The One Who Is Mostly A High-Protein Breakfast
We’ve all been there. They seem perfectly normal, and then you move in together, and realize that 80% or more of the time, they’re overnight oats drizzled with almond butter, or cottage cheese-and-egg-white pancakes. Typical.
The One Who Melted
The moment you walk in the door, this one is melted. Don’t bother trying to explain to your guests – this roommate is just melted.
The One Who Is Charles
Charles!!!
The Child
The child grew into the boy, and the boy into the young man, while one by one the remorseless years flew by, and as he grew and increased so did his beauty and the beauty of his mind grow with him. When he was about fifteen they used to call him Beauty about the College, and me they nicknamed the Beast. Beauty and the Beast was what they called us when we went out walking together, as we used to do every day. Once Leo attacked a great strapping butcher’s man, twice his size, because he sang it out after us, and thrashed him, too—thrashed him fairly. I walked on and pretended not to see, till the combat got too exciting, when I turned round and cheered him on to victory. It was the chaff of the College at the time, but I could not help it. Then when he was a little older the undergraduates found fresh names for us. They called me Charon, and Leo the Greek god! I will pass over my own appellation with the humble remark that I was never handsome, and did not grow more so as I grew older. As for his, there was no doubt about its fitness. Leo at twenty-one might have stood for a statue of the youthful Apollo. I never saw anybody to touch him in looks, or anybody so absolutely unconscious of them. As for his mind, he was brilliant and keen-witted, but not a scholar. He had not the dulness necessary for that result. We followed out his father’s instructions as regards his education strictly enough, and on the whole the results, especially in the matters of Greek and Arabic, were satisfactory. I learnt the latter language in order to help to teach it to him, but after five years of it he knew it as well as I did—almost as well as the professor who instructed us both. I always was a great sportsman—it is my one passion—and every autumn we went away somewhere shooting or fishing, sometimes to Scotland, sometimes to Norway, once even to Russia. I am a good shot, but even in this he learnt to excel me.
When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him at my own College, and at twenty-one he took his degree—a respectable degree, but not a very high one. Then it was that I, for the first time, told him something of his own story, and of the mystery that loomed ahead. Of course he was very curious about it, and of course I explained to him that his curiosity could not be gratified at present. After that, to pass the time away, I suggested that he should get himself called to the Bar; and this he did, reading at Cambridge, and only going up to London to eat his dinners.
I had only one trouble about him, and that was that every young woman who came across him, or, if not every one, nearly so, would insist on falling in love with him. Hence arose difficulties which I need not enter into here, though they were troublesome enough at the time. On the whole, he behaved fairly well; I cannot say more than that.
And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history really begins.
A Sinister Facsimile of Charles
He says he’s Charles. Everyone else tells you he’s Charles. “What do you mean, that isn’t Charles?” they’ll say. It’s shaped like Charles. It has Charles’ face. But it isn’t Charles.
The One Who Is Always In His Ziggurat
It’s like, do you even live here?
She
She lifted her white and rounded arms—never had I seen such arms before—and slowly, very slowly, withdrew some fastening beneath her hair. Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form, now only robed in a garb of clinging white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace that was more than human. On her little feet were sandals, fastened with studs of gold. Then came ankles more perfect than ever sculptor dreamed of. About the waist her white kirtle was fastened by a double-headed snake of solid gold, above which her gracious form swelled up in lines as pure as they were lovely, till the kirtle ended on the snowy argent of her breast, whereon her arms were folded. I gazed above them at her face, and—I do not exaggerate—shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw. I might talk of the great changing eyes of deepest, softest black, of the tinted face, of the broad and noble brow, on which the hair grew low, and delicate, straight features. But, beautiful, surpassingly beautiful as they all were, her loveliness did not lie in them. It lay rather, if it can be said to have had any fixed abiding place, in a visible majesty, in an imperial grace, in a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be—and yet, the sublimity was a dark one—the glory was not all of heaven—though none the less was it glorious. Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion. Not even the lovely smile that crept about the dimples of her mouth could hide this shadow of sin and sorrow. It shone even in the light of the glorious eyes, it was present in the air of majesty, and it seemed to say: “Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand—evil have I done, and from age to age evil I shall do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.”
