I am an introvert. This seems to shock people who don't know me that well or who have only seen me in small groups, but it's true. I am an introvert, and it's not that I don't like people, or don't need people. It's that most people are fucking work, and dealing with them is usually draining to some degree or another. That, though, is not really what I'm going to be talking about today. Today we talk about roommates.
What, some of you might be thinking, is the connection here? I am a flavor of introvert I tend to refer to as a territorial introvert. I like having two things in my residential space, preferably to coincide with each other. First, a bolt hole into which I can flee when people are too much to deal with; second, a space that is mine. It's hard to say quite what qualifies a space as the latter, although it being under my sole control certainly goes a long way toward that. Anyway, roommates.
I, as most of you likely know, went to boarding school. I had one roommate there, and only for three months--he left on permanent mental health leave (independent of anything I did) just before Thanksgiving, and the fallout from that is a story for another day. I never had a single in college, and one year went through three roommates (one for failure to sleep on his part interfering with my ability to do so, one for the house manager's being uncomfortable with unofficial gender-mixed housing by a non-couple, and one to close out the year in hilarious fashion). After graduation was two years of living with family--but in my own room (mercifully, we agree, for all involved). In law school, I had 647' sq. all to my self (aside from occasional influxes of other people's cats, which I invited and enjoyed), and neither need nor desire for a roommate. Now, though, I'm living in Ravenswood with my esteemed roommate Laura, who sent me an e-mail asking if I knew anyone in need of a roommate starting mid/late-August. I responded by waving at her and saying something like 'me! Me!' So I am back in the land of roommates.
Up until now, I've had a low success rate with keeping roommates as friends. The first one disappeared, never to be heard from again (except when he and his parents came to get his shit three months later, and during the entire moving out process said not one word to me even though I was sitting in a choke point of the room playing Diablo). The second one was a very good guy who ran in entirely different circles. The year of three roommates featured two who are still friends and one whom I will never hear from again (and I lose no sleep over that). The roommate from the year after that has blessedly vanished from my social horizons, leaving behind only stories of how I accidentally created the impression of a complicated and entirely non-extant love triangle in a dorm I did not live in. My last roommate-ship had ups and downs, but we did pretty well together--the key, I think, was that I had the little inner room of our two-room triple that slept anywhere from two (in the beginning) to six (at the end).
All in all, my successful stints of rooming with people have happened in circumstances that included a reasonable and well-defined division of space (a half of the room, a corner of another enclosed by a bed and a desk, or an inner room). The other main feature needed was a degree of consideration--each for the other--on issues that defy such petty boundaries (sound, stench, temperature).
There're plenty of issues that factor into successful rooming beyond mere personality compatibility: temperature preferences, general cleanliness/messiness (two scales, there), sleep schedules, equitable division of chores, musical tastes, etc. Just about all of this (responsibility for common space and cleaning common items/spaces aside) can be rendered moot by multiple rooms.
In my new place in Ravenswood, I have my own room. It is glorious, if rather densely packed with boxes that needed to not be in the living room anymore. Most of those, fortunately, will vanish onto bookshelves now that my friends found that they were in possession of my bookshelf-pegs (thanks, guys!). It's got its own air conditioning unit, a soon-to-be-filled wall of bookcases insulating my room from Laura's, sound-wise, and a closet for me to throw clothes in. Essentially, it's a near guarantee of roommate success (aside from how Laura and I don't suck at communicating--we've instituted a practice of leaving notes for each other when I leave before she's up and when she's going to bed before I'm back).
Soon I will be all unpacked and shit. And it will be lovely. Soon also there will be the His and Hers Housewarmings (the date for the His portion of it TBD), as it's a small place and we know lots of people.
Those are my vague and nearly clinical thoughts on roommates. Next time I'll talk about night time, video games, stories, or some other heretofore unconsidered topic.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
On Mornings
I suppose the short story is that I hate them. A line I acquired from my father when I was younger sums it up rather nicely--if God had intended me to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it for noon. This isn't really quite as cut-and-dried as it might seem. Most of my problem with mornings comes from an unfortunate pairing of facts about me. First, I am so much a night person that I could happily be nocturnal, but for the civilized world. Second, I do not do terribly well on a lack of sleep. Going to bed before midnight is not only difficult but disappointing. Therefore getting up before seven is somewhere between a chore and intolerable.
