The 'Sup Bro Moment, or Oh God Please Don't Talk To Me Outside of the Room

I first met my current roommate, Josh, two days after he moved in. The light shining under the bathroom door clued me in to his arrival, but I didn't have the guts (or general interest, really) to meet him for a while.

When I was finally bored enough to get to know the dude, I knocked on his door and he let me in. His room, newly inhabited, was already dirtied with scrunched up socks, wife beaters, and his prized XBox 360. The scent of Axe and XBox plastic was still fresh, undimmed by the horrors of pot smoke, booze, and shitty late night sexcapades that were mere weeks away.

"Hey, I'm Patrick, nice to meet you, man," I said.

"I'm Josh. 'Sup?" he said.

"I was just checking in to see if you need any help moving in." I said.

A pause.

"I'm pretty much moved in, man," he said.

"OK, cool."

Another long pause.

"Is that Modern Warfare 2? That game is so fucking cool."

"Yeah, I've been playing it a lot," he said.

"OK...What's your major?" I asked.

"Political science," Josh said.

Oh God. My roommate is a bro. Just a regular fucking bro. He's completely generic and boring in every single way.

************

I saw him tonight when I got back from the Alamo Drafthouse downtown. We exchanged our first words since that night over a month ago. I was walking down the hallway to my room, only to catch him as he left his.

"'Sup," he said as he gave me a bro nod.

"Uh, hey," I murmured, quickly turning the key to open my door.

Sometimes people are so monumentally mismatched that you're better off just ignoring each other.

Something is missing

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.

Monster Milktruck!

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.

Notes

Wade-
Bring food to work.

duh im hungry constantly

Lardo.

Gettin'er done.

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.

Can you dig it, man?

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.

Freshman roommates, or One Brain for Two Bros

Freshman year is the most important and defining year of anyone's college experience, and mine was no different, especially when it came to roommates. See, my first college roommates set the standard of oddness by which all others would be judged, and sometimes, surpass.

Sean and Zach lived in the suite, and Rob was my roommate. But for now, I'll write about Sean and Zach.

Sean and Zach were bros made for each other. Sean suffered from only child syndrome. Zach suffered from lack of discernible personality syndrome. Together, they made a horrible beast of a bromance that lived just next to my relatively civilized roommate and I.

One of the good stories (of which there are many) concerns a porno.

Sean and Zach, being bros, inevitably experienced the creepily bromo-erotic moment where they went to a local adult store and bought an unbelievably dirty porn film to watch.

"Hey Pat, you wanna come over and watch Cum Guzzling Anal Whores 4*?" Sean asked.

"Um WHAT?" I said, shocked. Now, I may be a prude, but I'm just not down for watching porn with friends, roommates, or anyone really. "Sorry dude, it's not really my thing," I told him.

But Sean and Zach really wanted to watch this film with someone - so badly they decided to watch it in our dorm's very public first floor lounge. They even invited a pretty decent sized crowd of maybe fifteen people.

An important detail that the bros seemed to forget was that we attended a Catholic university and lived in a dorm on campus, so there were certain rules broken by publicly screening Cum Guzzling Anal Whores. An RA discovered their super secret film screening while making routine rounds through the first floor by noticing twenty people watching a woman get fucked in three different orifices on a big screen TV.

Their punishment: write a lengthy apology to the school for their actions. Not the most severe of punishments, but when one willingly breaks rules as they did you kind of expect anything short of bodily harm won't teach them anything.

After freshman year, Sean, during a week-long stint as a freshman RA, was caught at a party on campus and relieved of his RA duties. He also resigned as Executive Freshman Senator in the university's SGA.

Zach continued to have no discernible personality.

They really are sad specimens.

*I really wish I was making this up.

Just FYI, searching Google Image for
pictures of bros leads only to the Jonas Brothers or nasty porn.

Visual representation

I 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.