Drawn by some magnetic force which I could not resist, I let my eyes rest upon her shining orbs, and felt a current pass from them to me that bewildered and half-blinded me.
She laughed—ah, how musically! and nodded her little head at me with an air of sublimated coquetry that would have done credit to a Venus Victrix.
“Rash man!” she said; “like Actæon, thou hast had thy will; be careful lest, like Actæon, thou too dost perish miserably, torn to pieces by the ban-hounds of thine own passions. I too, oh Holly, am a virgin goddess, not to be moved of any man, save one, and it is not thou. Say, hast thou seen enough!”
“I have looked on beauty, and I am blinded,” I said hoarsely, lifting my hand to cover up my eyes.
“So! what did I tell thee? Beauty is like the lightning; it is lovely, but it destroys—especially trees, oh Holly!” and again she nodded and laughed.
Suddenly she paused, and through my fingers I saw an awful change come over her countenance. Her great eyes suddenly fixed themselves into an expression in which horror seemed to struggle with some tremendous hope arising through the depths of her dark soul. The lovely face grew rigid, and the gracious willowy form seemed to erect itself.
“Man,” she half whispered, half hissed, throwing back her head like a snake about to strike—”Man, whence hadst thou that scarab on thy hand? Speak, or by the Spirit of Life I will blast thee where thou standest!” and she took one light step towards me, and from her eyes there shone such an awful light—to me it seemed almost like a flame—that I fell, then and there, on the ground before her, babbling confusedly in my terror.
The One Who Is Never In Her Ziggurat
It’s like, why do you even have a ziggurat?
Help, my old roommate used to wander the house leaving globs of peanut butter on every conceivable surface while also whining about the heat but still refusing to turn on the air in the summer, and I can’t tell if she’s High Protein Breakfast or Melted. Someone explain.
It’s funny, I don’t remember living with you, but…
Seriously though I am actually trying to improve on the peanut butter thing.
STOP LEAVING IT ON THE DOORKNOB YOU KNOW I’M ALLERGIC AND CAN’T TOUCH IT.
I mean, thank you?
Agh I know it must be the worst. The main reason I am trying to control my PB-smearing tendencies is because my manager, who sits at the desk next to me, is allergic to nuts.
ETA: She is also A Cold Person and complains about it being cold when I open the windows at work. Maybe you’re also my manager?
Was your roommate trying to trap you into a room and starve you to death or something?
If that person knew you’re allergic and kept doing that, I hope she receives some serious Karmic retribution.
One of my roommates was a guy that grew up in a tiny town in upstate New York so was used to real winters. He was ALSO so ignorant to what his parents actually did around the house when he was a kid that he didn’t realize you have to leave the heat on even when you’re out of town or else the pipes will freeze. Basically, if I had gone on winter break the day before him instead of the day after, we would’ve been completely screwed.
Man, I HATED fighting with roommates over heating/air conditioning.
Silent war going on between me and my housemate. She is someone who is always cold (BECAUSE SHE REFUSES TO PUT PROPER CLOTHES ON IN THE HOUSE AND WANDERS AROUND IN JUST HER DRESSING GOWN AND WONDERS WHY SHE’S COLD BUT I DIGRESS) and who also happens to have the coldest bedroom in the house. I am generally warm-blooded and also have the warmest room in the house. We’ve stopped discussing the matter, we both now adjust the heating to our own preference and wait until the other one changes it back. We’re in a cycle now of a week on her system and a week on mine. Progress?
Wait, shouldn’t you just switch bedrooms?
Aside from the temperature issue, neither of us wants to switch rooms. Also, all the rooms are rented out separately by the landlord as opposed to the whole house being rented out to us collectively (none of us know each other beyond being housemates) so it would involved contracts etc. Also her room has damp so I’m not having it.
So let her have some more heating at night (when it’s cold out) and you can open a window or something. I’m not saying blast furnace 24/7, but give a little.
Don’t think I haven’t suggested that, but she just turns the heating on 24 hours a day. Literally. That is the only acceptable level of heating for her but she will also not move into a different, warmer room of the house even when there’s been the opportunity. There is no further negotiation to be had.
