I don’t know how many people out there would say this, but I love having a roommate. I’ve had thirteen so far, since my freshman year of college, and I don’t intend on stopping until I shack up or get married and find myself with a new kind of roommate.
I’m not really sure why I prefer to share my home with friends and strangers. I think of myself as a fairly independent person, comfortable with being alone, as equally introverted as I am extroverted. Of course, there is the all-important fact that until now, I was either not allowed or I could not afford to live on my own (at least not in the cities or neighborhoods where I would want to live). There’s also the fact that I work from home, and if I didn’t have a roommate keeping tabs on me, it’s quite possible I would stay in one set of pajamas for an entire week straight, and that’s just not right.
As a writer, I’m in my head all day, and sometimes my current roommate (bless her) is the only one who keeps me from talking to the furniture. When she comes home from a long day at the office, where no doubt she’s had to deal with fifteen different screaming clients, an annoying cubemate who uses her office phone as her personal party line, and a boss who wants to talk about her latest performance report, I have a tendency to pounce on the poor thing, my mouth running a million miles a minute like a prisoner who’s just been let out of solitary.
My love for roommates could also be due to the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to have a long string of awesome ones I genuinely liked as people. Karmically speaking, I’m probably due for a kleptomaniac-sociopath with an unannounced live-in boyfriend, because the only complaints I could seriously muster against the people I’ve shared a room, house, or apartment with would be humorous or annoying at most: there were several with an almost clinical aversion to doing dishes. There was one with dog farts, one with rotten-fruit farts, one who had trouble sleeping, and one who had trouble cleaning. There was also one who gave our old television to her boyfriend without asking. And, of course, the freshman year roommate whose friend left a message on our shared (guess she didn’t know) voicemail calling me “loco.”
