While attending college in South Central Los Angeles, I split a three bedroom apartment around the corner from a few Mexican restaurants and a gas station with four other girls, occasionally one of their boyfriends, a dog, a hamster, and approximately 1,000 cockroaches.

The next year, I lived in a similar motel-like building, but a street over. We didn’t have the roach problem there, but we did lose power whenever the temperature crept into the triple digits, which in Los Angeles meant most of August and part of September. By the time I graduated, I excelled in showering in the dark, slaughtering insects, yelling at landlords on the phone, unclogging washing machines broken by communal use, and cooking entire meals with only non-perishable groceries.