NoodleDog

Well, it’s February 15th. It’s halfway through February. Even a bit more than halfway, because there aren’t 30 days in this shortened month, for which I am very, very thankful.

Why am I so thankful, you ask? Because this heralds the last few days of living with a roommate. Rob had a roommate before I moved in, and now that I’m moved in, the roommate has got to go. We had thought way back in January that he might be gone by now, but we were sadly mistaken. He will still be living in the house until the end of February.

I know I complained bitterly about this whole situation a couple of weeks ago, and it probably made me sound all cold-hearted and whatnot. It’s truly not fun to live with a roommate. I don’t know how any of you people do it, under any circumstances, ever. It’s a horrible idea. If you can’t afford the place you’re in, don’t live there. Find a nice, private cardboard box somewhere and live there instead. Maybe I’m so jaded because I’ve had some bad roommate experiences:

Roomate Experience #1 – The Make-Out Chicks
When I moved away to go to University, I went to Ottawa to live with my cousin and his wife in their nice townhouse near the university. I was 17. Young and foolish? Perhaps. However, the living arrangements changed after a year and I moved into a different townhouse with three girls. It all seemed innocent enough when we first made the arrangements, but the situation deteriorated rather rapidly. I lived there from September until November, it was that bad. September was alright, although usually all the dishes were dirty (come on, people, how many pots do you need to make KRAFT DINNER?!!) and the other girls would never run the dishwasher. Instead, when they needed a plate, they’d take out a dirty one, wash it in the sink, re-use it and then re-insert it back into the dishwasher. Additionally, a strange development occurred. One evening, when I came home from a late class, I went upstairs to the living area and sure enough, no lights were on. However, someone was sleeping on the sofa, so I figured I’d just get a glass of water (if I was lucky enough to find an unsullied glass), and by the time I had gotten the glass of water, I could hear giggling from the living room, and sure enough, two of the chicks were making out. It got worse from there – they were always in the living room, making out. I couldn’t watch any TV, and of course, I lived for the moments I could scrape together for some TV time. I moved out, with…

Roommate Experience #2 – The Non-Roommates
From the Make-Out Chicks place, I moved into an apartment with some people I worked with at the coffee shop. Enter Lisa and George – Lisa was a coffee girl, same as me. George was the owner’s nephew. The owner was Greek, and George’s parents were strictly Greek, and forbade their son from having anything to do with Lisa, who was not Greek. Sadly, Lisa was knocked-up, and George vowed to disobey his parents, move in with Lisa and furnish our new apartment. None of this happened. George was unceremoniously shipped-off to Greece, and Lisa had to live with her parents. The apartment I moved into was completely empty except for my futon and bedroom furnishings (minor). The apartment also had no heat, and had a lien against it. The Condo association it belonged to posted a notice on my door one evening, and demanded I pay them the rent I would otherwise have paid to my landlord (the unit’s owner) since he owed thousands of dollars in back condo fees. I had to get a space heater to try to keep from freezing (since it was November – January) and Rumble developed the habit of sleeping ON me for body heat. I paid neither the Condo Board nor the landlord, ultimately, and did a midnight-move (in broad daylight) after two months in this unheated, unfurnished, unpleasant place.

Roommate Experience #3 – The Boxer
After George & Lisa and the bad landlord, I moved to another apartment in the adjoining building. This apartment was nice. It had two girls living in the other two rooms, and the one girl whose room I was moving into was moving out with her boyfriend. It was a large room, and my cat, Rumble, was pleased to have more usable living space. Plus, the other girls were pretty nice to him and we all got along fairly well. However, summer wasn’t far off, and after a few months, they moved “home” to Toronto. They were only able to find one sublet – this guy, who was a boxer by trade, and a McDonald’s worker by dint of necessity. He actually worked “security” at McDonald’s on one of the busier Ottawa streets that had problems with bar people getting into scraps in the McDonald’s after the bars closed. Presumably, he was there to keep them from getting into it, but yeah, whatever. So he took a fancy to me, and I did not reciprocate. He was messy, loud, smoked in the apartment and was generally obnoxious. When I told him I was not his mother and he needed to learn to pick up after himself, he flew into some sort of blind rage, to the extent where I had to call the police to have him physically removed from the apartment. I then contacted my aunt, and moved into their house until I could get moved home to Calgary.

Roommate Experience #4 – The Diva
After Roommate #3, I stuck to living with guys I was involved with for a while, which didn’t work out either. After bouncing across the country and back, I decided it was time to get back to University and start studying again, so I did, which is where I met Lisa. Lisa was nice. She seemed great. We got along well, and had lots of fun together. However, Lisa was a bit of a princess, taking at least an hour to apply her makeup while sitting IN the bathroom sink, and after a couple of months in a place that was probably too expensive to start out with, she started to have some money problems. She broke the lease and moved back in with her parents. I don’t begrudge her that – it was the way in which it was done. I was left a series of notes, each increasingly more panicked and accusatory than the last, until finally, she was just gone. I’m probably not that easy to talk to, granted, and can be intimidating, sure, but Lisa and I were friends, so the lesson learned was never to live with a “friend” again.

