waking up was indeed the coffee I had in my cup. But while I will take the general premise, I think the specifics are simply wrong – Folgers was just bad.

I

Call it an experiment in Modern Recession Living. Call it crazy. Whatever it’s called, it boils down to this: For the next six weeks, I’m sharing a house with four guys fresh out of college.

It didn’t start out that way. Originally, when I was looking for a place to live during the summer, some of my students offered a sublease of the house they’d be living in next year. There would only be two other guys living there, they said, and one of them would be away on vacation most of the time. I’d practically have the house to myself.

Then I got an e-mail from one of my future housemates, letting me know that one more guy would be living with us. Fine, I replied. No big deal. Then, as I moved in, my housemate pointed out a sleeping bag in one of the basement rooms. “That’s where Brett’s sleeping,” he said. Guy Number 4. All of a sudden, I’ve gone from my own apartment — bare but spacious and relatively clean — to a house decorated in the style of Classic Late Period College Guy, distinguished by its fondness for neon beer lighting.

These are four smart, funny, socially aware and thoughtful guys whom I love dearly, but they’re still Guys. It’s surreal to suddenly be surrounded by so much testosterone. I’m considering it an anthropological experience, a little like Gorillas in the Mist: I walk among them, but I am not of them.

On my first evening, as I arranged boxes in my room, one of my housemates called to me. “Katie! Come sit out on the porch with us!”

I walked outside, where the four of them were lounging on some benches on the porch. “Want some chaw?” one asked, and grinned. My walking among them could only go so far, and I said no.

We sat, and they talked, and spat their tobacco into a small metal bucket. They gestured to the large hedges that bordered our front yard and gave us some privacy from the street.

“We’re thinking about trimming them into a shape,” one said. “I’m thinking elephants: like mama elephant, baby elephant, mama elephant, baby elephant.”

“I was thinking a dragon,” another chimed in. “If it’s a burning bush, that could be really cool.”

“We could set the bush on fire and then it would be a burning bush,” a third said.

One of them got up and walked around the side of the house. He came back with an axe slung over his shoulder, the word “SHAME” written on the handle near the blade.

“The Axe of Shame!” one guy cried. They explained that they used the axe on household objects that were no longer useful. A forlorn and now apparently doomed toaster was sitting on the porch.

“It’s great, because it toasts things in like 10 seconds,” one said. “But it’s kind of a fire hazard.”

The guy with the axe carried the toaster into the front yard. “Gotta have protective eyewear,” he said, and slid his sunglasses on. He raised the axe, swung, and it landed on the toaster with a satisfying crunch.

The guys on the porch murmured their approval.

Dinner would be on the roof that night, I was informed – the best way to watch the sun set over the mountains. As I unpacked in my bedroom, I saw my roommate climb on the edge of the porch, grab the porch roof and expertly hoist himself up. I hoped that wasn’t what I was expected to do.

Four of their friends showed up for dinner, and they all climbed up onto the roof via a folding chair perched on a large tree stump next to a low part of the roof. Feeling like I shouldn’t shun my roommates on our first night together, I did my best imitation of a spawning salmon and belly-flopped my way onto the roof.

We ate our black bean burgers and slapped at mosquitoes as we gazed at the admittedly nice view of the mountains. Then came the point where I had to get OFF the roof.

The guys all agreed that the chair was too rickety to try to land on coming off of the roof. So they took it off the tree stump, leaving a three- or four-foot drop. I was the last one off, and I had visions of breaking my ankle or wrist or street cred. I sat on the edge nervously.

“Come on, I’ll be right here to catch you,” one of the guys’ friends, Alex, said. “Worst case scenario, you land in the bush.” He gestured to the thornbush next to the tree stump. “I’ll count to three,” he said.

I took a deep breath, hopped off the roof, had a moment of exhilaration when I realized I landed on the stump, and immediately lost my balance and fell into the bush, laughing.

Alex grabbed my arm. “Are you OK?” he asked. I said that I was. “Well, I did catch you,” he said. “After you fell, but…”

Day One, and I had interacted passably with the herd. I also had a scraped knee, thorn wounds in my calf and mosquito bites along the straps of my sandals. If this experiment doesn’t kill me, I’m assuming it’s got to make me stronger. Or at least able to safely swing the Axe of Shame.