Roommates

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.