Ah well, I definitely know from experience that once you hit that stalemate you’re stuck. Sorry, 30.
I knew there had to be a catch. 🙁 Sorry for the unfortunate situation! I once had a situation where one of my roommates was living in, essentially, a sleeping porch that had been converted into a “real” room, but was still really poorly insulated. God, our heating bills that winter were insane.
My roommate was convinced I was manually changing the AC to be warmer during the night and finally sent me a passive aggressive email about it and how hot she was. It’s a pre-programed thermostat. She had been fighting (and losing) against a pre-set temperature…
I reprogrammed it for her to be cooler and two days later she asks if I can reprogram it to be warmer.
I can’t wait til she moves out.
I live in an old apartment complex. We have radiators that are all connected throughout the complex. The office controls when the heat is turned on and off.
I’ve explained this to my current roommate three times. He persists in thinking there’s a thermostat in our apartment. He thought we shouldn’t open the windows to cool off (it was a warm day and the radiators were going) because if the room got cooler the radiators would think they need to work harder to keep the temperature up, and then we’d end up in a wasteful feedback loop.
I had this same problem with a coworker once and as the perpetually cold person can I just say that putting layers of clothes on does not work as well as you warm-blooded people seem to think it should. And besides, I should not have to wear six sweaters to stay warm in the middle of July SERIOUSLY UNLESS YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE FAMILY CHANNICHTHYIDAE THERE IS NO NEED FOR THAT MUCH AIR CONDITIONING.
Ahem. Sorry. Apart from that, it sounds like you have some reasonable beefs.
YES! Wearing gloves at my desk in July because the air conditioning is set so high should not have to be a thing.
I worked in an archives once where my office was in the transition/holding area between the stacks and the reading room. So it wasn’t at “stacks preservation” temperature, but it was at 62 degrees. I wore silk glove liners under bulky fingerless gloves every damn day.
My dad went to school in upstate NY and had very little money. Apparently his roommates managed to unlock the thermostat, and they’d raise the heat, then re-lock it, and the not-very-bright landlord would always marvel that the heating bill was so high even though it was at a fixed temperature.
It’s both- the other 20% of the time they’re not A High-Protein Breakfast, they’re free to be one of the other options, in this case Melted.
Ohhhhhh thank you so much!
Oh, Charles.
Also, the one who kept her ziggurat in the living room and never cleaned it. Off-topic, but the hanging cabinet next to the writing desk – from whence was it acquired?
That cabinet looks like something you could pick up affordably at an unfinished furniture store. You’d have to paint it yourself.
A lot of that stuff looks like ikea to me.
I like the room in the picture. That’s a very nice room. What’s the rent for that? Can I be a roommate in that room?
No, you have to stay in the ziggurat.
Tag yourself, I’m the one who melted
I’m one of the ones who tells you that your roommate is Charles.
I too am the one who melted. I would be found at all hours draped bonelessly across the couch in every manner but the proper one, generally in some sort of state of dishabille. My poor roommates.
Never out of my ziggurat.
I’m why do I even have a ziggurat, because that’s how I feel about most of my possessions right now.
She
We had to stage an intervention once with a roommate who didn’t know about shower curtains. He always showered with the curtain open. The bathroom was always wet. I had no idea this was knowledge that needed teaching.
What the WHAT?
I have definitely been the roommate who has suggested unleashing ban-hounds on men in need of a smiting as a result of their own passions.
But generally speaking my raiment is a pair of linen trousers in need of some sewing repairs and my undergraduate university t-shirt that says “Women’s Studies” on it.
A+ raiment.
NGL, having the money to live by myself without a roommate was a factor in my dropping out of college and getting a job in IT at the age of 23.
It’s why I lived with my parents long enough (to the point where we were all going a little crazy) to make sure I was absolutely financially stable.
I had roommates throughout college who were little more than strangers and I wasn’t doing that again. Noooope.
