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August 7, 2005

Housemates, Part Two

Unlike Adrianne, I am still not having an awesome housemate experience.

I wouldn't waste your time with my whining, except that my housemates are hilarious.

Housemate #2 (H2, henceforth) has, since the last post, been arrested. That's no big deal, right? People get arrested. It happens.

However, H1 doesn't like H2 very much. Further, H1 doesn't understand people very well. So, H1 went to the courthouse and asked for H2's arrest record. Apparently, H2 has been arrested four times in roughly the last year and a half.

Last December, he was arrested for selling marijuana to a police informant in a parking lot. This March, he was again arrested for the same offense, in the same parking lot. How bright do you have to be?

"Meet me at 199 West Coleman. I'll be in a white Toyota."
"Isn't that where you got busted three months ago?"
"Yeah. But then I was in a black Toyota. They'll never see it coming this time."

So he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. But he's ok. He sits around re-watching the dvd box set of Arrested Development and reading science fiction novels, and (as best as we can tell) doesn't deal from the house. Sometimes he eats our food, but he doesn't make anyone uncomfortable.

Housemate #1 is another story altogether. He seems to care much more about other people. Whereas H2 takes from others without obvious remorse, H1 tracks me down at work about once a week and recounts everything he ate without asking. A slice of cake, a piece of pie, some ice cream, and pasta. I can't seem to convince him that I don't want to talk about it, I only want the food to come back.

But that's his thing, talking at people. He is very dramatic (and, if you will recall, a six foot tall, 300 pound gay man). Whenever I bring up a problem I have with him -- maybe the fact that, for all of his accounting, he had gone a few weeks without replacing any food -- he goes into Queen Mode.

He immediately stops making eye contact. He becomes much loader, and he assumes one of several fake accents. He says things like, "Big Mama needs her own pasta to reappear," or "People also need to start wiping down the counters, because The Goddess doesn't like to come downstairs in the morning and see cockroaches. The Goddess is getting upset, and no one wants that."

It is while he is holding forth in this way that you realize that he doesn't care that much more about other people. He just likes to put on a show. A show of accounting for what he has taken, a show of indignation, a show of kindness. He's not interested in what kind of show, really.

Just in case you think I'm kidding, here is a picture of his oatmeal. As you can see, The Goddess shops at Wal-Mart:

As you can imagine, it is completely impossible to talk to the man in this state. Therefore, simple questions like, "Why did you remove the antenna and the cable for the DVD player from the television?" go unanswered for weeks.

(The answer, by the way, is that he was passive-aggressively trying to send H2 a message to do his dishes.)

Also, when we began labelling our groceries, he did this:

H1, we know you're gay. That's fine. But you don't have to turn our peanut butter into an invective against cunnilingus.

Posted by todd at August 7, 2005 3:28 PM

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Posted by: Eric at July 14, 2006 11:47 PM

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