It's a little ridiculous that we don't just shout through the walls, but I appreciate the inherent passivity that comes with telecommunicating rather than barging into bedrooms to ask if one of them has a stapler. Unfortunately, this can become problematic when we text each other in a room full of our peers, especially when we then lose our stone-cold composure and start laughing uncontrollably. About shitting.
Real mature.
Greetings, Readers.
Things are finally settled and I'm moving to Mississippi on Sunday. School starts in a few weeks and I need to get back in the habit of going to bed early and drinking less than 8 beers a night. Hell, next time my fair state sees me I'll be further in debt with another nice diploma. So here I am, winding down my last few hours in Texas, eating my last few tacos, packing my last few boxes, and generally considering how I can write a dedicatory post to my roommates, past and present. I had originally intended to write each of them a letter, but ultimately decided against it. I wanted to keep the sentiment genuine and thoughtful without writing a novel because I ate a cookie. Instead I want to post a series of photos from my time here in Austin, with the people I came to know and live with for the past 4 years. I'll keep the dedication short: y'all made this happen perfectly, exactly as it should have, in no way I could have ever expected.
Hey, y'all.
Long time, no post. I've been busy, I suppose, but mostly I didn't have much to blog about with my roommate in school for the semester. Let me tell you, though, now that he's on summer vacation I'll have an arsenal of verbal attack.
So what's new with us? Well, recently, my roommate has taken to sleeping in the living room. Why? Apparently my cat (who hates my roommate) peed on his bed because he hadn't fed them while I was out of town for a few days. Instead of cleaning it up, feeding the cats, and keeping his bedroom door closed while he's away or asleep, he though it would be a better idea to relocate to the couch, and, of course, leave his bedroom door open still. For how long? "Till I think the cats won't go in my room anymore," says he. My roommate must be an animal behavioral psychologist when I'm not looking.
This of course opens up a whole series of problems, the main one being that I am always the first awake and I enjoy my time in the common area of the house cooking, listening to music, and responding to emails and phone calls for school and work. The cats like being with me outside of my bedroom where they can look out the back door and I can get shit done away from my usual work area.
Today I went to make myself some lunch when I heard, "Can you keep it down? I'm sleeping." Beg your pardon, sir, I understand it's the wee hours of the afternoon. You keep me up playing video games with an entire attitude of teenagers shouting "FAGGOT" and "PUSSY" in my house at 2 or 3 in the morning while sucking a big one at Wii games meant for children, but I really ought to be a little more considerate and sensitive to your problems.
Anyway, I accidentally dropped 4 pans and let the kettle whistle for about half a minute after I told him I'd be quieter. Woops...
My roommate is doing the dishes, maybe for the first time.
Small steps in the right direction.
Howdy, y'all. It's been a while since I updated with new and exciting tales of roommates and laughter and fun, but I feel like all I'd want to do lately is bitch and moan. No one wants to read about how much I think my roommate has a pent-up anger issue. No one really wants to read about my roommate's obsession with video games and how his friends try to tell me I'm some kind of detached, antisocial nut for having a Blackberry and a Twitter account when they themselves would leave all doors and windows closed and never leave the house if they could extract vitamin-D from thin, artificially cooled, and pot-laden air. Frankly, I'm finding these things hard to write about, but fear not, dear readers. I will recount to you tales of yore, when my housemates and I did things together, and spoke more than a handful of words daily. But that day is not today.
I don't know. Give me like a week.
A little while ago, my roommate asked to use my computer. We were sitting in the living room watching a movie, and my computer happened to be in the chair next to me so I handed it to him. After having broken 2 of my wine glasses, he offered to buy me more, and I thought he was looking at the ones I wanted online since he asked me,"The wine glasses you saw were at Target, right?" when he asked for my laptop. After a few minutes, he closed it, handed it back to me, and I set it aside.
Just now I got the urge to check the weather forecast, and when I opened my computer, I had an unfinished game of solitaire on my desktop. Motherfucker seriously stopped watching Le feu follet with me to play solitaire. On my computer. And then skipped back a chapter in the movie because he missed it.
What?
Lately I've been doing yoga in the morning and at night. Of course, morning for me is about 11am, but that's what happens when you work nights. I don't really buy into the meditative elements behind yoga, but I enjoy the peace and quiet that comes from having my feet twisted behind my head.
This morning, I was midway through a shoulder-stand when I heard some commotion from outside my bedroom door. Then I heard the shower run for not more than 5 minutes, followed by a shout about my roommate evidently having to work today. I came down from my shoulder-stand and asked what the hell he was yapping about. He was 25 minutes late by the time he left the apartment.