I’m in the opposite position – for the past three years I’ve lived with one of my college friends, and now she’s moving at the end of our lease, while I’ve just gotten a job that will let me stay in the same place and pay the rent on my own. But I’ve loved living with a roommate! Yeah, we both annoy each other a little, but I will be lonely! But I also don’t want to find a roommate who’s a stranger.
“The grown-ass adult male who you now realize does not know how to take care of himself. He can’t do laundry. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how the dishwasher works. He is always mildly surprised and disturbed that food doesn’t just appear in the fridge. He can take out the garbage, but only after being asked about 12 times. He demonstrates no inclination to learn any of these skills. Time goes by and you fantasize about sacrificing him to the Goddess of Defeating Misogyny, but eventually he finds a girlfriend to take care of him and moves out. You still find random possessions of his for months after, but pretend you don’t know what they are when he asks about them.”
Sometimes, when feeling generous, you quietly feel sorry for the girlfriend who took him off her hands because that is her future. That is her future.
That girlfriend is my sister. I’m this close to shaking her. LOOK AT YOUR LIFE, LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES!
Don’t live in that Marge Simpson denial, SmrtCookie’s sister. Just don’t do it.
You’re saying there are men available for dating who are NOT this?
I have a housemate like this. From visits on the weekend, it appears that his girlfriend is equally useless, but she’s the one who’s learning about these things and he isn’t. They’ll get married and he’ll get a job in finance and she’ll pop out babies and get furious about yoga class snubs.
Can’t bring myself to feel sorry for her because I heard her chatting to him about ‘lezzers’ once.
they clearly deserve each other.
This was mine roommate for the previous year.
He did, however, take out the garbage more often then not. He also took out the recycling…but only half the bin, and stuck it in the garbage dumpster, not the single stream recycling one.
I’m goneeeeeeeee now.
Ha ha ha ha YES.
I was like “…we have a dishwasher, and it is four feet away, so WHY ARE HALF-FULL BOWLS OF BEANS IN THE LIVING ROOM?” The fuck?
I would feel bad for his GF-now-wife, except she’s actually a much worse person than he is in every other way, so.
I had the female version of this roommate. Her family had had a weekly housekeeper growing up, so apparently she never did ANY cleaning. I had to rewash the dishes after she did them, because no matter how many times I told her she had to wash the outside of bowls, glasses, pots, etc., she could not retain this knowledge.
Ohhhh man this was…well, kind of me. I lived on my own in France for a few months than switched to an apartment with a nice lawyer who, I think because my spoken French was pretty bad, thought I was just helpless. We split dishes pretty evenly but she told me to just leave laundry out and she’d take care of it; I did some basic cleaning around the place but not as much as her, and she even cooked dinner sometimes. Eventually I cooked a nice meal (she wasn’t around much, lawyer) and that kind of evened things out, and eventually she trusted me to do the laundry.
Ah, yes. He’d managed to figure out the skill of roasting vegetables, so he wasn’t entirely useless, but he did clog up the sink repeatedly by putting plates covered in food in them and turning the water on. There was no garbage disposal in the sink. There was not even the expectation of a garbage disposal in the sink. Let’s not even discuss the bag of trash he left in the middle of the stairs for an entire week.
I’m pretty sure he’s a well-paid doctor by now.
I think I might have been the female equivalent of this, but I mostly stuck to my own room (which had a kitchen in at least one place I was in) and made my own microwave meals only occasionally asking my roommate to open a jar or something, also I figured out laundry eventually and do take out my own trash eventually.
The One Who Was Hard to Look At
She!
Bless.
The 80-Year-Old Dog-Eared Man
“Oh, the sound! The Noise! When will this cacophony ever stop!”
“What noise?”
“Can’t you hear it? The incessant music! The talking!”
“Huh?”
“Oh, my must my sleep be shattered so. All I want is to close my eyes and slumber in perfect silence. WHIPPERSNAPPERS! Keep down that racket!”
“I can’t hear anything.”
“How can you not? In an apartment one floor up and on the other side of the building! People are enjoying themselves to sound! Stop it! STOP IT!”
“Sigh.”
Reader, I married him.
If this gentleman likes classical music and bleach, it’s possible my Dad has a clone.
