The couch was also for the eating. You didn’t have a dining room table, and if you did, it wasn’t for eating, it was for putting your guitar amp on, or your computer where you played Sim City, or for your pages and pages of homework that you will invariably cover with with your keyboard while playing Sim City and forget to turn in.

Don’t even get me started on how the couch was for lounging.

A trait that I think should really be indicative of only college couches was their habitat adaptability. By this I mean that, despite the lack of any specialized materials that may have suggested otherwise, all couches were indoor/outdoor. Many were exclusively one or the other, but they all had equal potential. When I see an outdoor couch nowadays, it being obviously not expressly made for that purpose, and being owned by someone clearly no longer in college, I find it sad. It’s not the act itself that’s sad, it’s the person. It’s sad that they still think couches go outside.

In Santa Barbara, the couches were also all about the burning. Strangely, the spectacle that this created never seemed to attract the kind of attention that you’d think it would. Or rather, it attracted exactly the kind of attention you’d think it would, which explains why no one was ever around said couch, and instead the distant wailing of sirens could be heard over the crackling and popping. Often you would be walking or riding down to DP (which, does not, in fact, stand for what you think it does… you perve), and you would come upon a burning couch, or a smoldering couch, or an ashen couch, A sad fate indeed for something so ubiquitous in daily life.

The couch also was for sex. Often, perhaps when your roommate was pawing a girl in your bedroom when he could have clearly been going much farther; if only he were on the couch as you were. This fact, the fact of the sex on the couches, may explain the burnings…