As far as I know, I've always been rather like this. My mother, an aggressive morning person (it seemed like it was not enough, growing up, that she be up at some ungodly pre-sun hour--all of the rest of us had to be up sometime shortly thereafter), has stories about waking me up for school. She would shout, I would protest that I was up--flagrantly lying, flat on my back--and so it would go for several iterations. She eventually settled into three methods of prying me out of bed. Yelling, tickling, cats. The first was the easiest, and probably the least effective. The second was the most effort intensive, but also the most effective. The third was the best for stories: she would lob a cat at me, on the assumption that its landing--all claws extended--would startle me into permanent wakefulness. The problem was that I learned to catch the cat, cradle it as an actual athlete might a football, and then pacify it by petting. And so I would roll over and return to vague sleep. I only have vague memories of this, but I'd kill for evidence of it.
Boarding school came, and college, and somewhere along the way my mother either relented or gave up (probably a bit of both, is my guess), and therefore just let me sleep unless it was absolutely necessary that I be up and awake and functional. It was a lovely compromise. Since graduating into the real world (a trial run after college and the real thing now that law school's spit me out), my mother is no longer my alarm clock. I suspect this is a good thing for everyone. Instead, my cell phone serves--noisily, insistently, inevitably--in her stead. Oh god the beeping.
Now, when I wake up in the mornings--for the first time I'm conscious of doing so, anyway, which may not strictly be the first time (although it often is when alarms are involved)--I am awake. That sort of awake that crystalizes everything you were thinking about just before you went to sleep. The sort of awake that scrolls your to-do list before your eyes as they open in budding horror at how late it is, even though it's painfully early. The sort of awake that causes you to vault out of bed in defiance of gravity and several other laws purely through force of adrenaline and terror. It's rather unpleasant, and I'd much rather ease gently into wakefulness sometime in the early afternoon.
After the energy of waking up is spent--often my the sheer drudgery of getting myself from my bed to the shower, often by way of the computer (those web comics won't read themselves)--I lapse back into a groggy state that seems zombie-like only because my brain and my body aren't in synch. The brain's working fine--often a bit too fast--but the connection's a bit wonky until I've showered, shaved, and generally clawed my way toward humanity. This may be why people think I'm bad at mornings. And it's a fiction I'll maintain for as long as it's useful to do so--largely because, as I said, I dislike mornings.
It being 10AM, I still would rather be asleep.
Next time, I will talk either about roommates or night time.
As far as I know, I've always been rather like this. My mother, an aggressive morning person (it seemed like it was not enough, growing up, that she be up at some ungodly pre-sun hour--all of the rest of us had to be up sometime shortly thereafter), has stories about waking me up for school. She would shout, I would protest that I was up--flagrantly lying, flat on my back--and so it would go for several iterations. She eventually settled into three methods of prying me out of bed. Yelling, tickling, cats. The first was the easiest, and probably the least effective. The second was the most effort intensive, but also the most effective. The third was the best for stories: she would lob a cat at me, on the assumption that its landing--all claws extended--would startle me into permanent wakefulness. The problem was that I learned to catch the cat, cradle it as an actual athlete might a football, and then pacify it by petting. And so I would roll over and return to vague sleep. I only have vague memories of this, but I'd kill for evidence of it.
Boarding school came, and college, and somewhere along the way my mother either relented or gave up (probably a bit of both, is my guess), and therefore just let me sleep unless it was absolutely necessary that I be up and awake and functional. It was a lovely compromise. Since graduating into the real world (a trial run after college and the real thing now that law school's spit me out), my mother is no longer my alarm clock. I suspect this is a good thing for everyone. Instead, my cell phone serves--noisily, insistently, inevitably--in her stead. Oh god the beeping.
Now, when I wake up in the mornings--for the first time I'm conscious of doing so, anyway, which may not strictly be the first time (although it often is when alarms are involved)--I am awake. That sort of awake that crystalizes everything you were thinking about just before you went to sleep. The sort of awake that scrolls your to-do list before your eyes as they open in budding horror at how late it is, even though it's painfully early. The sort of awake that causes you to vault out of bed in defiance of gravity and several other laws purely through force of adrenaline and terror. It's rather unpleasant, and I'd much rather ease gently into wakefulness sometime in the early afternoon.
After the energy of waking up is spent--often my the sheer drudgery of getting myself from my bed to the shower, often by way of the computer (those web comics won't read themselves)--I lapse back into a groggy state that seems zombie-like only because my brain and my body aren't in synch. The brain's working fine--often a bit too fast--but the connection's a bit wonky until I've showered, shaved, and generally clawed my way toward humanity. This may be why people think I'm bad at mornings. And it's a fiction I'll maintain for as long as it's useful to do so--largely because, as I said, I dislike mornings.
It being 10AM, I still would rather be asleep.
Next time, I will talk either about roommates or night time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)