He manages to be so hard of hearing that movies without closed captions are a waste of time for him, yet so sensitive to sounds that clinking a spoon too loudly against a bowl is a sin. He either doesn’t hear you at all or wonders why you’re shouting. Very Loud Wagner is OK, dropping something is not. (He gets a pass on hating loud and sudden noises because he was a little boy during the Blitz, which, if we’re going Lamarckian, would also explain the Family Claustrophobia.)
WAIT ME TOO!
White noise machine, marriage-saving purchase.
Oh no, we can never buy a Loud Fan Box. So it is decreed.
I am this person. Oops.
Also me.
Me three.
I have a white noise machine. I have earplugs. Doesn’t help.
*raises hand*
Me four.
Yep. Today I learned that I am actually the opposite gender and over twice the age I assumed myself to be.
He actually lived in the apartment below mine. For months I had the cops called on me weekly for raucous soirees featuring blaring music and dancing, which is peculiar due to the fact that as a reclusive shut-in without enough friends for a game of solitaire this was physically impossible.
Of all the police visits my favorite was when they came due to a reported kegger but found just me, quietly crocheting at 1AM in my neon, rainbow, onesie pajamas.
Oh, mine wasn’t so bad. He would call the landlord, but never the cops. I honestly had to strain to hear some far distant sound, and my hearing is pretty good.
*solemn yet wholly respectful applause*
i never got to live with him, but the person who i replaced in my co-op was a vegan bodybuilder that minored in Theater. he enjoyed making high protein breakfasts early in the morning in a blender, and was known to watch friends/concert DVDs shirtless in the living room. instead of doing his dishes like a normal human, he would lick is plate clean and then put it back on the shelf.
every now and then, one of my roommates will google him and send us all a bulletin about what he is up to. last i heard, he is still starring in amateur films and eating high protein breakfasts.
instead of doing his dishes like a normal human, he would lick his plate clean and then put it back on the shelf
nonononononononononononono I refuse to believe this, it did not happen, AHHHHH
Seriously, the other things I’d take as whatever but THAT might lead to ACTUAL MURDER
The rest of the people waiting to be called for jury selection are very curious about what is so horrifying.
I know a young man who has a dog and uses the cups that everyone drinks out of to scoop up his dog’s kibble and then returns them to the shelf, unwashed.
“I know a young man who has a dog” … that he uses to lick plates clean, and then returns them to the shelf, unwashed. FTFY
This man may be The Most Co-Op Person Ever.
There’s always one person in my coop who doesn’t believe in soap or washing up liquid. I want to form a housing coop based on hygiene and no drum circles.
I would move into your co-op so fast, provided that there were also provisions in the rules for not covering the kitchen floor with old mattresses.
But was he happy? I am imagining that he was and is wholly joyful in his life. I would hate to imagine he’s so committed to this lifestyle if it made him unhappy. (I mean, obviously he’d be a nightmare as a roommate, no question there.)
i believe it is impossible to live a lifestyle like this and not be a very obliviously joyous human/puppy
That’s what I think. I’m insanely jealous of that oblivious joy but I would hate to make other people so uncomfortable.*
*I already make people uncomfortable and I hate it but apparently I didn’t get to be the person who slips through life like a cigarette boat through still water.
“Amateur films” = porn, right? Or something plotless filmed with a single shaky camera, so it’s Deep?
well my roommate did talk him into letting her draw penises all over his body to help “fully immerse himself” in a role so
either, really.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh, dear god, BLESS YOU for relating that tidbit.
can i be honest and say that i just keep going back to and staring at that photo? the light, the herringbone floors, the vaulted ceilings…omg
Me tooooo. I don’t have either herringbone floors or vaulted ceilings but now I want to paint everything white and see if I can get close.
SAME- those curtains!
I want to live there and refer to it as “my rooms in ____ Street”.
The One Who is Never in Her Ziggurat But Then One Time There’s A Lithuanian Raver There For Some Reason
“Oh, you’re waiting for [roommate]? Uh…I never, I never see her. No, I don’t need a beer. Thanks, man, I’m cool. Is she…oh, you’re going to the desert? Ahh, yeah, no. Nah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna pass on that one. I’ll just…sit here. With you. Until she appears…….HOW did you get into my locked apartment, again?”