I wonder what he uses that Moleskine notebook for if not to write down class assignments and a work schedule. Maybe "go to sleep" and "wake up" are in there along with a tentative grocery list of "orange juice, potato chips, and toilet paper." And he gets after me for writing down "everything" like "The Oscars" and "Kite Festival - Roy in town" as if they were pointless things that didn't demand attention. He had previously made some snide remark at me for having a planner after having graduated college.
"What do you have to even write in there?"
"I don't know. My work schedule, maybe."
My roommates have always been my co-hosts, co-pilots, and mutual side-kicks. Even if someone does something dumb, the other is always there to make some fun out of it. I suppose this only works when fun is a generally agreed-upon subject. Throwing money in the air and chasing it like lunatics, waking the neighbors at all hours of the night with the organ and the drum machine, befriending said neighbors and going on adventures around town with them... that was how we spent 2006 in Austin.
Not anymore.
Please view full screen,
My roommate is "studying" for a presentation on Vietnam. In reality, we're driving a milktruck off the Himalayas.
This game is awesome because you never die.
Today my roommate and I were off from work, and it was the first nice day in almost a week. If you're not from Texas, you just don't understand how miserable we become after more than 2 consecutive days without sunlight, and all week it was raining and cold and awful.
Not today, though. Today was gorgeous: 63 and sunny. I spent most of the day re-watching Lost and not drinking (till now, surprisingly) and we both cleaned and sorted books on the bookshelf and other roommatey things. Late in the afternoon, he thought it would be a nice day to fire up the grill and cook up some steaks. This sounded mighty tasty, so we spent the next hour and a half watching Pee Wee's Big Adventure and not grilling, because I started drinking and he started doing other things...
Around 6 PM, I had faced the fact that grilling wasn't going to happen because the sun was going down and the temperature was dropping. Honestly at that point I just wanted some mac 'n' cheese, but Wade went outside and "fired up the grill."
By the way, he's never grilled anything in his life. While the common opinion around these parts is that men do the grilling and women do the cooking, he turned it, like so many things, on its ass. It took him nearly half an hour to get a fire started. About 15 minutes later, the briquettes were finally hot enough to throw some meat on them. By this time, it was nearly 7. It was cold, and there was no sunlight. Our complex isn't extremely well-lit, either, so he was out there in a jacket with my Maglite "barbeque-ing". In the image to the left, I would like you to notice those roaring flames. What you don't see are his sandals. Totes ridick, bra.
Finally, though, we ate. Giant 13-ounce steaks with potatoes and green beans did enough to shut me up. Now that I've got the itis and some gin in me, I might make it to bed at a decent hour.
EDIT: My roommate has informed me he has indeed grilled something in his life. While the answer to "What has he grilled?" is pretty lame, I'll leave that one up to your imagination. He also tells me he wasn't wearing sandals, but he totally was.
I love food. I love food almost as much as I love science fiction, which I love even more than my own mother, who loves science fiction more than me, too. We have matching Star Trek communicators, but that's another story.I love food. I love to cook it. I love to smell it. I love to eat it. My favorite foods are "waste" meats, like eyeballs and tripe, and broccoli. My roommate is not nearly as adventurous with food as I am. He sustains himself primarily on eggs, chips and salsa, and sandwich meats. I think this is mostly because he can't cook. I do cook for the two of us on occasion, but as he is the buyer of the groceries and I am the cooker of the food, I find there's very little I can do with such limited ingredients. Most of the time, I just dream about mac 'n' cheese when I eat a plain pastrami sandwich.
On a related side note (Don't worry, there's a segue.) I'm kind of stuck in the 70s. Long, unkempt hair, solid-colored clothing, understated shoes, the periodic emergence of a leather jacket, usually to go to shows. It's kind of ridiculous, and I never really think about it, but lately I've had a problem with "advancements in science". I am more concerned about contracting cancer from post-Green Revolution technologies than I am about being mugged downtown when I'm alone at night.
This naivete extends fully into my anti-microwave oven philosophy. I refuse to own one, and my roommate thinks that's completely bizarre. I guess I have to forgive him because he was born in the 90s, but I think it's preposterous to think a microwave oven is a kitchen necessity. In fact, I believe that's why my roommate eats such a limited variety of foods, because he can't cook without nuking something. I have only recently showed him the magic of a conventional oven, but he still insists on getting take-out choriqueso at restaurants whose waiters I like and complaining about his inability to re-heat it at home later. Sorry, dude. I don't want anything to do with something that produces heat without heat. Just don't get the queso.
