Yesterday, I found myself far sadder than I expected to be at Dara's departure. We never really hung out that often but had a really nice casual relationship where we chatted whenever we encountered each other in the living room and yesterday when her room was empty and her van basically all loaded up, there was this physical absence of stuff in our apartment. That's when what her absence would mean also began to hit me. I lived with her for the past two years, which is a decent chunk of my life and knew her for four years before that. I remember meeting her during orientation week at college.
And so it has been a really comfortable, relaxed living situation - one that I was unaware of how comfortable it was until she was leaving and I thought about how I had to find a new roommate since that Amanda girl called the day before to say she didn't want to move in. And I knew that there would be awkwardness having to interact with someone I have not know for so long. I had told about eight or so people yesterday to come look at the place at 7:30 when Jillian got home from work. And as soon as Dara left, I kicked it into higher gear, trying to get our disgusting apartment into open house shape. If you had seen the apartment yesterday morning, boxes everywhere, dishes everywhere - just an ugly mess - you would have been so impressed by how it looked when I was done cleaning.
At seven, all I had left to do was vacuum and then eat some food before people started showing up. But at seven, the first person also called me to tell me that she was outside. I was pretty annoyed but showed her the apartment and explained that I said 7:30 because that's when my roommate got home. I made conversation with her a bit and got over my annoyance because she was really nice and went to lots of the bars I liked. She is a total scenester and knows all those "cool" kids - the Misshapes people, the Stache people, etc - and it was fun talking to her and she told me that we should go out, that she knows about all the cool parties. And so she was definitely growing on me. She also told me she could get me a job. More points for Mel.
I told Jamie to come upstairs since I was running out of things to talk about and we opened a bottle of wine and finally Jillian got home. And shortly after Jillian got here, it was one person after the next, all of them arriving at about the same time, making it really hard to talk to anyone of them - at one point, I think we have had six potential roommates here at the same time. They all stayed for a long time, drinking wine and talking, all of them were people that I wouldn't mind living with and that is the worst, when you like all of the potential roommates because it makes the choice that much harder. It's so much nicer when it is a bunch of people you don't like and one or two gems that show up. We finally got rid of them right before the Dylan documentary came on, talked for a bit about them, and then did not do so for two hours because we were watching what I thought was a pretty sloppy documentary. It lacked any narrative focus and so much of the footage lacked dates even though they were years apart, some of the stuff. There would be early footage of him in some bar in the village and then some footage of him playing electric and getting booed and maybe it was because I was kind of drunk off of wine, but it seemed so sloppy and so full of Ken Burns' zoom in on photo doc techniques that I couldn't understand why the thing was so hyped.
But after it ended, the conversation picked up again about who we wanted to live with and we narrowed it down to three people: Connor, Mel, and Adele. Then because we had to winnow it down to two, after a lame attempt at a pro/con chart, we axed Connor and then had to decide between the two twenty year old hipster girls. There was something aggressive about Adele and her outfit was so hip that it seemed like she might be kind of snotty, so we were leaning toward Mel. And then we decided that Mel would be moving out of her parents' house and living with roommates for the first time, so we swung back to Adele. We swung back and forth between them both before again settling on Mel.
Then I found their Myspace profiles.
And maybe that makes us horrible that we basically chose our future roommate based on who had the cooler profile, but we had to choose somehow and it is always going to be some superficial, gut judgement that you make about a new roommate who you talked to for maybe ten minutes. You only get to see the side they want to present to you in that amount of time and it is so hard to know what living with someone will actually be like. Mel had one of those imported image backgrounds and music playing on her profile, one of those profiles that slows down your computer so much. And there were Misshapes, the Corbrasnake, Fight Cats, and other obnoxious things listed under her favorites. She had about 400 friends, whereas Adele had a much nicer seventy something. Adele also had really good taste in movies and listed two artists as her heroes. So that made our decision a lot easier, one seemed perhaps obnoxiously scenesterish, and one seemed nice and so Adele it is, unless we change our mind again this afternoon. They both seem nice, though, and both would probably be fun to live with. And both Jillian and I are pretty weak willed, go with the flow personalities. Neither one of us had a choice that we were pushing. We were both wavering back and forth and I sort of wish that one of us would have been really adament about someone to make it easier, but whatever, whoever it is, will surely (fingers crossed) be a good roommate.
Oh, and because she likes to drive me crazy and is out of her mind, Amanda, the girl was supposed to move in tomorrow, but two days ago said she didn't want to and basically gave me a panic attack where I wanted to pull out my hair and was forced to spend the better of yesterday talking to strangers seeing if they wanted to live here, called last night during the open house and left a message on my phone saying that she had changed her mind, and not to find anyone else to live here because she does want to move in. Oh sure, Amanda, I understand that you changed your mind. Of course, you can still live here. Whatever you want, take as much time to make up your mind as you want because its not like we have to pay rent or anything. Fuck you, Amanda. Live on the street because we aren't having you and your wishy washy self living here.
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