Why I love going out with my roommate

Roommate NYC

I, of course, like spending time with my friends, but getting older and wiser I am trying to do what’s best for me, and I have figured out that going out with my roommate is much better than doing it with just a friend. I’m not talking about the fun side here, it’s all purely practical: When you are going out with a friend you are basically responsible for yourself, but when your roommate is beside you, you feel (at least I do) like it is your mom’s younger and cooler version (sorry, mom).

My roommate is the best wingwoman (is there even such a thing as a wingwoman?) in the world! She keeps hoping that I’ll meet my prince charming, so she is always on the lookout for me. She scares me sometimes with her almost computerized skill to scan the room in search of a potential boyfriend. It’s like, we would be drinking and talking, and she would appear really engaged in the conversation and then: “So I told Katelyn that we should ask for Friday off this week since there are only two of us showing up in the office anyway… Have you seen that cute guy with the beard over there? With the beard… WITH THE BEARD! He keeps looking at you so intensely…No, not that one! He has a ring on… omg, don’t turn like this, you are so obvious!..”

It’s ok for us to pay for one another when we go out because there is always an unpaid balance fluctuating between two of us. Let’s say I paid our electric bill and she ended up owing me certain amount of money, then we went grocery shopping together and she paid for our groceries, but the amount she has paid is slightly bigger than what she gave me, so now I owe her, and so on.

I am not afraid of getting tipsy (read: wasted) because I know that my body will be safely delivered home and placed into my bed. I can even hope to be woken up next morning, if she doesn’t oversleep herself.

Being on a neutral territory helps us to ease the tension and discuss the issues we might be having with each other. I don’t know why is it like that, but things apear much simpler and less significant in the darkness of a bar.

It’s always an adventure going out with her, because we have completely different interests and outlook on life, so spending time together outside of our apartment is like introducing one another to our private worlds. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s never boring.

And one more thing that made me really fall in love with my roommate: she has taught me one really cool russian anti-hangover trick: activated charcoal+pickle juice, that once had saved my life and my career. That is the debt I can never be repaid…

Happy Fourth Of July… to me (stitches instead of fireworks).

This Fourth of July was good for me despite the fact that I ended it in an emergency room having my hand stitched up and missing the fireworks.

celebrating 4th Of July with my roommate
Thanks my roommate for leaving me a Fourth of July souvenir!!! PS. I’m not mad at you.

So this is how it all started: we were having a small party, only the closest friends invited, on our roof (we are technically ot allowed to go there, but we do it anyway), and that was when my roommate got aggravated with her ex (who was also invited for reasons unknown to me), and smashed her wine glass against the wall of a roof entrance.

We didn’t hear the whole argument, and all of us just stared at them in shock, when I noticed that I am bleeding. It turned that a huge piece of shattered glass had bounced of the wall and slashed the skin on my hand. I went down to treat the cut and while rinsing it I was even more surpised to see a stomach turning gash on the top of my left hand, with blood streaming down from it and quickly forming a puddle under the sink.  My roommate who walked into the bathroom a moment after me, was even more horrified and nearly passed out when she saw all the blood and flesh.

We rushed to the ER where I was congratulated by the surgeon on the fact that the glass had barely missed my tendons. So there was a sort of silverlining in the dark cloud of my injury (see, having it had jeopardized the trip to the beach that we had planned for Sunday). Another good thing was that I have learned some new things, and it never hurts to learn something new, right?

Things I’ve learned:

-The fastest and easiest way to clean blood stains from hard surfaces is to pour peroxide over it and then wipe it off with a paper towel (wikihow doesn’t teach you that!).

-People in Mississippi are not all overweight racists (watching the episode of Bravo’s  What Would You Do? while waiting to be seen doctor in the ER’s waiting area).

-If you ever find yourself in an emergency room and are asked if you have had a #%$& (something that makes absolutely no sense to you) done, your immediate response should be “yes”. Because if you say no, or even appear hesitant you will be vaccinated on the spot to prevent diseases that you didn’t even know exist.

-The best way to ignore a person in pain is to pretend that this person is not there (nurses in the ER to a homeles woman with a bad burn on her leg waiting to be treated by a doctor). I mean, you probably should ignore someone who smells bad and yells obscenities at you, but, am I wrong to judge them for not trying to understand that all her stunts were just an attempt to get the attention and care that she obviously doesn’t get but needs so desperately? And are they really that busy looking mad, that they can’t spare a minute to make a small talk with someone, or at least just look and smile and the person? Well… I’m sure all of it is more complicated than it looks…

-Tullie loves blood. But it gives her mad diarrhea.

If we were silver screen personalities

My roommate and I had rerobert_downey_jr_and_jude_law_in_sherlock_holmescently watched A Game of Shadows (the Sherlock Holmes Series) and realized that we are pretty much like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. They are both mature and responsible, so are we, one of them is on a weird side though an absolute genious in his trade (me, being modest, but realistic) the other one is a knowledgeable and respectable professional with strong moral values(my roomie), they each have different interests, but are friends, hang out together often and have each other’s back in the times of need. Well… Mostly, Dr Watson is helping Sherlock Holmes but.. who’s fault is that that Sherlock Holmes’s life is more adventurous and interesting than Watson’s, right?

interview-with-the-vampire-empireAfter giving it a better thought I realized that these are not the only two iconic roommates who we can relate to. If you remember a movie called Interview With The Vampire the two main characters there, the vampires, were also roommates and they started out as friends with one looking after and mentoring the other one. That is just like my roommate and me, taking turns in mentoring one another.

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There is another great movie about roommates, called The Fight Club, which is also quite old but is considred the undying classic (am I right or wrong?) with two psychopathic friends crashing an old abandoned house in an industrial area, taking on the national finance system. Even though one of the roommates is figment of the other’s inflamed imagination, and they are, technically, terrorists, they still remind me of us with all the fun and philosophical conversations they have at the beginning.

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Also if you have could consider Timon and Pumbaa from Lion King to be roomates sharing the jungle then it could also be us, hanging out and having fun together, we are sort of missing Simba but I don’t think either of us wants the third person to enter our household.

I didn’t even realize untill now, that all the characters I compared me and my roommate to are a males. I guess it can say something about us in a psychological sense…