memorable roommates

i'm sitting here in the office with Ash while he is doing top secret work, listening to Sufjan's Age of Adz b/c it's one of our favorites. and the mood calls for it. he's on the imac, i be on the laptop. and i ask him for a blog topic (like i don't have 40 in my head already). what do i get? bunnies.  what the shit? he has babies on the brain. and now he is back to doing what he was doing so i can get no more out of him. this is our life. of the 5 awake hours a day we see each other, we spend roughly 2.5 of them coexisting in the same room, not talking. only glaring when the other toots. boooor-ing! we are that couple.

so new topic. the last post was on home. it seems like so many people i have been talking to lately are dreaming of similar things. a place to call home, whether it be in or out of the city, a house or a condo, or just a place that you can choose the paint color. being in transition does remind me that life is a journey. the home i grew up in wasn't spectacular, but i felt like it was planned well and felt big enough for all five of us. and we lived there my entire life until after college. so did Ash with his family...entire life and they still live there. so i think it makes sense that we both long to have somewhere that we can be for the long haul...for a community that we can be a part of...for better or worse, i guess. and maybe not for the longest of hauls, but longer than we have together to date (3 places in 6 years). we have a running notebook full of dream house ideas...and Ash lets me write whatever i like in the program for the dream house, even if we both know it will definitely may not happen. but all you suckers are going to want to try my bidet when you come over and don't think you won't. and you'll be jealous of my pot filler, carrera marble, and soaking tub too.


so i think i will take a walk down memory lane for a minute as tonight's topic: Memorable Roommates.

speaking of perpetual transition, since i graduated college, i have lived in 7 different places, and in college I changed dorm rooms/apts pretty much every semester that i could, having 9 roommates throughout college. nine roommates was not because i didn't like the people i lived with. not at all...i think i pretty much still keep up with everyone. except for my freshman year roommates.

#1 was a UM pairing they thought would be funny and make it rhyme: Amy/Jamie. similarities ended there. imagine for a moment a giant wolf face poster staring at you every time you walk in the room as well as an even bigger rebel flag hanging in the back of her closet (that you could see from our doorway). the placement of that flag was our first serious tiff...with her redneck boyfriend glaring at me the whole time. it was also a tiff that allowed for my newly acquired mountain bike to stay in the room as well. i forgot to mention that this room was maybe only 20'x13', at most. and carpeted. carpet that was more than 30 years old, kind of a concentrated bile color, having a stale, wet smell that i can still close my eyes and recall without much effort. ACK. i digress. so Jamie had this redneck boyfriend that liked to stay over a LOT. she was a pastor's daughter who was hell bent of sewing her sexual oats every minute she got that semester, which didn't make the room smell any fresher, or allow me to enter my own room without having to knock first. ACK. i'm not judging b/c i was somewhat in the same boat,  just not as straight up geeky about it. or maybe i was, i also smoked a lot of weed with the girls across the hall that semester, so i could be wrong about that.

freshman roommate #2 was a girl i partied with a lot in the fall semester. we moved to my sorority hall for the spring semester even though she wasn't in my sorority. Kelli. she had my favorite hand-writing of anyone ever. i can't describe it, but i would want to make it into a font if i knew how. you would think we would be much better paired since we'd become such good friends when i was exiled to her room during the fall semester during Jamie's sexathons. but somewhere towards the end of that fall semester and january, i had become a christian, which just made it inevitably awkward. looking back, it was one of my favorite living situations, despite me learning what it meant to be a christian, and being constantly confronted with the need to relate to and enjoy my friend who was growing increasingly wilder by the day. and bonus, she had gotten back together with her boyfriend at the end of the fall semester, so once again, i had two roommates for the price of one, and still had to knock before entering my own room. i still really enjoyed shenanagans with kelli as she was (and still is, i assume) one of the most hilarious people i have ever known. my favorites were her stalking the south african soccer team boys from our window to see when they were headed to the caf so she could drag me in there with her. or her walk of shame stories she had (while on small hiatuses from boyfriend) from the delta chi house sans pants, and the reasons why she put posters on the ceiling above her bed, and our answering machine messages, both outgoing and ones we would leave each other. but we have lost touch b/c she is not on facebook and i am (that most definitely IS judgement). and she has that side of her that enjoys being very aloof and un-findable, though i did stalk her at the hair studio she worked at for many years and let her make me blonde for a season. i did run into her at the publix in rosemary beach a couple of years ago. i got that unmistakable, "OH-WA. MYYY. GAWD. AY-MEEE LEW-CUS?!" so funny.

unfortunately, Ash had no college roommates (that's actually very sad to me), but he does have a funny post-college roommate story that involves living with a blind guy who owned a gun. again with the knocking and announcing ourselves to roommates upon entry...

happy monday!