|
2004-10-31 - 11:59 p.m.
like we don't live here
I wrote this as an essay for a class I'm taking this semester, but it's mostly based on stuff I've written on this page. The title is "On Roommatehood": In the past four, going on five years since I first left home for college and began cohabitating with anyone other than blood relatives, I have lived with seven different people: all men, all roughly my age, nearly all also college students. And in looking back on my recent past, I find that I’ve begun to index these years not only by where I lived but by who I was living with at the time. Each one has had some kind of profound effect on my daily lifestyle during the time I shared living space with them, often to a greater degree than anyone else in my social life outside the apartment. Within this mental index of past and present roommates, I’ve taken to unconsciously organizing the group into subsets. The defining characteristics that separate each set are mainly the circumstances under which I came to live with them, and where we lived. There are roommates I’ve shared an apartment with, and roommates with whom I’ve shared a dorm room. There are roommates I knew well before moving in together, and ones that I became friends with after moving in with, and ones that remained only acquaintances, and friends that I moved in with and then parted not as friends, and combinations of all of the above. And each time, I felt that I had learned something new about fundamental differences between them and I, and the problems that arise from sharing personal living space with someone else. My first roommate was Kenny, who I was randomly paired with freshman year, based on vague predetermined specifications such as our both being nonsmokers. We lived on the old side of campus, where the rooms are crushingly small, and there were maybe four feet of floor space between our beds, which were parallel against opposite sides of the room. Amazingly, despite keeping such close quarters, we managed not to get to know each other or have much of an impact on each other whatsoever. In fact, I posit that this blank civility and respectful silence was the secret to our survival. We talked, we shared some interests and a few laughs, but there was a wall of respect down the middle of our tiny room, and it was never crossed. After freshman year, I continued to pass Kenny while walking through campus now and then, and we’d say hi, or at least acknowledge each other, but with each passing year, those nods of acknowledgement became smaller and more implied, until we stopped even really putting the effort into eye contact unless we were both heading directly toward each other on the same path. My next roommate was Scott, who had been one of my best friends in high school. had a spare room in his apartment in Newark, Delaware for the summer, and I needed somewhere to stay between semesters. Even though we only lived together for a couple months, it was probably the best roommate experience I’ve ever had. It was enough time to strengthen the bond of our friendship, but (just barely) not enough for us to get too close for comfort and get sick of each other. That fall, I started my sophomore year and my new roommate was Randall, a friend I’d made in class the year before. The two semesters that I lived with him were perhaps the most surreal roller coaster of a year in my entire life. He seemed like a nice guy before we lived together, and in many ways I benefited from living with someone with a much more active social life than mine. I made many friends because of Randall, and many of those friendships ultimately outlived my friendship with Randall himself. At some point during our second semester as roommates, the entire delicate system of mutual respect and privacy that’s necessary for two people to live together without a wall between their respective living areas just about broke down. We had a significantly bigger dorm room than I’d shared with Kenny freshman year, but it was
nonetheless too small for the both of us and our widely varying sleep schedules and personal habits. I can’t claim to be blameless in the messy deterioration of my friendship and roommateship with Randall, but I can definitely credit him with the biggest violations of the sacred implicit social contract of cohabitation. Among the offenses: insisting on playing video games at mind-numbing volumes at all hours of the night, and toward the end, the frequency of Randall’s new girlfriend’s overnight visits verging on qualifying her for 3rd roommate status. Towards the end, Randall also became very possessive and manipulative about his television, which at first he’d been very generous about letting me use since I didn’t bring one, figuring it’d be kind of silly
to have two TV’s in such a small room. He started programming it so that you need to put in a code to watch any channels, and then pretended that the TV was just acting weird and wouldn’t tell me why. That was one of just the many small passive-aggressive wars we waged against each other towards the end. We moved into that room with mutual respect and friendship, and we moved out with lingering grudges.