Roommate Experience #5 – The Drunken Welshman
So rather than live with a friend, I solicited roommates from friends. Friends’ friends aren’t really your friends, but supposedly, since you share a friend in common, there may be some common interests and whatnot. Apparently, that is not the case, because I ended up with The Drunken Welshman, Nick. Nick moved into one of the rooms that had been Lisa’s (she had a couple in that place – it was a nice place, after all) and promptly staked-out all the bars within walking distance. He didn’t drive, so he had to walk to the bar to get drunked-up. Which he did with alarming frequency. I don’t think he spent more than two or three nights at the place when he wasn’t totally plastered. He was nice enough when he was sober, but when he was drunk, he was dangerous. He left things in the oven, for instance, on “broil”, and I was awoken on more than one occasion by the smoke detector freaking out about something having been burnt beyond a crisp. Once, I came up to check the oven and turn off the smoke detector (by hitting it with a broom) and found Nick passed out, kneeling beside the sofa with his head gently resting on the sofa arm. The final straw was that one evening, he brought home a new friend from the bar to drink with in my living room, and they left the back door open. I had two cats at the time (Rumble and Caspar) and they had been known to get out the back door, so of course when I realized that the back door was open at 2a, I panicked and went to find them. They had gotten outside, but hadn’t gotten far. I informed Nick that he was to leave his key in the morning and to never come back. At all. I nearly threw him out right then at 2a, but allowed him to stay the night, which I think was more than generous.

Roommate Experience #6 – The Conspiracy Theorist
After all of that, I had another one of my cousins move in, figuring if you can’t trust friends of friends, you should be able to trust family. Mike moved in and was trustworthy enough, but the experience of just having him live in the same house was draining. It wasn’t like I saw him all the time – he set up the downstairs room as a self-contained living quarter – bed, sofa, keyboard & stereo equipment was all set up in there and he rarely ventured upstairs to interact with me. Occasionally, he’d come up to chat or pay his bills, and that was about it. He rarely even used the kitchen, and had a little hotplate downstairs instead. However, he smoked vast quantities of marijuana and the smell was pervasive. Also, having smoked the vast quantities of marijuana, he became a little paranoid and believed firmly that the government was listening to his phone conversations and was probably out to get him. I should note that his mother probably had quite a lot to do with his ultimate state of being – she was and continues to be a horrible woman. I blame her entirely for her whole family’s misfortunes. Of all my roommates, even though he was still trying, Mike was probably the best of the lot. He stayed living in the basement until I eventually bought my own place and moved out – so nearly four years.

Roommate Experience #7 – The Pregnant Teens
So I was trying to save some money to buy a condo, and posted an ad in the paper to fill the two vacant rooms on the middle floor (like I said, it was a big place), and the ad was immediately answered by this teenage couple. They came by and saw the place and wanted to take it instantly and offered me cash. They explained that they were being kicked out of his boarding house because they had hooked up against the rules of the house, and sure enough, the chick was knocked-up. He worked at some labour job, and she was still supposedly going to school, and I took pity on them. I even helped them move in. After about a week, it became apparent they were going to be unable to pay me rent and continue to feed themselves (without constantly raiding my limited grocery supply), so I had a frank discussion with them and had them call their parents, coincidentally both sets of which lived in Drumheller. There were tears and hastily-formed plans, and I dropped them both off at the bus depot the next day, never having gotten any rent or security deposit after all. You’d think I would have learned something from that lesson, but…

Roommate Experience #8 – The Gambler
I was out one evening and ran into a sort-of friend I used to know a couple of years before. He had been a relatively successful guy doing something in the O&G field downtown – always had a lot of money, was always dressed nicely, seemed like he had it going on. He was down on his luck, lost his apartment, lost nearly all his stuff, was living in some flophouse somewhere, doing day-labour… Again, I took pity on him and said he could come and stay with me, get back on his feet, all that bla bla bla… He started working as a landscaper, and said he liked it. He worked two weeks, got paid and then called me from the bar to come and pick him up – he had blown all of it on VLTs. I told him he couldn’t stay at my place without paying rent and for his groceries, and he left. I never did find out where he went, but after about six or eight months, I donated all of his things to the Calgary Drop-in Center (the local shelter, basically).

Aaand that was that. I vowed never again to have a roommate. You can kind of see why. I mean, the worst one was probably The Boxer, since he was leaning towards physical violence, and The Gambler was pretty stupid as well since he had to have known my patience would run out as soon as he blew two weeks’ worth of pay on VLTs… Even the ones I didn’t detail as horrible experiences were annoying – for instance, one would always be sleeping on my sofa in the living room, where I wanted to watch TV. Or one would always ignore his alarm clock, which would ring for seriously an hour before he’d get up and shut it the friggin’ hell off. Living with my cousins was alright when I first moved out, but even they had strange habits and behaviours I couldn’t help but notice. They were all just annoying. I find that as soon as you add another person to my living space, I start to get annoyed. Then, small things I’d otherwise be able to ignore really start to get on my nerves, and sure enough, I lose it eventually. Oh, never actually to the roommate’s face, but I grit my teeth a lot and complain to friends and family to the point where they tell me to just move, already, and then I either do move or get the roommate to move out. I have a fair amount of patience, but when it’s gone, it’s totally gone and nothing anyone can say or do will change my mind about something.

So we can now add:
Roommate Experience #9 – The Divorced Bachelor Trying To Recapture His Youth
It’s not that I don’t like Jim. He’s a swell enough guy in small doses. However, living with Jim is like living with an uncle, or a friend of your dad’s. He’s old, and divorced. There is nothing he can do to change that. He has fine attributes – he’s friendly and clean. However, he makes strange and ill-placed comments, and like I said, just having another person in the environment throws everything off.

February’s end draws near. I’m going camping this weekend so that will be at least two roommate-free days! It can’t last that much longer, can it? I can make it! And if I can't, I'll tell you all about all my prison roommates.