Last year I was sharing a two-bedroom apartment with my friend Laura. Like many of my roommates, we didn't always get along very well. I have a long history of bad roommate relationships. The fact is that I'm lazy and inconsiderate, and I'm not much of a "team player" with cleaning, or respecting other peoples' belongings. Now that I live by myself, things are much better.
The truly bad roommate situations were with Hamilton (junior year high school), Adam (sophomore year of college), and John (california year one). There was lots of shouting, some silent treatment here and there, a couple of "this is my TV and you're not allowed to use it, since I can't use your computer" type arguments, and the all too frequent "ETHAN YOU NEVER DO THE DISHES." And once I got a "take your feet off the remote control right now. That is so wrong." Hopefully that gives you a rough idea of the nature of our disputes. Only once did such a relationship devolve into violence, and it was over a C programming question. Adam thoroughly insisted that 2-d arrays should really be called 1-d arrays, since they were long and flat, and had nothing 2-dimensional about them. I disagreed, and since he wouldn't listen to my stressed-out nonsense version of reason, I shoved him. He came back by pushing harder and knocking me to the floor. (I can't clearly remember Adam's side of the argument, but it was something along those lines. Feel free to clarify, B.)
All 3 are dear friends of mine today - somehow we've become closer than ever after moving out.
But anyway - I'm telling you all this for a reason (actually not really). Laura, my 13th roommate ("roommate" is someone I shared a room or apartment with for at least 2 months). Laura regularly drank 2-3 gallons of skim milk per week. So one night Laura and I were watching television (usually Simpsons, Aqua Teens, Family Guy) when a Milk commercial came on. It was just this close-up of milk being poured into a glass, brought to us by the Milk council. At that, Laura got up, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a tall glass of milk to drink. I was all "did you get that because of the commercial?" And she was all "what commercial?" I thought it was pretty cool how she never consciously thought "milk looks good...", or even noticed the commercial. It was just the commercial doing all the thinking for her.
That's all - Laura and I had some rough spots, but we were never as bad as me and some of my other roommates. We were both happy to go our separate ways at the end of our lease, though. Although neither of us changed jobs, we now live about 80 miles from each other. Think about it...
Posted by Ethan at January 1, 2003 08:39 PM