I know finding people to live with for your first apartment out of college is a crapshoot, but I feel like I seriously got screwed in the roommate department.
There’s one dude and one woman.
The woman is not chill at all. She’s always saying stuff like, “Honey, you should give Grandma a call once in a while. She loves hearing your voice.” It’s like, what is this, roommate patrol? The guy is just as bad. He’s always talking about the type of man his father was or trying to teach me how to do my taxes. I want to say, Bro, can’t we just smoke a joint and play Madden?
We’re always having these dumb roommate talks about responsibility, usually after I forget to take out the trash or come home drunk on a Tuesday. I’ll zone out when they lecture me, and the guy will say something like, “You know we won’t always be around.” And I’m like, “I know. Best case scenario, I won’t have any roommates by the time I’m 25.”
They make me sit through all these brutal dinners. Sometimes they’ll bring their friends, who will say things like, “I heard a certain someone just got out of school!” It’s weird how much they want to hang out. I mean, a lot of people barely even know their roommates, but mine seem determined to be best friends with me. Sometimes I get the feeling they are actually in love with me.
Plus, we have basically nothing in common. For one, they dress like they’re from a different decade. For another, we have completely different tastes in music. I’m not sure what blogs they check, but they keep going on about some chick named Van Morrison, and when it’s not her, it’s this EDM group Jefferson Airplane. They also don’t like when I play my music after they go to sleep, which is like at 10 PM (hella lame!) I swear, their house rules are the worst.
Our ideas of a good weekend don’t match up either, and I’m always jealous when I hear all the sweet things my friends are up to. Like, last Friday, my friend Josh’s roommate took him to this exclusive gallery opening in Dumbo. Meanwhile, mine spent three unbearable hours trying to teach me duplicate bridge before giving up and making me watch The Coal Miner’s Daughter on Showtime. Then we moved into the living room, and I somehow got into an argument with the guy about how he’s always using my bathroom to take showers after work. Another classic weekend with the roomies.
The thing is, it’s hard to complain because the house itself is amazing. I mean, my room is huge. The main downside is that it looks like its last tenant was a 13-year-old boy: there are all these Chelsea Piers trophies, old Eminem posters, and framed childhood pictures that I would love to throw out, but every time I try to, the woman roommate is like, “Honey, you should save these!”
But the main reason my setup is amazing is that I’m not paying any rent or utilities (not sure how long this will last). They might want someone else for the room because they keep asking when I plan on moving out. Their last roommate ended her two-year lease a few months ago, but not only have my roommates not even looked for another tenant, but they left her room exactly the way it was, and now it looks like a creepy shrine. The girl still comes back to the house every week to do laundry raid the fridge. She lives in her own place in Fort Greene now, and she says it’s like heaven.
All that being said — and I know I complain a lot — there are a ton of great things about my roommates.
My roommates have all this wisdom and perspective about adulthood, which is so baller. When you’re just a cool dude out of college that doesn’t know what to do with his life, sometimes it’s nice to come home to people that have their shit together, even if the stuff they do for a living is completely boring (I’m like the only person I know whose roommate is a comptroller). Plus, the flip side of the “Obsessed with me” thing is that my roommates are really supportive of my passions and goals. I get the sense that they really want me to succeed, like it would really bring them eternal happiness or whatever.
They always have my back too.
This one time last month, I was sitting in my room and crying about how tough everything is (like a total nerd), and my roommates came in and started comforting me. They told me, sure, everything seems impossible at first, but your 20s are about figuring everything out, and that they will support me while I do that. In fact, nothing would make them happier. And in that moment I thought, Whoa! I think my roommates are actually awesome. Like they might be the dopest dope I’ve ever smoked. It really made me think how lucky I am to have my roommates because there are millions of people around the world who have shitty roommates, and then they grow up to be terrorists or bowling alley cleaners, or I don’t know, something un-chill.
Lately, my roommates and I have been getting along great. I mean, they are still corny, but that’s all right. Because I know these guys care about me a lot, even if sometimes they seem obsessed. It’s really nice to have someone watching your back, even if it’s just your lame roommates.