Welcome to the Shark Tank

Come meet the people I’ve lived with for almost a year now. It’s time I introduced them to you:

It was a cool night--a great night for a beer and a smoke. I sat on the front porch of the Shark Tank and relaxed alone. Enjoying my Taylor Swift playlist, my Blue Moon, and my not-so-good 99cent cigar.

Heather arrived home from work. I love Heather. I love how real she is, how open she is, and how we can laugh hysterically or cry uninhibited when we’re together. We chatted a bit, but she was holding her stuff and holding the front door of the house open, so I told her to grab a beer and come sit with me so we could gossip.

She came back and we started talking. We talked about lots of things, but eventually we got to sad subjects and we both got teary-eyed and then we got quiet. We sat quiet for a little while—sometimes you just run out of words.

There are a lot of rabbits in our neighborhood. They drive my sister’s dog crazy. Usually we see them in the mornings, but this night we saw one hopping in the middle of the street. I guess Heather and I were so sad we desperately needed something to pull us from the glum. That’s another thing I love about Heather, she uses humor—like I do—to combat the world of negative emotions.

            So there we were, all sad, and this rabbit starts hopping. At the exact same time, with no signal to each other, I jumped off the porch to chase the rabbit and Heather started barking at it. We laughed pretty hard and then we congratulated ourselves on being the coolest people ever.

            Then we just got silly and giggly and started making musical noises by blowing air over the tops of our empty beer bottles. This was the state that the other two roommates, Corrie and Jess, found us in when they got home.  We had several more good laughs and didn’t call it quits ‘til late in the evening.

            What else should you know about the Shark Tank? Well, it’s pretty messy, actually. We aren’t very good at cleaning or picking up after ourselves. I’d say it looks closer to what you’d imagine for a bachelor pad: mismatched furniture pulled from the leftovers of other people's houses, messy floors that really need to get washed a couple times a week but we’re lucky if it gets done once a week, dishes in the sink, and so on. Right now we have a sweet potato growing roots and shoots in a plastic cup, sitting on the side of the kitchen sink. It’s like washing dishes in a jungle.  

By the way, if you have cool furniture that you are getting rid of, feel free to let us know, we are thrift-store hunting for some bar stools for the kitchen. I am also personally in search of a half-moon table of sorts for one wall of my garage-room. My defining presence in the Shark Tank is that I live in the garage. It’s really not so bad once I figured out how to get rid of the roaches.

            Food: two of the four roommates are on gluten free diets. We all love to eat chicken and eggs (but not at the same time). None of us are big fans of making salads. And the one food item we must have at all times is coffee.

            Movie nights or roommate bonding nights happen once every couple of weeks. They are usually unplanned and occur on the odd evenings when we all happen to be home at the same time. However, some roommate bonding experiences are planned attempts. I think it only took two times of rescheduling to come up with a morning when we could all make pancakes together.

            There are three types of people in the world: One type, you don’t get along with them very well, but after getting to know them better you realize they aren’t so bad and you end up becoming friends.

            Another type is the type of person you hit it off with easily and enjoy spending time with under any circumstances.

            The final type is the type that annoys you from day one and no matter what you do or how hard you try, you cannot like them. They continually appear in your nightmares and you’re sure if someone ever wanted to torture you they would lock you in a room with that person and you’d give up whatever secret information you were holding within half an hour. (Gratefully I don’t come in contact with this type of person very often).

            I am happy to say, that none of my roommates fall into the last category. I like all of them and enjoy spending time with them pretty much any time. The only times I usually get annoyed is when I have just woken up and someone tries to rope me into a conversation about fatalism or Calvinism or Buddhism before I’ve even had my coffee (we’re really brilliant at our house and talk about deep stuff all the time). I also get annoyed when the house gets unbearably gross, which is often.

            This past week, I was out of town staying with a bunch of people that I don’t know very well. They weren’t used to my sense of humor and had trouble discerning if I was being funny or not. When I got home, it only took a few hours of hanging out with my roommates to inflate my ego once more. I realized I’d gone almost all week without a really good laugh. I’d also gone almost all week without making someone else laugh, and that can be really hard on a person’s self esteem. That’s why I like my roommates, they think I’m funny and they make me laugh. We laugh together a lot. I think that’s really important in a friendship.