Just FYI, searching Google Image forI think my roommate is worried about the epic nerd fest that's going to happen in our apartment tomorrow for the premiere of Lost. I've tried to catch him up, showing him the Lost subway map and the now viral 5 seasons of Lost in 8 minutes video, in addition to trying to explain what happened in season 3 over dinner that night he embarrassed me in front of the cute waiter at Polvo's. Unfortunately, it seems my roommate thinks Lost is for losers with nothing better to do with their time. Let me contest this by providing a pie chart of my roommate's favorite things:
How, you ask, does this differ from my own? Replace video games with science fiction. Suck it.
Tonight my roommate and I went out to a Mexican restaurant. I imagine that because I was wearing actual pants and he was wearing sweats, that because I wore a coat and he had on a t-shirt, that because I ordered with words and he ordered by pointing to a name in Spanish, and because I paid with a credit card and he gave me some wadded up 5 dollar bills that it looked like I was babysitting and the cute waiter was immediately uninterested in me after having given me the invitation to flirt.
I'm never going to get laid living with this guy. Ever.
And this awesome view from my stoop with snow accumulation!
I didn't take pictures because he didn't want to submit it to insurance. Sucks for him.
Every apartment is plagued with "apartment problems". Approximately half of these have to do with the water, specifically in the bathroom.
About a month after I moved in with my downstairs neighbors, my former roommate Greg came down to let me know that there was a problem. I figured this had something to do with money, of which I had none, so I ignored it. When he knocked again, half an hour later, I went upstairs to see just what the hell it was he wanted.
"Corey's in the bathroom," Greg told me.
Okay. Whatever.
I went to the bathroom and tapped on the door. Corey responded with a screeching, "HELP ME," to which I responded, "What the fuck?" and peeked inside.
There was Corey, haphazardly dressed in green swim trunks, trying his damndest to plug the jet of water that was spewing from the wall where the faucet had once been. For some reason a chef's knife was plunged into the linoleum flooring. The only thing I could do to help was call the maintenance man. Any apartment dweller should be laughing at the futility of this decision.
Half an hour later, the maintenance man came up, but immediately left again, as could have been anticipated. I was soaked, bailing Corey out with a gallon jug and a tea cup. He had been in the tub for about 2 hours and was pruning something awful, but I wasn't about to switch roles with him. Meanwhile, Greg had been surfing the internet, likely hooking up with 16 year olds, as he did so frequently, while Erik and I tried to keep the building from flooding. Could we ask more from Greg? Absolutely not. He was essentially useless; an ugly piece of art.
After all was said and done, the city had to come shut water off to the entire property (some 300 units) and install new fixtures in the bathroom. I had wasted an entire day off from work making sure I didn't have water damage to my ceiling, and all the while, I was consoling an anxious, high-strung Corey in the bathtub with pressurized, boiling hot water and an ignorant Greg, who kept wanting to tell me the Mets' record in 1998.
To this day I will not take charge of any bathroom situation, no matter how dire.
What I loved most about living with Erik is that for 2 years we never ran out of things to talk about. We never had an awkward silence and we were never annoyed with what the other was saying. He and I had perhaps the widest variety of conversations I can recall having with any one person. Topics of discussion included:
- Nuts and bolts
- The downside to the metric system
- Celebrity chef Bobby Flay
- Brands of wood stain and methods of staining wood
- Cacti
- The dictionary definition of the word "thermostat"
- Bonnie Tyler as expressed in flow charts
Interestingly, he and I had absolutely nothing in common other than our keen sense of observation and uncanny ability of knowing a little bit about everything. Anyone who has ever gone to a party with Erik and myself knows that when we combine forces, everyone feels as if they have somehow "connected" to us. This is especially hilarious for us because we were probably black-out drunk.
The world is just a little bit more boring without Erik around, but I get a lot fewer hang overs.
My roommate Wade and I are co-workers. This occasionally becomes problematic when either of us wants time alone. For as many environments as we find each other in together, he still feels the need to tell me when he goes somewhere. Sometimes when I'm in the bathroom he stops to let me know that he's going to school, or to a friend's house, or wherever.
At first I found this behavior odd, perhaps because my family and friends are typically not the type to communicate to one another while in the bathroom, though I know that potty talk is fairly common in many circles. But beyond where I was at the time he delivered his itinerary, I wondered why it mattered to me where he was headed. Why go out of one's way to make public something so frivolous?
So I checked my Twitter account and realized more people know what I had for lunch than should ever give a damn. From now on I'll just say, "Okay. Good bye."
My friends tell me I move a lot. In the past 3 years, I've lived in 5 different apartments with 7 different roommates. Somehow I have managed to be the anchor of reality for the majority of these people.
I took this photo of Yoda in the bathtub of my first apartment after having this conversation:
ME: "Are you STILL in the bathroom? What are you doing?"
YODA: "I'm in the bathtub with some money."
I guess I thought he was lying.
