Roomie Ruminations

I have had plenty of roommates over the years. In college, I first roomed with a perky cheerleader type who I got along great with. Then I roomed with a rocker girl: she played bass in a band, took karate, watched The Highlander, and was gone every single weekend. We got along fine, though she would chat on the internet, click-clacking her keyboard, all night long. Fine. I bought earplugs. Then came the challenge. I lived with five other girls in a house with one bathroom. With our combined efforts, we managed to make the place homey enough: we had a full set of dishes, a nice couch, flower pictures on the walls. There were tensions, as you can imagine. We posted a shower schedule on the door and if you wanted a morning slot you only got fifteen minutes. People got angry about dirty dishes and loud shoes. But we remained friends and for the most part were pretty happy.
For six months I lived with a Taiwanese girl. She cooked for me. I proofread her papers. There was a puke-colored stain on my carpet, but my room was the size of a football stadium.
Then I moved to NYC, and the rotations really began. There was a house full of Jersey girls in Hoboken. When the floor got dirty they wanted to hire a maid. Profuse eye rolling commenced on my part. Then I subletted from a 40 year old man named Zorik. He was going to work at 6 Flags for the summer, and left me with his cat, a full jousting outfit, and a lifetime of books, movies, buttons and filth. My roommates were Fred, a creepy bald man that I avoided at all costs; Paco, a gay set designer who was never home; and Boogie, the Belgian stripper/dominatrix/witch. She too was forty years old, had long blond dreads and once brought me out to Brighton Beach where she proceeded to sunbathe topless. Her nipples were pierced with hunks of metal the size of keychains, creating a parade of teenaged boys past our towels. At least they kept the seagulls away.
After that summer, I moved to Manhattan in a six room apartment with seven, or sometimes more, people. Kim, who was from Texas and could open beer bottles with her front teeth; Joe, who gave me a black sesame seed doughnut the first time I met him and later became my boyfriend; Ali, the crack whore who had run off to Sweden when I moved in; thus Sunny and Christian, a punk couple also from TX moved into her room until she came back; Spike, the computer/video games genius; and of course, Oriana, my bohemian friend; Zad, her toothless Iranian boyfriend and their two dogs. It was the happiest place I ever lived. Sure Ali would get hopped up on crack and fall asleep in the bathtub. And Spike dated a string of slutty girls from craigslist who eventually gave him herpes. And don't forget how I could hear Zad and Oriana fight from halfway across the apartment.
It didn't matter. We had a ROOFTOP, strung with Christmas lights. You could see the Empire State building. The fridge was always filled with beer, so even if someone ate your cheese you couldn't complain. Friends from far and wide would come to sit on this rooftop. And every Wednesday night we'd pile into Joe's room to watch South Park and the Daily Show.
But good things don't last forever. When the lease was up in December, we split up. Oriana and I picked up Jen and moved to Brooklyn. Soon it was apparent that Zad was living with us too. Joe moved to the Upper West side. Spike moved in with his dad in Jersey. I don't even know where everyone else is. I live an hour away from my boyfriend, who I used to live with. Now I feel like I live in two different places. Still, our apartment in Brooklyn is very nice. We have a dining room, which we painted mint green. My room is tiny, but my rent is fairly low. We'll see what happens December 31st, when my lease is up, and my wanderings begin again.

Me and me mum

Say, I see somewhat of a resemblance there, don't you? Yes, I'm taller, but I am also wearing heels.
Look at those perfect eyebrows.

You can't buy those, no not even in Manhattan.

Insurance is legalized extortion

I am in insurance hell. I have submitted my claim by mail and by fax, a claim that should never have even gotten to me in the first place. Now one letter tells me they need more information, while the guy on the phone says I submitted it to the wrong place. I can't find the number to the doctor's office, and all of this is for a stupid physical I had in JANUARY. The worst part is that through all this the realization is growing, in the pit of my stomach, that this is never, ever, ever going to end. I will die fighting insurance companies for money. My children will fight for money to bury me with and end up secretly dumping me in the compost file because by the time the claim goes through my body will be decomposed and smelly.
All this while I don't have a real job. I'm lucky I have insurance at all (technically I think I'm stealing it, but it's extortion anyways, right?). My job consists of two days of typing until my hands swell up. They'd give me full time work, but my hands would hurt so bad I couldn't brush my teeth or wipe my butt and then who would give me a real job?
Sometimes I wish I was at a different level of ambition. If I had less, I could work in a decently paying dead-end job with excellent insurance and be perfectly content the rest of my life. I could move into middle management. If I had more ambition, I could start my own business, freelance, and finish my novel by the time my unemployment ran out and be perfectly happy. It's just that I like TV enough to watch it all day, but not enough to go out and make it for fun. Plus, I'm a whiner.

Out of the Woods

Joe met my grandparents on three different occasions and they managed to tell him the same story three times. All about how they met and married. Then my brother (lucky) went there once and got to hear a story about a three-titted cow that later ripped one off on a fence and became a two-titted cow. A neighbor had to come stitch it up. Sweet.
Beer and cheese and old friends. Wisconsin is always a trip. We went tubing, four-wheeling, blueberry picking, and drank all the while. We made s'mores around a campfire, shot beer bottles off a woodpile, and toured the Steven's Point brewery. How did we fit it all in? Magic stationwagon.
The wedding was nice. Joe and I helped put together the wedding favors--trees in birchbark. I drank champagne with the girls at the beauty salon while we got our hair done and dug through the salon's makeup and nail polish to beautify ourselves. The weather was perfect and beautiful. Jaime, Karen and I sang "Goin to the Chapel" before the ceremony to amuse the bride because we were all ready too early. We were supposed to be early so the photographer could take pictures, but we only got the photographer's assistant, her chunky, zitty, seventeen year old son who wasn't able to figure out how to frame the pictures so the "Toilets" sign wasn't in it. My mom had to sew all our dresses to our bras so they didn't show and Joe had to cut me out again at 1 am, both of us drunk and sleepy.