I have MET a Lithuanian Raver and this is accurate.
Logically, I know there could be more than one, but just now I couldn’t helping thinking “there’s another one???”
TAKE THIS SIMPLE TEST TO FIND OUT WHAT KIND OF ROOMMATE YOU HAVE!
Answer! It’s the Zodiac Killer.
Well, he’s gotta live somewhere now that all the political fundraising galas are over with.
I have to say I’m a little sad that the TCITZK facebook page is going to (probably) die a relatively quick death now that he’s dropped out. It’s been the one bright spot in this whole miserable year.
So I had a roommate once who was on some kind of extremely malodorous curry diet (for the record, he was Italian, and normally I find the smell of curry quite congenial, dunno what was up with this). Was he a high protein breakfast, or was he his own thing?
There was also the one who set the apartment on fire.
After I got married, I told spouse he was the best roommate I ever had.
Look, I only set the stove top on fire, and I managed to put it out. What more do you want?
Nononono, this involved the fire department and having to move afterwards because the place was uninhabitable.
PSA folks: Your duvet is not a good place for candles.
Ok, yeah, that right there is a bad idea that is bad and unwise.
In my defense I wasn’t the one to throw flour on the grease fire. Okay yes I accidentally put in their head because I was drunk and couldn’t remember which common white powder found in a kitchen was supposed to be used on grease fires. BUT I wasn’t the actual thrower.
Charles? There’s no Charles in this kindergarten.
Charles won the lottery last year, so ….
I read She when I was fourteen, and then I tried to read the Return of She and then I gave up and that is my true story. What a book.
Omg I made it thru the return of she and you saved yourself a deal of boredom and gross out! Honestly never thought I would hear about that book again! Trust Mallory!
How about the one who randomly empties the fridge and throws everything out because the fridge needs a clean and putting everyone else’s stuff back in afterwards would have been too easy?
My lord, I love living alone.
I once had the opposite, someone who never emptied the fridge. When I finally did, I found at least five packages of the same cold meat, four of which were opened and out of them, three had mould on the meat.
This was also the flat where once, when I was opening the other fridge, a milk carton exploded.
Similar: I had a roommate who bought a giant package of chicken thighs (like, Costco bulk sized), which he ate at a rate of 1 a week or so. Fast forward a month and our entire kitchen smells rancid, and the smell gets worse every time you open the refrigerator. I don’t eat meat, so I never check the meat drawer and therefore have no idea what’s causing it.
After a straight week of this horrid smell which seems to emanate from nowhere, I spend an hour cleaning the fridge door to door and top to bottom, only to get to the very bottom drawer where he keeps his meat. It sloshed when I opened it.
He had left a bulk bag of chicken thighs completely unsealed in the bottom drawer of the fridge for over a month, and the nasty raw chicken juice was leaking out of it and congealing in the bottom of the refrigerator. And it was all completely rotten.
Worst part: I rebagged the chicken in double plastic bags and lined the bottom of the drawer with paper towels, and no only did he keep eating this rancid chicken, he kept leaving the bags open, and the smell kept coming back.
Silver lining: the meat drawer was under the drawer where I kept my fresh produce, not over it, so at least I didn’t contract salmonella poisoning during the weeks it took me to realize what was happening.
Wait, you didn’t throw the meat out?? Because that smell is the absolute worst.
Bevers
He doesn’t even LIVE there!!
I have been on both sides of the ziggurat. Meaning, the side where I was always in mine, and the side where I wished that the person I roomed with had one.
I’ve also not had a whole hell of a lot of roommates, it turns out.
This makes me realize the missed opportunity for a Hey Ladies! where the Ladies are all in college living in an 8-bedroom house off-campus.
Missed opportunity? Surely those emails are buried deep in their archives someplace and could be resurrected one of these days when one of them is feeling nostalgic/depressed.
The Ladies aren’t living in any old house, they live in a Sorority House, You GDI Plebes. Highest tier, crafts all day and keggers all night. Every year a pledge gets thrown out because she went out in public with a $50 Vineyard Vines t-shirt that had different undertones than her 7.0 mm silver Tahitian pearls.