The next semester, I decided to move off-campus, and got a 3-bedroom apartment with a couple guys I didn’t really know who were friends of a friend. I figured that any kind of roommate situation had to be better than the last one, and at the very least there’d be walls between us so we could avoid each other if we wanted to. Although that
summer I ended up working at the same job as one of my roommates, Sean, it was the other roommate, Mike, who I ended up hitting it off with. So Mike and I began hanging out together a lot, in and out of the apartment, while Sean mostly kept to himself. And after Sean began seeing Mike’s ex- girlfriend (who he’d eventually marry), there was kind of an awkwardness between us and Sean that never escalated to a confrontation, but did make the apartment feel a little divided. The apartment itself was a bit of a rathole, too, literally. Or rather a mousehole, I should say. By the time our one year lease was up, Sean had decided to move in with his (and Mike’s ex-)girlfriend, and Mike and I decided to stay roommates and get a new place.
Mike and I gradually experienced some of the growing pains of being friends under the same roof. But by the time he got a job in Washington and decided to move
out, there were no hard feelings and we stayed friends afterwards.
Because I planned on staying in the apartment and there were still several months left on the lease, it was Mike’s responsibility to make sure that someone else would be occupying his room and paying his half of the rent after he left. And being as I was busy at the time and didn’t have anyone in mind for Mike’s replacement, I let him take on the burden of finding someone himself. I’d hoped he’d find someone he knew and trusted, but I wasn’t picky. I had some initial misgivings about the first respondent to Mike’s personal ad, Jace, but after his background check went through fine, we
decided to let him move in.
The time I lived with Jace was the most impersonal, noncommunicative roommate relationship I’d had since I lived with Kenny, except this time we had our own seperate rooms, so we saw even less of each other. At first it was refreshing, after a couple years of living with friends and constantly having conversations at home. But after a while, it became discomforting to even initiate the occasional discourse necessary to discuss rent and bills. We had entire exchanges in which the only thing Jace would say, over and over, was “ok”, in response to my complete sentences. After a while it became such a pain to draw him out of shell enough to make any unnecessary conversation at all that I didn’t feel comfortable enough to address issues like his collection of stubble shavings around the bathroom sink, or the sad state of affairs in the kitchen. When Jace gave me notice that he was dropping out of school and would be moving out in the fall, after just 6 months in the apartment, I was more relieved than anything else that I wouldn’t have to endure a whole year living with this quiet, slovenly stranger. And this time, someone I actually knew was interested in the apartment, one of Mike’s old friends, Landon, who I’d met and hung out with several times when I’d lived with Mike. Before Landon’s paperwork was finalized, I prodded Mike several times, asking him if I was making the right decision, if there was anything I should know about Landon or be prepared for when living with him, but Mike assured me that I had nothing to worry about. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was that I would turn out to be the roommate with the bad habits in this equation. I’m not the cleanest, most orderly guy in the world, but I’m also not the biggest slob. My personal habits tend to adapt to accommodate my surroundings. So when I lived with Jace, who left trash bags in the living room and dishes in the sink for days, I tried to keep the place clean, but after a while, I kind of lost the drive for domestic upkeep and became apathetic. So by the time Landon moved in, I’d nurtured some bad habits and the place was in pretty poor shape. I didn’t expect this would be a big deal, given that Landon is a college-age guy with a laid back demeanor who likes to drink. Generally this is not the profile of a neat freak. But what I didn’t factor in was that Landon spent a couple years in the military, which instilled him with an overwhelming need for order and cleanliness. When he arrived at the apartment, he was appalled at the state of affairs. For the first two weeks, he waged a constant campaign of cleanliness in the apartment, scrubbing, vacuuming, and even renting a carpet shampooer, all the while scolding me for letting it get that bad in the first place. But once that uncomfortable transition was done, I finally had a clean living space and we were able to agree to keep it that way. I’ve heard enough horror stories to know that my experience with roommates hasn’t been all that bad. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t eagerly looking forward to the day when I can either live alone, or only with family members and loved ones. At some point, sharing your living space with someone who you don’t feel intimately or genetically connected to just becomes an annoyance. Next year my girlfriend and I are moving in together, and I’m looking forward to the end of my strange life of cohabitation with friends and strangers. - al
previous - next
|
