I recently moved out of an unsavory living arrangement (three roomates, rundown house, drug use, stupidity, laziness, thievery, etc.) and into a much more appealing venue (one roommate, well kept house, no drugs, intelligence, and as far as I'm aware, no thievery) and I only had to move about 100 yards to make this improvement. Yay me.
I find it fun in an anthropoligical kind of way to observe the life differences between me and my roommate. Here are a few:
I'm 41, she is 26.
If I were enrolled in college I'd be the world's oldest sophomore. She has a Masters from Columbia. The college, not the country. Got that Jeff Winger?
I have a wage-slave travel/service industry job that I tolerate, she has a job for the government that she loves.
I rent a room in a house. She owns the house.
I am a homebody. The things that I like for my leisure time (movies, gaming, reading, sleeping, cooking) keep me at home. She is an active soul. She had Monday off (government job, don'tcha know) and her and her boyfriend and other friends went hiking. Outside. In February.
She has boycotted a local pizza place because they advertise on the local, homophobic radio station (which, honestly, I had no idea existed.) I eat there because the pizza is yummy.
So, not exactly peas in a pod, but we get along well and stay out of each others' way when needed. It works pretty good. But here's a fun story.
A few weeks ago she asks me if I know what couch surfing is. I say that I do because I do it a lot. She laughs at my ignorance and tells me that she doesn't mean couch surfing like my lazy butt does on my day off where I lay (lie?) around in my pajamas all day and watch tv. She means
Couch Surfing like on NPR. Like where travelling people you don't know come and crash at your house and you share food/life experience/time/other stuff because it is a generous and enlightening thing to do. I said that I had never heard of it before.
Turns out I
had heard of it. It's called 'homelessness'. Har har.
She tells me that she is a member and that from time to time people will be staying in the guest room and do I have a problem with that?
On the inside, the asocial part of me is all 'Eewww. People I don't know and may or may not have anything in common with will be near me?' but the 'can't we all just get along?' part of me is saying 'Nope. Doesn't bother me at all." and, of course, the logical part of me is thinking 'It is
your house, after all, you can do as you wish but thanks for including me in the discussion.'
I was afraid, I think, of people who look like this
are gonna show up and ask if they can try on my underwear and when I'm not looking they'll rub peanut butter inside of my shoes and they'll sabotage any food I eat with some sort of laxative/thumb tacks.
As usual, I was wrong. The folks who showed up were a couple from Australia and they were quite nice. They spent an evening out with my roommate and her boyfriend and then came back to the house after I had gone to bed. I met them the next morning. They brought their own food, they helped us move a heavy/awkward treadmill from the porch to the living room (we thought it would take a few minutes but it took a few hours and the person with the know-how to take it apart and then put it back together was the guy from Australia) and they were nice to be around.
To be honest, I was disappointed. I wanted some sort of salaciousness/tackiness/complaint worthy something-or-other. But I was denied by their general pleasantness. Bummer.
Until...
After they've gone, my roommate asks if they had told me that they were
NUDISTS. Or that they work in the
PORN INDUSTRY.
Why, no, they didn't mention
that. I only hung out with them for 4 hours, why would they tell me something like that...something that they told her right off the bat. Why was I denied this interesting topic?
Maybe next time I'll find out the good couch surfer info while they're still around.
To quote everyones favorite date-rapist skunk, Pepe le Pew... Le sigh.
Wow. Rambled a bit off topic there. Um, pretty sure I don't care. Hopefully you don't either.