Renting is such a sham! You can take out an affordable 30 year mortgage and buy your OWN ziggurat.
Well, shit. I am high protein breakfast person. I don’t understand you muffin people. AT ALL.
I will forever be shaped by Passive Aggressive Sarah, who thought she wanted a gregarious and affable roommate, but only if said gregarious and affable roommate would return to the apartment by the arbitrary curfew set by Passive Aggressive Sarah. If the gregarious and affable roommate was late, or took a lover for the evening, Passive Aggressive Sarah would retaliate by basically turning off everything electric in the apartment and complaining (or leaving notes about) about gregarious and affable roommate’s selfish and indulgent lifestyle.
Once, after a remarkable weekend with a lovely gentleman, I came home to a house full of Post-it notes about the expense of Christmas tree lights. I was allotted certain hours to enjoy them – I recall it was 7-9pm. I moved out the day after Christmas and have never even googled her name since.
My husband is a muffin person. The only time we eat breakfast together is on vacation, where he thinks it is acceptable to have a pastry and coffee for breakfast. And then proceeds to not be hungry well into lunchtime. I don’t get it, man.
If I were forced to pick a meal to skip, it would honestly be dinner. But then I am more of a three-equally-sized-meals person than a small-breakfast, medium-lunch, big-dinner person.
When I am in my natural state and not bound to my work schedule, I tend toward small breakfast, small lunch, afternoon snack, small dinner, bedtime snack. All the snacks!
This is a good system. Myself, I’m partial to no breakfast (eating after I wake up makes me nauseous), mid-morning snack, medium lunch, small dinner, bedtime snack, ALSO bedtime snack because I went to bed later than I planned.
Having never encountered this She before, I was momentarily intrigued by the idea that I had, with great success, somehow mentally blocked out significant portions of A Separate Peace.
Oh my god, I am such a Sinister Facsimile of Charles. Haha, got me!
SIDE NOTE, that picture absolutely infuriates me. Who lives like that? Where do you keep your clothes? Why is there no chair at the desk, draped with five different jackets? Why are there no piles of dirty laundry on the floor, or half-read books next to the bed? Nobody lives like that, how dare you.
I would never move a piece of furniture in the place, lest I so much as leave an impression of a scratch on that perfect floor.
Maybe there is a closet behind the picture taker? Also there are drawers under the daybed, which are presumably full of jumbled clothes, since the floordrobe must have been shoved into the drawers for the picture. Half-read books probably go in the shelf-on-a-shelf at the head of the bed; perhaps the room’s occupant just got back from returning the last batch to the library, and has not yet unpacked the books they checked out while there.
I did not know about She, and thus thought until I got to the tags that Mallory had gone really all-in on this post and written a whole early 20th century adventure novel just so she could excerpt it.
I am Charles! At least, I hope I am. Would be a bummer to learn that I am actually just A Sinister Facsimile Of Charles…
The roommate you realize is a bad idea but you’ve already signed the lease. Pro-tip: never live with someone who tells you she loved your recommendation of “Cassandra at the Wedding” because she’d “never found a character she’d related to more strongly.”
My third roommate was a raging sociopath who led to my getting ptsd and swearing off living with people. AKA, the one who is like slipping in goose shit when wearing new shoes
Who else pictured Mallory as She (but without the terrible ending)
Once I had a flatmate who diluted his wine because “that’s how the Romans drank it” and would sit there seething in silent judgement as I drank my ACTUAL wine. This was not the worst thing he did, but it is the most representative of that horrible short-lived arrangement as a whole.
Did this roommate also dip bread in his wine and eat dormice? Because if not he really can’t claim to be drinking/eating like the Romans did.
Yes! Did he _recline_ whilst doing these things?
NB: I’m sorry you lived with this person.
He neither reclined nor dipped bread in his weird alcoholic squash drink. I never saw him eat dormice but the idea that he was secretly running around fields to catch a tiny rodenty dinner is tremendously entertaining.
Romans also flavoured their wine liberally with lead, which I hope your flatmate also did leading to his early but well deserved demise
If he were that committed to the Roman thing I think I’d forgive him everything. Mostly because he’d be dead. That’s a nice thought.
So, I could be wrong, but I thought that the Romans watered down their wine because it was stronger than modern day wines and they drank more of it throughout the day. Not watering it down would get you too drunk.
I’m not 100% sure on this. But unless you like drinking watery wine, you can safely ignore how a bunch of long-dead Romans drank theirs.
I once roomed with the college stoner version of Jekyll and Hyde and both were bad in different ways. The stoned side of her used incessant incense and made a lot of chicken soup but never cleaned the kitchen. The sober side left passive agressive notes about oddly specific things. “Hairbrush in shower this morning!!! 🙁 ” or “forks not put away! :'( “
I roomed with the college speedfreak version! The sober side collapsed in tears on the stair landing because some guy who had never loved her still didn’t love her. I think that was also the side that didn’t take care of her cat and never did a single dish in the entire six months I lived there. The speedy side would catch my boyfriend when he came to visit, drag him into her basement bedroom before I even knew he was there, and make him listen to the Barenaked Ladies for upward of two hours. That side also agreeably and without provocation gave away the clothing procured during her shopping binges, and we wore the same size so … yay?
The one who did a poo in the garden and refused to ever clean it up.
😮
♬♩♩ Charles in charge of our days and our long, dark nights of the soul… ♪ ♫
I am High Protein Breakfast. Fortunately so is Pymdude and the PartTime Boys so it all works out ok. We go through 2 dozen eggs in 3 days.
Worst flatmate was the one whose mother came over to clean his room and do his laundry. He also invited streetkids to crash in our flat and burnt popcorn in the middle of the night (more than once)
I had the roommate who:
Took the door off his room and left it off for several years.
Only ate beige-ish food (corn chips, eggo waffles, medium cheddar, wheat thins, flour tortillas, peanut butter, earth balance not-butter, store-bought chocolate chip cookies, french fries, and because he was an enigma…grape jelly).
Refused to talk to me for six months because I put out kill mouse traps after he had purchased some other kind and then just left them on the counter for me to deploy after he said he’s “take care of the mouse.”
Could not load or unload the dishwasher.
Shrank a wool XL men’s sweater into something so tiny a toddler would use it for their doll.
Rattle-can painted his hubcaps (of his black Miata convertible) pure white…to match the rattle-can painted hardtop he bought for it.
Thought toilet paper was endless in supply.
And I lived with him for almost five years because he paid the rent on time and never left his room.
The one who moves in “temporarily” without warning, having been picked up and brought home by the elderly unrelated gentleman who owns the house, following an abortive, four-day-long attempt at starting anew in a commune located in another state, from which she admits several days later she MAY have brought bedbugs, and who has a history of befriending homeless people who come eat of her food and steal of her expensive electronics gifted by the elderly unrelated gentleman who owns the house, who lengthily pities those foolish enough to treat mental illness with medications, convinced she’s adequately treating her own with yoga, vitamins, and “active aggression” (yelling), who not only stays after I inform the elderly unrelated gentleman who owns the house about my intention to move if she’s still there at the end of the week, but stays rent-free, and who fantasizes aloud about showing right the fuck up at the next apartment I’m hastily trying to find, just showing up, perhaps with a basket of oranges, or supplies for painting, together, her loneliness so naked and her connection to reality so tenuous as to interpret my caged-animal watchfulness for something she might consider friendship.
Wheey, I’ve just moved into a shared apartment for the first time in a while and happily it is big enough that if one dude is going to be slobby in one part of it I can give myself the gift of not caring. Trying to encourage other roommate to do the same, as they appear to have fallen out. “You’re never going to change a slob” – repeat, forever.
the one whose toenail clippings continue to grow after you have collected them in a plastic bag
[yes reference]
Yep. I was like, man, she is nailing this!
I am just poorly-read
It really really sounds like something she could write, though.
The One Who Was Just Three Corgis Standing On One Anothers Shoulders, Wearing a Trenchcoat and some Sweats They Found On the Sidewalk In a FREE Box.